Ronda, Spain, Spanish, Themes, and Everything Else

A while back I wrote about SEO using social bookmarking and blog communities and since nearly a month has passed I thought I'd update my notes on the subject

I've been most happy with Blogcatalog this month, it really seems to have powered ahead to the extent that I am now actively working my Blogcatalog profile. I think the very fact of mentioning it in my last post attracted a lot of visitors who then added me as a friend, and the widget helps too. You may have noticed I've been more active in the Blogcatalog forums and I've updated my profile and joined a couple of groups.

Next month I'll be keen to see how Blogcatalog continues to develop for me so I think I'll be making use of the friend feature more to drive more traffic and increase subscriber numbers. Strangely though, Blogcatalog traffic increases haven't increased the number of comments, and commenting is something I'm really monitoring, BTW thanks to Paul and Jillian for taking an interest. Read More

For a couple of years now I've been playing around social bookmarking sites, blog communities and other widget type sites like Blogrush, and for almost as long I've been meaning to write up my thoughts about them. Well, at long last, here it is.

Technorati and SEO
I started with Technorati like most bloggers do, I even have all of my tags set to the Technorati standard so they get read properly by the Technorati spider, and it wasn't until I did this that I noticed any traffic from Technorati. I'm one of the fortunate few who use Serendipity as my blog software so I have a plugin that automatically converts my tags into the format they use, and this really is absolutely necessary if you hope to get any serious traffic.

Technorati users seem to work almost exclusively on tag searches. Out of interest, almost all traffic I get is to entries with descriptive titles, and doesn't seem to have anything to do with the description or first paragraph so if you want Technorati traffic, use tags and write good entry titles.

Social Bookmarking
I've also tried Digg and del.icio.us which can be great sites for gaining backlinks and traffic but need to used wisely. Both of my profiles are examples of how not to use these sites if you want to be successful. Let me tell you why, I haven't really used their services for anything other than a half hearted attempt at self promotion, and if I was serious about using them I'd be digging or bookmarking worthy sites within my keyword niche as well as a few of my own entries. In terms of traffic, I get nothing from either of these sites but I'm going to change the way I use them both and try to improve that. Read More

In this video tutorial I show Serendipity users how to install the HTML Nugget plugin and then use it to add a network badge to their blog sidebar. The same technique can be used to place Adsense advertising into a sidebar, or a counter.

This video complements the video I prepared a few days ago on plugin management and is aimed at new users.

I'm still looking for ideas for other s9y screencasts so please add your comment below to give me ideas.

This is my first video tutorial for Serendipity and it's all about plugins, specifically how to move sidebar plugins from one column to another, changing the order of s9y sidebar plugins, adding plugins to sidebars, installing Spartacus, and installing plugins using Spartacus.

Plugin management with Serendipity is so much easier than some other Blog software and this 10 minute video shows how powerful it is. Many new bloggers automatically choose Wordpress or Blogspot simply because a friend uses it, or because 'everyone' uses one of the other packages. I'm a passionate supporter of Serendipity for my blog and if you're one of those people who hasn't used it, and want to try it out, sign up for a free Serendipity blog over at Supersized.