The Importance Of The Priority Tag In Google Sitemaps

I’m sure most of you all have heard and even use sitemaps on your sites right? Well, I just want to take the time here to stress how important the priority tag in it is to search engines, particularly Google. The importance of correctly setting the priority tag in your sitemap.

At first I didn’t really care much about the priority tag in my sitemap, letting the the Google sitemap generator plugin in Wordpress do automatic priority calculation for my site when I upgraded it. So the plugin did it’s job, calculating the priority values for pages and posts in my site – my posts got assigned a priority value of about 3 to 4 while tags and categories got assigned a value of 6 to 8. At that time I didn’t understand what the priority tag in the Google sitemap meant so I left it be, trusting the plugins automatic calculations and ignoring the voice in my head telling me that the priority of URL’s in my sitemap  were actually all manually set at 1 before.

A few days later I noticed there was an extremely sharp drop in traffic from search engines. Keywords which I used to rank number 1 in were no longer bringing in traffic. I found this really strange as the keyword I was ranking number 1 in was quite a popular keyword and had been bringing in traffic quite consistently. I did a quick search on Google and found out that the post that used to rank number 1 in it was no longer ranked number 1. I added the word “drett” after the keyword and searched on Google again only to find that only a category of my site was indexed. The previous posts was nowhere to be found within the Google search index.

To confirm what I thought had happened, I did a quick search on Google for the pages of my site and this was what I got:

Notice that no posts was listed, only tags, categories and archives.

The first few pages of the result were all filled with tags, categories and my archives, the posts were at the last few pages. I immediately connected the situation with something to do with the priority tag settings in my sitemap and went and set the priority in my sitemap to be all the same for all posts, category, tag and pages.

After 2 days (today), I found that my previous keywords were once again bringing in traffic. I did another search on Google for the pages and posts indexed in my site to see whether there was any difference.

Notice that some of my posts are now included on the frontpage.

After looking at the results, I found that more of my posts were located on the frontpage, which is a good thing. There were still a few categories that ranked higher than my posts which I think that I will be able to fix once I set the priority of the categories lower in my sitemap. If you are wondering why I want my posts to rank higher than all my categories and tags, it’s because my posts contain more content and keywords thus ranking higher in search engines than my categories and pages.

I did a little bit more research on the priority tag on Google and found out that the priority of the URL is relative to other URL’s in your site and that the priority you assign to a URL has no direct influence on the position of your URL on the Google search engine. Although the priority has no direct influence on the position of the URL in the Google search engine, I found out that the priority tag influences the likelihood that your more important pages are indexed in the search engines results. When I my posts had a lower priority than my categories and tags, the Google search engine decided to include my categories and tags into it’s search results instead of my posts. This didn’t directly affect the position of URL’s in the search engine, however after running my categories and tags through whatever Google uses to rank pages, my categories could not rank as high as my posts thus appearing in the search engine’s index but not has high as my posts. This then directly affected the position of my URL’s in the Google search engine.

I’m still experimenting a bit with how the sitemap influences the inclusion of posts and pages of my site in Google’s search results, however I feel that it is safe to manually set all URL’s to a priority of 1 in the sitemap.

So, just to remind you all again, please do check the priority settings of the URL’s in your sitemap, as they might be limiting the amount of traffic you get from search engines .

Note: I do think that the priority tag has the same influence on all search engines but maybe I didn’t feel the affects of it as the other search engines might not have detected the change in priority of the URL’s in my sitemap.

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This Is How You Should Deal With Trackback Spam

Trackbacks are extremely useful for bloggers and webmasters alike when it’s used properly. When used properly, trackbacks can help facilitate communication between blogs and notify bloggers when and who has written about their content. When it’s used in bad ways, it then becomes trackback spam – on par with that of comment spam.

What Are Trackbacks?

Trackbacks basically are a linkback to someone’s else content who has linked to yours. It is used to let the blogger who receives the trackback that someone else is referencing his post and mentioning his site. Trackbacks usually appear in your comments section of your blog (it depends on what type of blogging platform you use and the theme you are using).

Trackbacks look like this:

To see a live example, check out my post here and scroll to the bottom. Note: I deleted the link in the trackback. A trackback without it’s link deleted links back to the website that links to you.

Trackback Spam?

We’ve all heard about comment spam. It’s one of the things that every single blogger would most probably know about. Comment spams usually contain lots of hyperlinks to websites that have questionable content. Comments that do not contain any sort of hyperlinks but are not related to the topic or the post are also usually looked upon as spam and thus gets moderated by the administrator (This happens at Drett)

As comment spam filters are getting increasingly complex and effective, the spammers are getting more and more desperate to find new ways to spam a site, and thus trackbacks spam is born. A person with a website with questionable content links to your post, a trackback then appears on your post which links back to his website. Thus giving him the backlink he wants and also entirely bypassing comment spam filters. Don’t mix up legitimate trackbacks with spammy tackbacks. The spammy trackbacks are where the post in which the person links to you has entirely no relation to the content in which you are writing about while the legitimate trackbacks are where the the content is related.

So What Should I Do about Trackback Spam?

When receiving a spammy trackback, you can do a few things. The first choice would be to delete the trackback, keeping your comments area clean and spamless. The second choice would be to leave it there, giving the spammer the linkback he wants while lowering your reputation and respect as you link to sites with questionable content. The third option is what I’m recommending for you to do, and that is to delete edit the trackback and delete the link, but leave the trackback there. (Example here). This gives you content in your comments as sometimes even spammy trackbacks are related in very small ways while also lightening up your comments area, but at the same time taking away the linkback to the spammy site. Thus saving you reputation and reputation from going down the drain.

Every blogger and webmaster loves content and activity within the comments of a post, but hate giving out links to spammers in the comments area.  The third method I suggested is the best way to deal with trackback spam. It gives you all the advantages of a legitimate trackback while neutralizing it’s disadvantages.

Word of advice, only use the 3rd method which I highlighted above when the trackback is not complete spam. As even the method above won’t help you if the trackback is complete spam. Also, you can use the method which I shared to edit even legitimate trackbacks to stop your pagerank from leaking – yes, it might seem cruel but people do do this .

So from now on, do yourself a favour and instead of totally deleting the trackback, edit the track and remove it’s hyperlink. What do you guys think about trackback spam and the method of which I shared on how to deal with it?

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How To Increase Search Engine Traffic Without Spending A Cent

Search engine traffic is one of my favourite sources of traffic. It’s free, it’s targeted, and it steadily increases in time. Drett receives around 800 unique visitors a month from search engines alone, this means 800 visitors that I do not need to pay a cent for. Pretty nice deal right? Free targeted traffic.

Before I start on how to increase search engine traffic to your blog or website, I just want to say that I’m not some expert or guru who claims to be able to increase your search engine traffic overnight. Nor am I saying that the tips and guidelines I’m about to share with you are surefire and will surely help you increase your traffic from search engines. I’m also not trying to imply that by using these tactics you can easily gain more traffic from search engines that established sites, although I wish this was true.  I’m just a blogger who is still relatively new to blogging and want to share my humble experience and opinions.

And with that, I’ll start.

There are many ways to increase search engine traffic to your site, so many that if I were to write about every single way to increase traffic known to bloggers and webmasters, it’ll take more than a day. Rather than trying to cover every single way to increase traffic from search engines, I’ll share some tips that will help you increase your search engine traffic by just adjusting and optimizing the way you write your content. Something which I found to be quite effective, does work, and something I myself do.

Content is something every website and blog has. A lot of content, a little content, boring content, interesting content – all different forms of content. What many of them who write the content on their sites and blogs do not know is that they rarely ever do manage to optimize their content and maximize the content’s potential.

Here are some guidelines to follow and take note of when writing content on your blog which I find helps you rank higher and appear in more search engines results, thus increasing your traffic from search engines for free. I’m quite sure that these strategies and guidelines below work, so you might really want to give it a try.

• Increase the number of different keywords in your content
• Increase the number of times a keyword is repeated – don’t spam it though
• Phrase your sentences and keywords in your content properly
• Have a permalink with keywords
• Have titles that have keywords

Increase the number of different keywords in your content and increase the number of times a keyword is repeated.

Just by increasing the number of different keywords and times the keyword is repeated in your content, you can quite dramatically increase search engine traffic to your site. When you write your content, don’t just write for the sake of writing, think about how you want your visitors to find the particular content you are writing, what kind of terms and keywords that are related to your site, then write your content around those particular keywords. Repeat the keywords whenever you have a chance (please don’t spam the keywords though, exercise discretion ).

As you have more different keywords and repeated keywords, the keyword density of your content and related keywords number increases, and so does the chance of getting more traffic to your site from search engines. For example, if you have 2 kinds of keywords in your content - “bike” and “camping”, you’ll be able to get traffic from search engines not only on keywords such as “bike” and “camping”, but also on searches for “bike camping”. This really does help. Trust me.

Phrase your sentences and keywords in your content properly.

I cannot begin to stress how effective this method has been for me. Basically, you should try phrase your sentences and keywords in the same manner and sequence in which people use to search on the search engines.

For example, you should use repeated sentence in your content, such as “free traffic for a lifetime” instead of breaking up the sentence. This is because it gives you a higher chance of ranking high in search results whenever people search for “free traffic for a lifetime”.

Similarly, if you keep using the phrase “make money online by blogging” throughout your content, you’ll stand a high chance of being listed high in the search engines result whenever people search for “make money online by blogging”.

Have permalinks and titles with keywords.

One thing I noticed after a couple months blogging is that posts and pages with titles and keywords that has the keywords I’m searching for more often than not appear higher in the search engines result. This means that the search engines put a higher emphasis on posts that have titles and permalinks full of keywords than those that don’t.

The next time you write the title of your post, instead of just writing a catchy title, try to strike a balance between the degree of attractiveness of the title and the number of keywords in it.

So these are some of my tips on how to get more traffic from search engines by just optimizing your content. And once again, I don’t claim that with this you’ll instantly be able to gain a whole lot of traffic from search engines, but every little bit does does help.

My last word of advice to all of you is to never stop writing content, as even if you don’t optimize it thus maximizing it’s traffic from search engines potential, these content when accumulated and indexed by search engines will eventually bring in some traffic from search engines.

If you agree or disagree with some of the tips I wrote about above, please comment below. Together we might still be able to come out with better tips .

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When Should I Start Monetizing My Website?

I know of many bloggers who jump into blogging for the sole purpose of earning money off their blogs by buying lots of traffic to their site which has loads of annoying advertisements and little original or quality content on it. Well, I used to be one these guys. I had big dreams that one day I would be able to support my life entirely or partly on the earnings my cyber-endeavors made me. I still have these ambitious dreams, but I go about them in a slightly different way now. Last time I used to try and copy other blogs, pretending to be an expert on certain subjects whilst actually having no idea what I was talking about- in short, having a  mirror blog and trying to be someone I wasn’t. Now I’m taking an entirely different approach compared to last time. Nowadays, I don’t pretend about that I’m expert and instead give my honest opinion as a blogger.

So, to the question that bugs many new bloggers and webmasters, when should I start monetizing my website? Well, my opinion is that you shouldn’t be too concerned about how to monetize your website first and instead concentrate on getting some good quality content up into you website. I used to focus a lot on ways to monetizing my website without actually building up on my website, pretty soon I found out that it was just a big waste of my time. The logic in this is if your website doesn’t have quality content, what contextual advertising programs would want to accept your site, and that with the little visitors you get when you first start a site, what are the chances that they would actually click an advertisement? There is nothing wrong with researching and implementing ways to monetize your website when it has just started, but make sure you don’t make it a higher priority than writing original and quality content on your blog.

I used to be a monetizing freak, as in I would find out about all the contextual advertising systems around and apply to them to get my website accepted. At that time, my website was really a crappy site with little real or useful information, and all I thought about was how to monetize. I got rejected from most of the reputable ones and got accepted in the more shoddy ones. After implementing advertisements into my blog from contextual advertising programs that I had been accepted in, I found out that I had near zero traffic and had wasted my efforts when I should have concentrated on actually building up my blog.

The reason why you should be more concerned about writing good and quality content before you start worrying about the ins and outs of monetizing a blog is that with quality content you’ll automatically (of course some basic SEO’s and site promotion must be done!) have lots of pages indexed by searched engines and links in from other websites that find your content useful, and that would in turn bring in traffic and visitors. Once you have a certain number of traffic and visitors, then only you should monetize your site and reap your hard work.

In short - you should only start monetizng your site once you have good quality and consistent content on your website with reasonable traffic and not the other way round.

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