Does a blog help improve your rankings and website presence in search engine results? Will blog search engines (Technorati), directories (BloggerSG) and RSS services (FeedBurner) drive new traffic? Do the pretty action buttons at the end of blog posts (e.g. Add to Digg) actually help? Let’s find out. In the last week, I’ve been spending time and effort in setting up my SEO blog. Hence, I’m curious to learn how much I can benefit from that …from a SEO and social network marketing point of view anyway. In case you want to do the same for your blog, this is what I’ve done so far: 1. Download and install Wordpress. 2. Add action buttons and the corresponding links: 3. Change permalink structure to /%postname%/%post_id%/ (must edit .htaccess). 4. Create my RSS feeds for syndication at FeedBurner. 5. Submit, claim and tag your blog at Technorati. 6. Here are more places to submit your RSS feeds. We’ll get the current traffic numbers and SEO-related observations to make a comparison at end-June 2007: Avg. Unique Visitors - 231 per day. Alexa Rank (3-month Avg.): 461,562 Link Popularity (Marketleap) Search Engine Saturation (Marketleap): No Digg, Del.icio.us, Technorati, Blinklist or Reddit in the top 250 referrers.
a) Digg -
http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<?php the_permalink() ?>
b) Del.icio.us -
http://del.icio.us/post?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>
c) Technorati -
http://technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>
d) Blinklist -
http://blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php&url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&Title=<?php the_title(); ?>
e) Reddit -
http://reddit.com/submit?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>
Avg. Pageviews - 567 per day.
Technorati: 1,493,285 (4 links from 2 blogs)
Total: 4,462 incoming links on Google (157) and Yahoo (4,305).
Total: 372 indexed pages on Google (56), Yahoo (62) and MSN(254).