You can drive more traffic to your WordPress blog by using these two features.  By keeping them in a highly visible area of your site, your encouraging your readers to use these tools to follow you. 

Feedburner.com is a great tool to manage and track your RSS feed. Feedburner also lets you create link to allow users to subscribe to your feed by email. Providing both these links gives choices to your readers. Google’s Feedburner help will walk you through setting up Feedburner.  Feedburner will provide you with code you can use on your wordpress.com blog.  Using the wordpress.com “text” widget, you can embed the feedburner code. Google also describes how to use the “subscribe by email” feature.

Feedburner provides you with the opportunity to embed Adsense ads within your RSS feed. Now, wordpress.com users can take advantage of making money with your blogs.

Subscribe to my blog

Here’s an overview of how to Verify your site and submit your WordPress Sitemap to Google.

Step 1 – Google Site Verification:

1. Go to Google Sitemaps and login. 
2. Enter your website into your dashboard- click add site.
3. Now, Google needs to verify your site.
4. You’ll need to choose a verification method – use  “Upload an HTML file”.
5. Copy the entire random string Google generated. Don’t close this browser tab.
6. Now, go to WordPress and log into your blog.
7. Create a new page anywhere on your site. I created a child page to my “About” page. 
8. In this new page title, paste the code that Google generated (the one you copied) and publish your page.
9. Now go back to the Google Sitemap page, and click “Verify”.
10. Once Google has verified your site, your can now delete the WordPress page you created.

Step 2 – Submit your WordPress Sitemap to Google

1. Go to Google Sitemaps and click on Sitemaps in the left column menu.
2. Click Add Sitemap and select General Sitemap.
3. Enter “YourBlogName.com/sitemap.xml”  into the text box (step 3 – My Sitemap URL is:).
4. Click the Add General Sitemap button 
5. You have successfully added your Sitemap to Google. 
6. Check back with Google in a few hours to see if Google has indexed your site.

- Steve Hart

If you’re a Google user, head over to the link below and edit your profile.  You can use your Google profile page for search engine purposed (so people can find you) or just another crazy profile page. 

Create your profile

- Steve Hart

——————

You’d be amazed how many folks still don’t understand how important link building is for high ranking in search engines, and in specific for Google. And, what are valid tactics for 2009, what things have changed?

Backlinks, or ‘incoming links’ are a critical part of your website’s ongoing visibility in search engine results. If you couple this with quality incoming links, you’ll likely see benefit (increased traffic) from people clicking as well.

The game has changed over the recent years. Now, you see the fast emergence of the “social web”, and new tactics such as social networking, social bookmarking, blogging, social news has to be learned. Still, reliance on traditional marketing and public relations is a must, more than ever.

To become and continue to be a leading website, more thought and care must go into developing ‘link bait’ – quality content, tools, widgets and similar – that may receive faster/better links from other websites back to you, with less ongoing work – links just keep coming!

Creating content is not enough – you must promote and drive users back to your site from many channels, which can include PPC (Pay Per Click), for example. Running a quick campaign using Paid Search to send visitors to your content bait is one of the creative ways to build awareness and traffic. Think about your target audience before starting any of this.

Things To Remember When Link Building:

1) Rich Keyword Use – in the anchor text. This is the recognized “blue underline” link that points back to you. Get keywords in there!

2) Trust and Authority – incoming links from other significant sites – to send powerful ‘link juice’ and to help elevate your site as another professional, trusted site amongst users and search engines.

3) Natural Link Acquisition – no massive, short and spiked build up of links, no bad link neighborhoods, but a carefully distributed effort amongst varied IP#’s – to show breadth of sites. No black hat approaches or spamming. Also, remember that sites that have more trust and years established online, can get away with more than newer sites.

Manually searching for these authority sites can take time, but professionals do it all the time. Since relevancy is key, try to stick within your marketplace, but don’t over-analyze either, mix it up.

You can submit to directories, use article marketing, and locate blogs for a wider distribution, and I recommend picking a few strategies to start. Don’t try to do too much, too fast.

Some Tools and Ideas:

a. Keyword link search builder – Linksearch – type in a keyword, and it will build Google search strings to speed up the processs.

b. Directories – you should consider Yahoo Directory, Business.com (B2B), Botw.org, Goguides and JoeAnt to start. If you find 20-40 directories of higher quality and related to your niche, that’s good. Try dmoz.org as well, but it will take a while. To find more, use ISEDB.

c. Social Media Sites - The ‘link juice’ is often excluded on sites in this marketplace, but can garner secondary links and certainly visibility and traffic for your brand. Look into Delicious, Stumbleupon, LinkedIn (B2B), Twitter to start.

Quality of links are important, and you should check to make sure links don’t have a “rel=nofollow”, robots.txt exclusion, or javascript redirect code applied. Check also the Google “cache” date – to make sure the page has been recently included, and spidered regularly. As a general guideline – anything page older than 30 days or more is less quality.

These simple tactics and steps should get you thinking about how you must change your link building game for 2009.

—————-

-Steve Hart