My blog has been in existence since 2004 and started off as an experiment into SEO, link-building and website promotion. It all started in the English Beergarden in Munich during one of my consulting projects in Europe where we started a “Who will rank on the first page on Google when searching for ‘cv jee web sphere‘”-competition.
My original website was a simple HTML based site just containing my CV and during those days, SEO was pretty much based on content and link-building. Within 5 weeks I managed to position myself as #1 with the above search-term and a number of others.
My blog has evolved over time – initially just additional HTML-content pages, then the usage of b2evolution for more than 6 years and now WordPress.
Reflecting on 2011, I have created a list of top content (based on page visits). My not so proud moment is the “jailbait” series which was part of a “sex-sells” experiment several years back which still brings in plenty of (questionable) organic searches.
My interest in gadgets, electronics, gaming and home-entertainment covering one of the first tutorials to perform an OS X TimeMachine backup through non-supported Apple devices is still a highly visited content page:
Top Posts of 2011
- The Friday Picture: Jailbait
- ADSL: Significance of SNR and attenuation
- The Friday Picture: Jailbait
- OS X: Time Machine backup to Synology DS107+
- PS3: Recovery menu – fix your BluRay issues
- How to hack your Belkin router
- The Friday Picture: Jailbait
- Synology – automatic indexing via synoindex
- Android: Too Many Pattern Attempts. Phone is locked.
- Android: 3G Watchdog
- Android: Connect to an enterprise LAN via LEAP/802.1X
- The Friday Picture: Jailbait
- NAS: Create your own caching proxy
- The Friday Picture: The Lamp Is a Lie
- Running Transmission on Synology DS1010+
- Marlboro License Department rocks!
- NAS: Enable SCP and password-less SSH login
- OS X: Install JDeveloper 11g on OS X 10.6
- Microsoft Project Plans on OS X
- The Friday Picture: Asian Girls
While in previous years, Internet Explorer dominated my traffic, this has changed over the last 12 months with both Chrome and Firefox starting to trend. I tend to see a pattern where returning visitors do come in with Internet Explorer (new PCs?) and eventually switch to Firefox or Chrome. Safari has also started to pick up thanks to Apple making MacBooks more accessible in South Africa:
A good mix of organic and direct traffic dominates my traffic sources which validates my sentiment in SEO that “content is king” and optimizing your Meta-descriptions and Meta-keywords according to your content adds a tremendous advantage when it comes to boosting traffic. An important aspect in referral traffic is content syndication on forums, blogs and news-sites and referral traffic should be organic rather than through link-farms or paid link inclusion.
Many bloggers and web masters are very protective over their content, but I found that sharing content and giving permission to repost content (obviously with a link-back to my original post) provides a good number of organic back links. Most of my Synology, Popcorn Hour and ADSL posts have received mentions on forums and still drive good traffic to my blog.
While the “jailbait“-posts are not among my proudest moments during my The Friday Picture-series, it did validate one important aspect that trending topics will remain popular over time. Perhaps not quite a good strategy for most websites but a consideration (provided that one keeps it clean) for bloggers wanting to boost traffic.
Since my blog “downed” for more than 6 months and only received a revival over December, I am currently experimenting with a number of new SEO strategies (related to good content and social media) and while I have noticed a dramatic improvement in back links and social mentions, it’s perhaps too early to disclose those strategies at this point in time.
WordPress plugin – Disqus commenting
I previously used b2evolution as my blogging software and one very painful aspect was the managing of comments. Granted, WordPress’s native commenting system is lacks many features Disqus has.
The installation and configuration of the Disqus plugin is really simple, since Disqus provides a WordPress plugin which integrates seamless into WordPress. Disqus also allows you to import your existing WordPress comments and management of comments is afterwards simple and transparent:
The Disqus plugin manages the syncing of comments in the background and works really well compared to other commenting systems I have come across. One of the main benefits of Disqus is the social aspect and tight integration with their user base. Several widgets exist to integrate recent comments in the sidebar.
The initial import (I had about 500 comments across a few hundred posts) took more than 12 hours due to delays on the Disqus system (their importer seems to have frequent issues with delays).
You might want to cleanup some of your comments as the b2evolution importer uses <br/> tags and carriage returns which creates a lot of whitespace in your comments. This was unfortunately something I had to do manually to tidy up some of my comments.