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Increasing Traffic with Easy Tweaks: "
We are one month away from hitting the road again and we are getting closer to reaching our goals with revamping our blog.
It has been one of the busiest summers on record. Who would have thought that travel blogging could be so time consuming. Especially when we were not travelling that much!
The summer has been filled with making changes to ThePlanetD.
We have kept monthly updates as to how things are going since first submitting our blog to The Travel Writers Exchange’s Under the Microscope and since it is the beginning of the month again, it is time to highlight some of the changes that we have made.
We don’t want to go over our previous changes as we have made many, but if you would like to see what we have done to almost triple our readers since June and move up from 150,000 in Alexa Rankings to 68,000 you may want to check out our previous posts.
It is amazing what some little changes can do to make people start to pay attention to your website.
Now, what have we done during the month of September?
1. New logo and header – We had an outdated photo at the top of our blog showing our faces at the end of our 12,000 km cycling race through Africa. We were pretty skinny after cycling 12,000 km in 4 months time and don’t look like that photo anymore. When we first made the website, we thought it was a great picture because you could see both of us clearly in the photo, but have since learned that we don’t look anything like it. When we met fellow bloggers and readers, they informed us that they almost didn’t recognize us! Now we have redesigned the header to look more professional. Dave designed a new logo for both ThePlanetD and the Photography Site Picture the Planet with an arrow pointing people to click on the link.
What we still need to do: We have a few tweaks to do on the header still, We need to widen it a little so that it doesn’t look so squished and we are going to change the globe for Picture the Planet to blue to match the mountain vista photograph. Blue and Orange are complimentary colours and we like it much better than our old blue and black colour scheme.
2. RSS Subscribers – We have been trying to increase our RSS subscriber list all summer. For those of you that don’t know, RSS stand for Really Simple Syndication. Simply put, it is a simple way for readers to receive updates in their email or on their google reader. It is great for blogs because it shows that people actually want to come back regularly to see what you are up to? We haven’t done a great job at promoting our RSS until this summer. The past few months we have slowly and steadily increased our subscribers.
What did we do?
1. We just recently added a new plugin called WP Greetbox to let our readers know that they can subscribe to us at various social media sites like twitter, facebook or in their email inbox by RSS. We only installed this greeting last week, so we are not completely sure if this will help or not, but we have noticed that many other blogs have this greeting so we thought that we would give it a try.
2. We have a great plugin at the end of our posts called subscribe remind. But I think that we were under utilizing it. It is a reminder at the end of each post letting people know that they can subscribe, but we found that our font was too small and people were probably missing it. We just recently made the font larger so that people will notice it.
Did it work?
Besides these recent changes above, we made our subscribe button larger in our sidebar and we have noticed a large increase in subscribers in the past few months.
Search Engine Optimization
Tagging
As we told you in our previous post Travel Blogging Business Week 1, we have been working like mad on retagging photographs in old posts and making our older posts more Search Engine friendly. We didn’t tag our photos before and considering we are a very photo heavy blog this was a big mistake. We have now changed photos that were tagged with things like “img_2967″ to “holi_festival_india.”
It seems simple, but we didn’t do it!
Key Words
We have noticed a considerable increase in views of our older posts since working on our SEO (search engine optimization). We haven’t gone overboard with adding key words because we don’t want to change the posts to seem strictly written for keywords, but we did notice that we were very light on key words in all our earlier posts.
For example: In the past we would write something like “Africa was incredible.” We now changed the sentence to “cycling through Africa was incredible.” The post was about cycling Africa, but we hardly mentioned the words cycle, bicycle or cycling. We learned that we have to add a few of these words if we want to be found in the search engines when someone is looking for “cycling Africa”
Now, when we search cycling Africa, we show up on the first page of Google.
Meta Tags
First of all, what are meta tags? Well, Google describes them as a great way for webmasters to provide search engines information about their site. They are usually placed in your header.php file anywhere above your <head> section. For a more detailed description click here.
Boy did we have all the wrong meta tags for our blog. We started to do a search of certain keywords for our site last week and realized that we should be placing higher. After checking out our meta tags that we set up at the very beginning of our blogging career, we learned that we chose some terrible ones to describe our blog.
We had tags like, “tourism, follow us, tips and advice” etc. These were pretty useless for our blog.
We focus on Adventure Travel Around the World for Couples.
We have now changed them to adventure, travel, around the world, couples, blog and travel photography.
How do you find meta tags?
If you go to your website’s homepage and click view on your browsers toolbar you will see “view source.” Click on that and you will see your meta tags for your website. Check out some of the top sites in your niche and see what they have as their tags. It is a great learning
So there you have it. Only one month until we are back on the road and we will not be able to do as many updates to our blog. We are hoping to have everything set up before leaving for Fiji and China.
There is still a lot to do, but with a lot of hard work, we have made progress and we hope to make some more in the next few weeks.
Stay tuned for one more update before we leave.
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