New blog advice

[Lauxa]

I've recently started a blog on the Zend Framework (a popular PHP coding framework). My goals for the site are as follows:

1) establish myself as knowledgeable/expert in this technology and provide coding samples for potential employers to look at
2) build a repository of tips and tricks for my own future reference so that I can build web applications faster
3) help people who are getting started with ZF to learn some more advanced techniques

Here is a link:
Zend Reflections

I've published 8 articles so far and have a goal to publish 2 articles a week. Most of the articles are set up tutorial style so that a reader can get a working example of the feature being explained by following the steps and copying the code in the article.

Based on my goals, it shouldn't matter that the site is getting no traffic, but when I look at google analytics and see 2-4 page views a day I feel like I could do better. I've sprinkled a few links on forums and relevant blog posts, but not getting many hits from that. Google doesn't yet know that my site exists.

Should I even be thinking about this now or just keep building content and eventually the viewers will come? Any suggestions for helping me to build my traffic and become visible to search engines?

Thanks in advance!

[CoolBee]

Patience
I think there's something in blogger (can't recall off hand and it's bedtime so don't want to sign into my account right now to check!) where you can inform google etc or elect to have them 'pinged' every time you write a new post - might be worth checking to see you haven't accidentally blocked it!
Also, you can submit your site yourself to google (but don't over do the submits!)

Fwiw - I just googled "zend reflections" and your site came up so google knows you're there.

Join a few relevant networks and put their badge on your site (eg if you look at my oldbag you will see afrigator (which is for african blogs) and technorati.

Most of my traffic comes from google - I'm in a very niche area and went over 20000 hits in over 2 years in the last few days but was slow kicking off. There are a handful of posts which bring in most of the traffic but when I wrote them I couldn't have told you that they would!

PS- as your intentions seem to be more about building up acknowledged expertise rather than fistfuls of dollars from google ads, then try this feedjit link thing that I have on mine - gives an easy way of seeing where people are finding you from. This proved invaluable when there was a fatal landslide in Cairo about 18 months ago and I realised people were landing on my blog looking for info because I had visited the area previously - so after a bit of investigating found there was no info on the web about how to help or anything and put together something very relevant and useful for people. sometimes I see what queries are bringing people in and it helps me to make minor amendments to posts or give ideas for new posts.

[Lauxa]

Originally Posted by CoolBee

Patience
I think there's something in blogger (can't recall off hand and it's bedtime so don't want to sign into my account right now to check!) where you can inform google etc or elect to have them 'pinged' every time you write a new post - might be worth checking to see you haven't accidentally blocked it!
Also, you can submit your site yourself to google (but don't over do the submits!)

Okay, looks like that is enabled by default, that's good.

Fwiw - I just googled "zend reflections" and your site came up so google knows you're there.

Yes, you are right, google even found this forum thread, damn they're good!

Join a few relevant networks and put their badge on your site (eg if you look at my oldbag you will see afrigator (which is for african blogs) and technorati.

Not sure what the relevant networks are, looked at a few other zend blogs and didn't find any badges, guess I'll skip this for now.

Most of my traffic comes from google - I'm in a very niche area and went over 20000 hits in over 2 years in the last few days but was slow kicking off. There are a handful of posts which bring in most of the traffic but when I wrote them I couldn't have told you that they would!

Guess I'll just keep writing then.

PS- as your intentions seem to be more about building up acknowledged expertise rather than fistfuls of dollars from google ads, then try this feedjit link thing that I have on mine - gives an easy way of seeing where people are finding you from. This proved invaluable when there was a fatal landslide in Cairo about 18 months ago and I realised people were landing on my blog looking for info because I had visited the area previously - so after a bit of investigating found there was no info on the web about how to help or anything and put together something very relevant and useful for people. sometimes I see what queries are bringing people in and it helps me to make minor amendments to posts or give ideas for new posts.

Okay I installed feedjit, it was very easy, I don't really like how it looks but if it's useful I'll keep it up. Hopefully google will start sending me traffic one of these days and I'll be able to use it as you suggested.

Thanks for taking the time to respond, I really appreciate it!

[Marger]

1. Get backlinks that Google actually uses. Commenting on blogposts and signatures (and sometimes posts) on forums get tagged as 'nofollow' which means Google will ignore them. Same goes for links on Twitter. But if someone links to your site in a blog post on their own blog, you get a real backlink and those are the ones Google values highly. Building Google traffic is, more than anything else, building quality backlinks, since that is a very important factor in your Google ranking.

2. Setup your site in Google Webmaster Tools. This will help Google trust your site. You could do the same for Bing and Yahoo.

You are already doing the other most important stuff: creating quality content.

[The Changing Ways]

If you want to get substantial traffic to your blog (and maybe even make some money from your blogging) be prepared to invest at least one year of effort into your blog WITHOUT seeing much progress.

It takes time to bould quality links to your blog and to start getting good search engine results rankings.

If you love what you are doing then this won't be a problem though

[yogesh sarkar]

First of all, if you are interested in establishing yourself as an authority in your niche, then get a domain, even if you want to keep your blog on blogger, to remove the cost of hosting and escape from the trouble of having to keep updating scripts. The reason simply being that a domain is always more easily brandable and rememberable than a sub domain.

Having said that, having your own self hosted blog on possibly a VPS would allow you to try and implement/test things out, which would not only provide you with experience, but an avenue to showcase you skills.

Also simply “sprinkling” your links over at various places wouldn’t get you much traffic and might even get you branded you as a spammer (depending on how you go about posting links).

What you need to do is spend time at those forums, contribute positively and build a rapport and only post links to your blog when the situation and discussion demands (having one in your signature is alright if allowed by forum rules) eg. if I give you a link to my blog post regarding how to effectively get traffic from forums, it would not only help the reader i.e. you, but also be on topic to the discussion taking place and wouldn’t be considered as spamming by most. However if I were to go ahead and do the same in say How to change the Skype chatting style, it wouldn't be helpful to anyone and would actually be considered as spamming by most!

Apart from this, try and work on link building by submitting to free directories and other sources, also link to your post from Twitter and Facebook if you have a following there to ensure that new articles get hits. Guest blog posts on popular programing blogs would also help you get more exposure and traffic.

Also internal linking is quite important, so in case you are talking about something which you have explained in detail in an earlier post, then link to the older post to keep traffic flowing from new to old.