BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

As I was almost going to bed tonight I (again) checked the PR in my trusty Firefox SearchStatus bar and to my dismay – it went down to 0. Of course I got puzzled and annoyed. First thing I did was going to Google Webmasters Tools to see if there is anything wrong with the blog.

Right I was! Turns out – when I changed the design of the blog I forgot to submit the site for verification again, since the old verification method was creating a specific meta tag. Obviously, with new template the meta tag was gone, which sort of angried the Google monster

Word to the wise. If you one of those people who enjoy tweaking your blog’s design instead of watching TV – don’t use meta tag verification method.

Now, if I only did it AFTER Google dance, not a week before…

No dip in website traffic though. Maybe not yet.

There is a huge number of posts on this blog that have a very high chance of never being read again. There is also a very high need to increase a PR, Alexa rank, Compete Rank and so on. There must be a way to reuse the content, at least that part of it that could be reused. So far I came up with the following tricks:

• Posts that make sense apart from the blog – submit them to article databases
• Posts that make sense without sponsored links – repost them once sponsorship expires
• Posts that make sense apart from the blog – repost them to other web sites with backlinks to main blog. This could be guest posts or just reprints.
• Posts by certain tag – mix them with posts from other blogs of similar nature to create new content-rich site.

Well, I have couple of more ideas as well. I will try them with Zealus Community Forums and will report on the progress. Most of this will be automated, so I won’t have to spend huge amount of time on that.

As any blogger I can’t help but look at the stats now and then. At certain moment I realized that I don’t see Alexa in list of visiting search engines. I also realized it’s wrong. So I ventured in depths of my memory and just before hopelessly sinking there I remembered someone posting about Alexa redirect and how that helps your Alexa score.

What I did was I gave out just one redirect link (http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.dontdateguy.com) to our friends’ blog DontDateGuy.com on a not very crowded forum and watched stats afterwards. In just several hours I saw a tremendous boost in Alexa’s “curiosity”. Alexa was going over the site like there is no tomorrow, superseded by Google only (but who can beat that guy, eh?). For last 8 days (since the blog became active) Google hit it 143 times, Alexa 93, Yahoo 65 and Ask.com – 27. Comparing to this blog where Alexa also wasn’t showing up – pretty impressive to me.

So I have set up some more redirect links to two aforementioned blogs and will keep watching what will happen by the end of the month.

UPDATE: Alexa’s redirect doesn’t work now. Guess it got abused too much.