Today in class we will have a play day – time to work on your project sites. Our focus today will be on building your community of readers by promoting your site. The internet is a big place and you will need to put some attention into building your profile in order to make it easier for people to find your site.
- From your WordPress dashboard, look at “blog stats” to get an idea of who is using your site.
- Be sure that WordPress makes your blog visible to search engines: From your dashboard, click Options and then Privacy, and then select “I would like my blog to appear in search engines…” and click “update options”.
- Also in WordPress, under Options, Discussion, select all of the first three options under “usual settings for an article”. Under “before a comment appears” be sure that “an administrator must approve” is not checked, then click “update options”.
- Be sure that Google is listing your site. Visit About Google for links to find if your site is listed, how to submit your URL, etc.
- Get in the habit of linking to other sites and of asking people at other sites to link to you. One way search engines rank pages (i.e. decide which sites come first when search results are returned) is to examine the links among sites. Start by asking your colleagues in the class to link to your site from their sites.
- Post frequently; more frequent posting generally raises search ranking results.
- When you post entries, use links to material you refer to and make sure that the text of your link uses a term that actually helps describe the material you are linking to. In other words, if you link to the neweurasia site. Do it this way: neweurasia.net. Don’t do it this way: this site. Google prefers links that are descriptive of what they link to.
- Try to think creatively of how you can boost your site’s popularity, even just a bit. Email friends and family and ask them to look at your site; If any of them have websites or weblogs, ask them to link to your site; As you develop your site, look for sites that address similar issues or topics–link to those sites, and ask the site owners to consider linking to your site as well.
That’s probably enough for today. We will do more of this in coming days.
