I took a vacation from blogging and now I am back, refreshed and full of ideas for my main blog, ChatWithKatrina.com.

One idea is to change the name. I looked at names like tidbits.com and morsel.com but they, of course, were taken. Seems as if all of the one word sites are long gone. Meanwhile, I have a few ideas for two word ones that hopefully will not be gone by the time I come up with the scratch to buy it.

Another goal is to be in the top 10 of the Adgitize Leaderboard. I’m just curious if being up there will increase my stats and, thus, have a positive impact on my earnings.

Goal number three is to get it to cost over 1000 Entrecard points in order to advertise on my blog. During my hiatus, it dropped all the way down to 2, the absolute lowest it can go.

And my final goal is to get my pagerank all the way up to a PR 4. On this I am not starting from scratch since my pagerank still maintains a respectable PR1 despite the intermittant nature of my posts. Lol.

All of these things, while not providing direct income, should certainly reflect in an increase in Google Adsense clicks. If not, then it will definitely reflect in the value of ad space for those purchasing on Project Wondeful and how much I should charge on CMFads, right?

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Woo Hoo!!!

My lil’ blog finally has a pagerank.

And, not only that…it happily skipped right pass a PageRank 1 and landed on a Pagerank 2.

 What is pagerank?

To sum it up succinctly, pagerank is a super secret algorithm that Google uses to determine the value of your website.

 Pagerank is a big ol’ world wide web popularity contest.

I am proud to be sitting at the Cool Kids table. Lol.

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• Whiteboard Friday – What’s PageRank Got to do With It? (seomoz.org)
• Reverse Google Pagerank Algorithm (hobo-web.co.uk)
• The Most Epic Misunderstanding of PageRank In Blogging History (seobullshit.com)
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• Google Pagerank Algorithm and its Working! (itinfoguide.wordpress.com)

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Image via Wikipedia

Here’s a handy-dandy tool to submit your site to 40 search engines, including Google.

The Webmaster’s Tools.

It even shows you when the submission fails.

Related articles

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• SEO less technical, more about reputation (theglobeandmail.com)
• SEO Tools & Tactics, From A Beginner’s Perspective Onward (wpromote.com)
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• Bing Webmaster Tools : How to Verification (pathanruet.wordpress.com)

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A bounce rate is how long your visitors stick around before leaving your website without visiting any other pages.

In essence, they “bounce” away.

It is a simple formula to calculate your bounce rate. Simply divide the amount of visitors visiting only one page by the total number of visits.

The smaller your bounce rate, the better.

In fact, your bounce rate can affect your search engine ranking. A high number of visitors hitting the back button tells the search engines that your page did not contain the content the visitor was seeking.

Ideally, your bounce rate should be under 20%. One of the few exceptions for this is informational sites because the visitor may just get the information that is needed and leave.

For example, if all I wanted to know is the scores from yesterdays game, I may click on a score site, get the score, then leave. Mission accomplished on both ends.

Image via Wikipedia

When you use programs such artificial traffic (such as Entrecard), you will most likely have a high bounce rate because your visitors come for a purpose (dropping your card) and then leaving.

However, organic traffic (search engines, bookmarks, etc.) will generally give you a lower bounce rate because your visitors generally have an interest in what you have to say.

Other than informational sites, there are two basic reasons for having a high bounce rate.

1. Poorly targeted traffic caused by ineffective marketing. Make sure that your keywords are appropriate and that you are the king of excellent content. This sites content is about blogging, for example, and has smaller bounce rate eliminatinge the keyword “work from home”. On the other hand, it definitely uses the phrase “monetizing your blog”. It also does well by having various category pages built up around all of the necessities of blogging such as SEO, Webhosting, etc. Make sure that your headlines and meta data clearly identify the purpose of the content.  These changes have the advantage of having what the visitor is looking for and, thus, reducing your bounce rate significantly.

2. Poorly designed entrance page. Content may be king but design is certainly queen. The colors, font, and general layout of your site should be appealing to the human eye. Ads should either blend in or be in a separate area altogether. The site should be easy to use and quick to maneuver around and havea quick load time. Eliminate or limit pop-ups. No music or video auto-starters. There should be links and tags to relevant content on the site.

After you have fixed the problems with your landing page, also delve into the design and content of your other pages to improve the overall bounce rate of the entire site. Following these tips should show you an improved bounce rate from your organic traffic almost immediately.

Here’s to us capturing all of those bouncing visitors and converting them into long term fans!

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• 5 Working Tip to Lower Down Bounce Rate (shoutmeloud.com)

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You can do all that and more with BlogUpp.

Well, at least according to them anyway

To get started, simply enter your blogs url and click to get your widget.

Your blog widget starts out grey but it will automatically turn blue once your blog has been manually approved.

Of course, it’ll turn red if your blog is rejected so be on the lookout for that as well.

What makes BlogUpp! unique?

• No Sign-up (URL only)
• Auto-Share on Social Web
• Selected Blogs, Exclusively
• Blog Targeting and Ranking
• Cheat-Proof and Fair Blog Sharing
• All-in-One Blog Promotion Solution
• Blogspot, WordPress and alike friendly
• Trusted by Blogosphere, Proven by Time
• Welcome Bonus for Every Approved Blog
• Premium from € 5 (Boost, Ads-Free, Featured)

Best de Facto Exchange Ratio (10:9) and more

How does it work, you ask?

Good question.

Basically, for every 10 blogs shared on your blog, BlogUpp will show your blog’s latest post 9 times.

It does so by taking a snapshot of your blog and pulling your latest post from your RSS Feed.

There is also the option to autoshare each new post on Facebook.

To start blog hopping, just click the blogs on your toolbar or go directly to the BlogUpp blog directory.

I must admit to not seeing a great increase in my stats from this particular widget.

In fact, according to Statcounter.com, I haven’t received a single hit.

I’ll keep it up for awhile to see how it goes as my traffic itself increases.

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I found another awesome plugin for my blogging  family, CommentLuv.

When you add CommentLuv to your blog, you will be connected to thousands of bloggers that leave comments on blogs that they enjoy. The beauty of CommentLuv is the fact that the commenters last blog post is linked to their comment via their feed.

Instant backlink reward for commenting where they would have commented anyway!

This is why CommentLuv is more than a plugin, its a network.

You can even earn credits which can be cashed in or used to upgrade your tools on the site.

Easy way to earn credits, have people sign up with your affiliate link (hint, hint).

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One of the most neglected aspects, but easily rectified, of SEO is the importance of a site map.

Site maps, bascially, are just maps of your site.

See mine here.

Site maps are great for your readers to easily navigate your site.

But did you know that having a site map could (maybe?? darn that google) improve your SEO.

Site maps are the threads that guides those lil’ spiders on just where to go.

However, you need to be aware that although many search engines such as Yahoo still accept an html sitemap, Google specifically uses a xml.

In fact, some sites have adapted to having two separate site maps; one for humans and another for search engines. And, fortunately, Google doesn’t penalized this as having duplicate content.

A much more detailed explanation on the importance of using site maps can be found on webconfs.com

Click here for the plugin designed by Dagan Designs for the site map used on KatrinaBlogs.

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In your SEO endeavors, do not forget the benefit of StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is a personalized search engine. Members can recommend and rate, ie stumble, a website, photo, or video.

Many websites have the Stumble Button added but members can also download the StumbleUpon toolbar and stumble at will.

And one of the beauties of StumbleUpon is the ability to stumble your own website in general or posts in particular.

It is also a social network as you can find your friends using Facebook or email and see which sites they stumble.  This is an effective method as StumbleUpon will primarily show you sites of your friends or members have indicated having similar interests to you, thereby giving you sites that you will be interested in and most likely to give a stumble.

Excellent for SEO, right?

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Website Grader has got to be one of my most favorite (free) statistic analyzer. Not only because it is free, but because of the useful information that it gives in helping to make my site better and better.

My current Website Grader score:

Not bad for this lil’ blog. And what does this score mean?

A website grade of 92/100 for www.katrinablogs.com means that of the millions of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 92% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data , website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.

Like I told you, what I really love is the information about your blog that Website Grader gives me. Like the fact that google has indexed my pages 312 times. Or how about the fact that my blog is easy enough to read by someone with an elementary school education. Or the fact that I may be going to heavy on the images, which I actually thought was a good thing but apparently it is slowing my sites load time.

I need to take the time to go throw all of this info more thoroughly but it is still my favorite place to go for website analysis.

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You can’t go on a forum about blogging without running across word Digg. From the context, I had a basic grasp of what Digg might be but I thought I’d go visit the site for myself to be sure.

Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. You won’t find editors at Digg — we’re here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and we’re changing the way people consume information online.

Apparently, Digg is another excellent way to get the word out about your blog. The advantage of Digg is that content is King. If your site offers the best entertainment or the most relevant information, then readers will naturally vote (ie, Digg it).

You can submit your own stories, videos, or images or, better yet, a perfect stranger can get the ball rolling for you by spontaneously Digging it. The more people who Digg it, the higher in rank it goes. The higher in rank it goes, the more likely it will be on the frontpage. And once on the front page, it will, of course, continue to receive excellent Diggs.

On the other hand, folks can also vote to “bury” your submission so I hope you don’t have any meanie enemies out there!

Feel free to request to be added to my cast of Friends. I can Digg it.

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