On Blogging and Social Media

With the number of blogs constantly growing it can become increasingly difficult to keep your audience and attract new readers, so it doesn't hurt every now and then to give your site a quick ping across the major search engines and directories.

Blogbuzzer is a free tool that can help you do this and give your sites' traffic a bit of a boost. It's very easy to use, just type in the name and URL of your blog and click on the 'Ping' button.
This will enable Blogbuzzer to send a message to many of the major blog directories and make sure that your site is indexed.

You can 'ping' up to 5 sites a day for free without registering or signing up. I've tried this a few times and each time it has brought a noticeable boost to my visitors stats. There is a premium service for $9 a year which automates the service for you and helps you monitor results etc. so if you are really serious about boosting numbers and don't mind spending some money, it might be worth thinking about (I won't be trying it).

This is a simple tool to use and it can be effective particularly if you haven't already got your blog or site registered.

I hope you find it useful.

How about you?

• How do you boost traffic to your website or blog?
• Is just writing good materials enough?
• Are there any free services you have found useful?

Please leave a comment or suggestion if you think you can help other bloggers.

Getting really useful feedback on your site or blog can be difficult and expensive, but there are some free tools which can help you to find out what you are doing right or wrong and help you to make technical improvements that may well boost your search engine optimisation (SEO) and so the visibility of your site to new visitors.

One tool that I have just tried is Website Grader and I was quite impressed by the amount of detailed information I was able to get about my blog without even parting with my email address.

How to grade your website

• To get your website's grade and report just got to: Website Grader and enter the URL of your site or blog. If you want to benchmark your site against others that you consider to be similar or competitors you can also enter their URLs too and generate a single report.

• Then just click on 'Generate Report' and your report will be created along with a grade which you can display on your site if you wish.

How to get SEO advice

• The site doesn't just analyse the content of your site and how well the pages are constructed, it also searches through different search engines and social networking sites to see what kind of impact your site is making.
• After a couple of minutes you can read through the report and find out where you are doing well and where you could make improvements.
• Where improvements are needed you are supplied with an explanation and some details so you can easily start making changes that will benefit your site immediately.

• All the information given is explained and you can dig more deeply into any areas you are unsure of simply by clicking on some of the links provided.

How to learn more about SEO

Website Grader is a great way to learn a bit more about your site and about some of the tricky sides of SEO that can at times seem rather complex. I'm already working on a few things I learned about my sites and making some improvements. I think though at the end of the day it's important to remember that however much you work on your SEO, the best way to bring traffic to your site and keep people coming back is to write good content.

How about you?

• How do you evaluate your site?
• Have you used other SEO tools?
• Have you ever had any SEO help from marketing companies?
• Did Website Grader tell you anything new about your site?

Related links:

• Compare your site using benchmarking
• Google Webmaster Tools
• How to track your site