Having spent a lot of time and effort into putting together a well thought out blog post, how annoying would it be for you to find that someone just came to your blog, highlighted the text and copied it and then reposted it as their own?

What if they just right clicked and copied the images as well. If you write good content then this is something that you will face at some point in your blogging career. For users of Wordpress there is a plugin that will help you prevent this from happening.

Called WP-Content Protector it provides you with the ability to control how your content is used. Through the settings you can decide to turn off the ability for images to be “right-clicked” and the ability for a reader to highlight text. These can be selected individually.

I think this is a great start to protecting your content, and considering the amount of time you probably put into it why wouldn’t you want to protect it? One more thing about this plugin that adds to its recommendation, it is already Wordpress 2.8 compatible.

Have you ever had your content stolen?

The benefit of using software like Wordpress is that it is open source and there are lots of people developing add on functionality for it in the form of plugins. This is where Firefox has a lot of similarities as it too is open source.

One very valuable plug in for Firefox is SEO Blogger from WordTracker. This browser plugin opens in a sidebar and while you are typing your post it suggests keywords for that post. Not only does it suggest keywords but it also provides you with the ranking of that keyword so you can see which words are going to get most traffic.

For example I know that the word “Firefox” generated 30,000+ searches. The term SEO generated 4,000+ searches so by putting both those in the title I am guaranteeing that this post will get good results in search engines.

How much attention do you pay to your blogs SEO?

You are unlikely to be the only blog in your particular niche, unless you have managed to corner such a narrow market that no one else writes in the space.  So assuming you have competitor blogs in your space wouldn’t it be nice to know who links to them ?

Why, you might ask would you want to know who was linking to your competitors blog? It’s important because if they are getting valuable inbound links that will positively impact their google page rank and of course drive traffic to them.

Once you know where their inbound links are coming from you can start to work on getting the same sites to link to you. So how do you get that information?

Use Yahoo as your search tool and the little known “linkdomain” command to reveal this information. It is used in the following format:

linkdomain:website address

For example if I want to see all the sites linking to this one I would type linkdomain:slyvisions.com

The drawback to that is it will show all referring links, including internal ones, to remove the internal links we simply add -slyvisions.com at the end, so we have linkdomain:slyvisions.com -slyvisions.com

How will you get more traffic from sites linking to your competitors?

Have you noticed that your regular readers are not the people who click on the ads that you run via Adsense. For the most part they know where your ads are and they just ignore them. So what’s the point of having ads if that is the typical behavior of your regular readers.

The truth is displaying those, fairly untargetted ads to your regular readers won’t earn you much money. However, displaying them to people who haven’t seen your site will. This is because in all likelihood they found your blog via a search engine, so they were looking for something specific. Having them find your page and then see an ad increases the chances that they will click it.

Here is how to achieve this for WordPress blogs:

Firstly, as always with these tips, back up the files we are going to work with, in this case - functions.php.

The first piece of code are going to add is this:

function visitors_fromasearchengine(){

$ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']; $SE = array(‘/search?’, ‘images.google.’, ‘web.info.com’, ’search.’, ‘del.icio.us/search’, ’soso.com’, ‘/search/’, ‘.yahoo.’);

foreach ($SE as $source) {
if (strpos($ref,$source)!==false) return true;
}
return false;
}

What this section does is establish the array containing the various search engines, if you want to add others simply add them as variables to the array.

Now we need to tell your theme to use this function. We do this by placing the following code wherever it is you want your adsense ads to appear.

if (function_exists(‘visitors_fromasearchengine’)) {
if (visitors_fromasearchengine()) {
INSERT YOUR CODE HERE
}
}

Now your adsense ads will only appear for those coming from a search engine.

One of the comments received to a post last week asked how to improve the google page rank for a blog, here is the comment:

I have a blog and its already have a page rank of 3, but I want to increase the popularity of it I don’t want to stuck in PR3. I want to know some techniques aside from creating links and directory submission…

I thought this was a great opportunity to go over the basics of how to achieve this as I know it’s something that a lot of people question.

Firstly, our commenter points out two of the most obvious ways, have inbound links, have internal links and make sure you website is listed in high profile directories and on other websites.

Those are good ideas but they are only part of the picture. The first and foremost way to improve your blog page ranking is to improve the content. High quality content will drive traffic and that will increase your page rank faster than anything else.

Quality content will also naturally lend itself to being repeated, quoted, and generally talked about, this will also increase your page rank.  Other methods that should not be over looked are:

Translate it - make your content available in other languages, this will spread the opportunity and increase the number of readers and potential sites linking to yours.

Use Social Media - create word of mouth campaigns centered around your really stand out posts so that they start conversations online, most of which will include a link back to your post.

Don’t over look the obvious - make sure your blog address is in your email signature, and everywhere else that you sign things that you send out, e.g. email newsletters, physical newsletters, ads etc.

What is your current page rank and what are you doing to improve it?

Linking to other posts you have on your blog is a great way to increase reader time on your blog, it also has a very positive impact on your SEO efforts.  However, remembering to link to previous posts, especially older ones can be a challenge.

The WordPress plugin WikiStyle Autolinks solves this for you by doing it automatically. Everytime you use a phrase that occurs in a previous post title it will create a link back to that post. I think this is a great time saving tool that has real benefits to you as a blogger.

It also allows you to create custom links via its Admin page interface which increases the flexibility of this plugin. Any tool that saves a blogger time is worth investing in, this is a free plugin, so I would recommend trying this one out.

How often do you remember to provide links back to your older posts?

One of the things that often gets over looked by bloggers looking to increase their search engine results position is the layout of their blog. While some design features are ignored by search engines others matter quite a lot.

Firstly, its important to remember how to use H1,H2 & H3 tags. These give the search engines a sense of structure to your site. Your post titles should always be in H1 tags so that you can clearly indicate to the search engine where the content starts.

The other area that matters to a search engine and a human reader alike is the loading pattern of your site. After the navigation loads, you don’t want a sidebar with your ads to load next. What you want is for your main content column to load, then have your left or right sidebar load. This will ensure that the search engines pick up your content. It also provides a better reading experience for your readers - which is definitely a win.

What layout could you change to improve your search engine results?

One of the easiest ways to increase traffic to your blog is to make sure it is relevant to the people reading it - sounds obvious doesn’t it, but sometimes that isn’t quite as obvious as it sounds.

What’s relevant to them and what’s relevant to you might not be the same thing. How do you make it relevant? One of the best ways is to tie your posts into popular culture. Whether you use Google trends, Twitter Topic trends, or even “Most popular” on Amazon you are going to be writing about topics you know that are popular.

This helps you in a lot of ways, firstly, it means that you are going to get picked up by search engings more often. If those topics are trending right now then its obvious people are already searching for those terms. Including those strategically in your post will cause your post to appear in the results and lead to more page views.

What tools are you using to enhance your posts?