your blog traffic : double it overnight

Do you want to double your blog traffic practically overnight with a couple minutes of work? Well, you've come to the right place to find out how. Of course, I'm totally stupid for not doing this from the very beginning, and I knew I should all along but was too lazy to actually do it.

Ok so here it is. How to double your blog traffic overnight: switch around your title tags so that the title of the post is first, and the name of your blog is second. Every last one of my blog posts that were indexed by google were being truncated so that only my blog's name and description were visible and the rest, totally ignored. Keywords not considered. Bad.

Now, when my posts are indexed, the title shows up first for all that extra SEO goodness.

If you are wondering how to switch your title tags around, there are plenty of tutorials out there that show you just how to do it. If you are using wordpress it is significantly easier than if you are using blogger (like me) (especially the old blogger.. grumble)

Proof about the increase in organic search traffic? Here is a screenshot of my overall traffic increase (don't make fun of my crappy traffic numbers) and traffic specifically from keyword searches, respectively (in Google Analytics).

cell phones cause cancer after all?

A $30 million World Health Organization report is now saying that long term use of cell phones may cause cancer. The World Health Organization has been doing the study for a decade and is now finding results that show a significantly increased risk of certain brain tumors after a period of 10 years or more of heavy cell phone use.

Suddenly I'm a little bit happier that I have my cell phone stuck to the side of my head for less than 300 minutes per month.

However, I'm skeptical of the study. The definitive answer on whether cell phones cause cancer has shifted from "yes" to "no" and back more times than the "is butter or margarine better for you?" argument.

After all, we get bombarded with radio frequencies all day long, every day. Granted, the sources of that radiation aren't stuck to the side of your head, but still.

Get Windows 7 cheap at newegg!

Newegg is having a launch special for Windows 7. This is essentially a 10 dollars off discount.
You can get Windows 7 professional for $139.99 (regularly $149.99), Windows 7 Home Premium for $99.99 (regularly $109.99), and Windows 7 Ultimate for $179.99 (regularly $189.99).

I am using windows 7 now and I can tell you a couple things:

1. The release to market version of windows 7 is much tighter and usable than Vista (or XP for that matter) was.
2. Windows 7 feels snappy and responsive, and compatibility, while still not perfect is improving and is much much better than Vista when it was launched.
3. If you are a student, look at your university or high school and see if you can get a discount on Windows 7. It's well worth the upgrade.
   

Does Google punish Entrecard users? an SEO question

I am aware that there have been rumors that Entrecard users are subject to getting "slapped" by Google for installing the Entrecard widget. However, it has been my experience that this is not the case (at least, yet). How do I know? Well, earlier today, I was interested in the topic, "how to roll over a 401k". I am about to do just that, so I searched for that exact term in Google. To my surprise, the top ranking site, genxfinance.com, has the Entrecard widget installed. I won't even bother telling you the pagerank because pagerank is dying anyway. It is obvious however that they get a nice amount of traffic because they have nearly 5,000 subscribers.

Right away one can tell that the reason they rank the highest for that search term is that their post is absolutely top quality. Their site is nicely laid out, and their content is top notch. On top of that, the traffic they've driven to the site generates comments which provide more keyword juice for google and further boost rankings.

If you have any other examples of websites that rank well for a particular high competition keyword or keyword phrase, please leave it in the comments. I'd love to see them.

Get more traffic to your blog by exposing your RSS feed

Getting your blog read by as many people as you can to generate traffic is the name of the game. One of the most common ways to get your blog read is to have an RSS feed. Here are a few ways to make your RSS feed more visible to search engines and programs.

1. Have a link to your RSS feed on your website. This is common, however, some people forget to put the type="application/rss+xml" attribute in their anchor tag that links to the RSS feed.
2. Other programs, browsers, and spiders also may look for a link meta tag. Put this inside your blog's head tag:
   

3. Get your feed submitted to as many free (or paid if you prefer) RSS feed directories. There are plenty of them out there, just spend a little bit of time searching. The more of these directories you submit to, the more traffic your blog will start getting. Here are a few to start with: free RSS directories submission list, free RSS directories, best blog directory and RSS submission sites
4. Every time you post a new article, ping your blog with autopinger.com. They ping the most popular directories and this will help you get traffic, guaranteed. However, don't abuse the system, only ping when you have new content. If you ping too often you could get banned from the ping services or get punished by search engines for spamming.

Remember, the more you can expose your RSS feed, the more traffic to your blog you will get. My list is by no means comprehensive so explore every way to get more readers for your blog.