Saturday, January 3, 2009

How to publicize your blog - Part I

Today, I noticed that typing "Damien learns Perl" in the Google search box does not return this website as a result...

This is not surprising as this blog is shiny out of the box and has not yet been crawled by the Google bots yet (the way I understand it, Google sends its little spiders crawling all over the web to discover new pages to add to its database).
After a little research (and by Google's own admission), I discovered that adding your URL to Google could take a very long time before they add your site in their database.
I also found some people who think they know tricks to accelerate the process:
The name of this game is SEO, short for "Search Engine Optimization".
It is the set of techniques used to make your blog or website appear at the top of the search engine lists.

Feeling adventurous, I took the following steps for DLP (Damien Learns Perl):

1. I inserted ads from Google's AdSense program. Several reasons for that:
  • Adding AdSense boxes actually increases the chances of getting listed by Google (at least, that's what tech-recipes.com says, see link above)
  • Some ads might be relevant to you as AdSense scans the contents of each post to target its ads to the appropriate audience. I will do my best to keep it light.
  • When someone clicks on an add, I earn a few cents (haven't figured out the math yet).
  • By looking at the AdSense stats, I can have a rough idea of the site's traffic. I know this is not ideal and I will try to figure out a better solution later. Suggestions? Also, I know I will not see you guys who are using Firefox with AdBlock Plus (little tricksters!).
2. I submitted http://damienlearnsperl.blogspot.com/ to the Google search engine (because it might just be enough)

3. I also registered the URL on http://www.freesubmitwebsiteurl.com/

I'll keep you posted for the results.

Next steps:
4. Register on other directories
5. Register URL on other search engines (Yahoo, AltaVista, AskJeeves, etc.)
6. Add an entry on Wikipedia?

French sentence of the day:
"Quand commence-t'on à apprendre Perl?": When do we start learning about Perl?

Next posts:
  • How to get Perl and set up your environment (Windows and Linux)?
  • Hello World program
  • How to publicize your blog - Part II
  • First version of FileInfo script

5 comments :

  1. To know the site's traffic, use google.com/analytics -- works really nicely!

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  2. Thanks Oana and welcome :)
    Is Google analytics what you use for your blog also?
    I'll make sure to check it out.

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  3. I use google analytics too:) I had never though of writing a Wikipedia page! Great idea!

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  4. Ok, I just set up Google Analytics. I hit a little bump so I'll explain in a post what I did. Like that, any new Blogger user will know how to use it.

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  5. I use StatCounter to figure out my site traffic. Adding a Wikipedia Entry is a great idea, thank you!!

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