omnia mea mecum fero

If we invest a lot of time and energy in our blog, it's important to do the right things to attract visitors and to keep them more than five seconds on it. Here some great advices to ameliorate, if necessary, the situation. [note Martin Gysler]

Here’s the situation: Your buddy sends you a link to check out, you get to the blog post and after glancing at the layout you immediately question the validity of the blog (and your friend). On occasion I have left a post thinking it was created by some autoblogging process, and then realized it only looked that way and was actually written by a human.

Text ads out of control, color combinations that hurt to look at, no social sharing links (or TOO many!) and images that barely have any connection to the text.

These mistakes can make a visitor run for the proverbial hills. A visitor to your blog is making a decision about your worth within a few seconds, sometimes nanoseconds.

Find out whether you’re making simple but crucial mistakes that turn readers away…

A really great blog post can bring a flood of visitors to your website when people who read your post share it with the world.

The best way to create a potentially viral blog post is to experiment with lots of different types of blog posts and to observe what has worked for other blogs.

Below I’m going to share 11 blog post ideas you can use to get more traffic. These ideas each came by examining popular posts from some of my favorite blogs. These posts became some of the most popular posts on some incredibly popular blogs. There’s no guarantee they’ll work the same for you, but try several of them and you might just make a breakthrough...

Sometimes it's to ask what it takes to that Google ranks us on the first page... :-) Here is an article that will give us more information on this subject. [note Martin Gysler]

Your blog is a good read. Everyone says so.

Although “everyone” is really just people you already know. Like your Mum.

So why isn’t your blog being found by other people? The millions and millions of people hungrily consuming blog content out there in the global online space we call the Internet?

The cold, hard truth is that Google hates your blog. And it’s nothing personal. You just don’t have anything that Google wants.

Creating high-quality, relevant content is a must if you want your blog to be noticed by search engines but it’s only part of the picture. If you’re not sure if Google really hates your blog, or whether it’s just ambivalent, then step through these warning signs.

1. You don’t know which keywords your readers are using

The very heart of search engine optimization is understanding what people are searching for online and aligning your own content to those searches. 

Read more: http://bit.ly/wqM8Rm

As 2011 comes to a close, now is a better time than ever to evaluate your blog, its performance, and most importantly, what you can do to improve your blog in 2012!

A point I always like to drive home is that you will never find blogging success by turning into an “eternal student”, one who always consumes information but never creates or takes action.

Image copyright mipan - Fotolia.com

As I am in the process of taking a step back from my own blog to reevaluate what things I could do better, I wanted to present Problogger readers a list of actionable tips that they could act on right now to improve their blog for the new year.

So check this list out, bookmark it for later (or tweet it out to your fellow bloggers), and make sure you go through and see what quick actions you can take to improve your blog!