This must be one of those topics which is very often neglected, but so important! We all know that choosing a book, or renting a DVD relies a great deal upon the name of the book or DVD. Humans are fairly lazy by nature, and if a title is not attractive, the chances of making an effort to read the back of the book or DVD is slim. I am not going to go into telling you about the importance of domain names, but rather look into the importance of post titles.

Each post made on any form of webblog requires a title. Now, it’s obvious that the post title should sum up the post which follows, but should we take time planning our title? Indeed. The post title on most blogging software is hyperlinked automatically, this allows quick referencing, and is used for back links and RSS feeds. Just looking at back links and RSS feeds, we can tell how important the title is. If the title in not attractive, the chances of getting a click through are slim. Furthermore, knowing that the title is a hyper link, gives us a great way to target search engine spiders correctly. Search engine spiders read these titles, and find keywords. That being said, it is important to try and include your keywords in the title.

Often when I write articles, I try and decide my post title, before I start writing, and I try and keep the post as closely related to the topic as possible. Systems, such as, Delicious, Digg and Stumble are perfect examples of where titles are key. Hundreds of people surf around these web sites, looking for interesting topics, so if you can hit a great topic, the chances of someone clicking through is high. One can go as far as constructing a topic which sounds like one thing, but it actually another, playing with peoples mind so to say to increase your traffic, and hopefully, even though the person clicked through with one idea, perhaps the material he/she stumbles upon will be of interest! When trying this approach, just remember that you do not want to go too off topic, or try and be too clever with the title.

Another thing to consider when choosing a topic, is the categories you use on your web site, you want to hold things together, don’t make a paste about fish breeding and lodge it in the ‘fish types’ category, and entitle it ‘Fish Breeding’, rather try and entitle it ‘Breeding for different fish types’. This holds your topics together, and the idea behind this is that a visitor will read the topic, and then hopefully read other topics under the same category!

Play around with titles, see which titles get the greatest click through ratios, and work up a system as to how you decide your topics effectively!

Something I have learned over the last couple of weeks, and especially with the release of Afrigator and Amatomu is syndication. RSS feeds are an essential attribute to a website, and should always be available to readers. I am not going to explain what RSS is at this point, as I feel that most people will already know what it is, but more to the point, I have a little plugin and information about using RSS in an interesting and useful way to increase our traffic and reader experience.

If you look towards the top of my sidebar on the right, you will see.. “RECENT PIXEL GRABS ON BLOGVERTISE”. Now, basically what is happening here is syndication. Over at Blogvertise, there is an RSS feed, which sends out a message each time pixels are taken by bloggers. Each time one of these feeds is sent out, the plugin I use captures the feed, and displays the title of it. Nifty? I think so!

If you scroll down the page a little bit, you will notice two things.. “Latest from iMod” and “Latest from IT Carreer”, these are, again, two live feeds from other websites. One being a feed from my personal website, and one being a feed from a good friends blog.

How will this increase your traffic? Well, firstly, if you have more than website, you can display the topics from site B on site A, and display the topics from site A on site B. Basically bouncing readers between the two websites, thus merging your websites and handling a larger reader base, as you have now spread your two sites over one! I hope you are thinking to yourself, “Wow, that’s a good point”.

Secondly, and perhaps not as effective as my former point: you can display live feeds from other websites, which cover similar topics to your site. Now, of course this might mean a reader clicking to a similar site, and enjoying the other site more than yours, this is a risk you will need to take. Chances are, the reader will enjoy the fact that you shared useful knowledge and thus return to your website again. If the reader has taken the time to look through all the links on your sidebar/navigation area, chances are he/she enjoyed the content on your website, and therefore is taking the time to completely look around your site. Personally, I think they would come back. What you could do, is make friends with someone who authors a site similar to yours, and both put up live feeds to eachothers website, kind of like a backlink, but with a bit more too it?!

Right, how do you do this? Well, it’s actually extremely easy, all you need is one file, and a statement of code. I have uploaded the files onto my iMod server, simply click here, to download.

You will find two files in the zip file. One which has a .php extension and a readme file. Upload the .php file to your plugins directory on your wordpress install. Once you have done this, login to wp-admin, move your navigation to plugins, and activate the plugin. Now, the readme file is really easy to follow, but to make it even easier to you, here is the code to display the live feeds on your blog..

<?php RSSImport(1,”http://feeds.feedburner.com/Webtrepreneurcoza“,false,true); ?>

That’s it! Simply include that code whereever you would like the feed to be displayed, and it will be displayed. Looking at the code above, there are 4 properties to this method. The first property (here a ‘1′), is the number of recent topics to display. The second property is the link to the RSS feed from the website you would like to display feeds from. The first third property, a boolean property (true or false) is for whether you would like only headlines to be displayed, and finally, the forth property, another boolean property is for whether you would like to truncate the headline - meaning that if you set the property to true, it will only show the first 30 characters of the headline, which is very useful if your design has a certain width.

What happens if 30 isn’t going to work for you? Perhaps your design is very narrow, and you want to only display 20 characters? Well, here is a solution for you:

53  if(strlen($item[’title’])>30)
54  {
55  $item[’title’]=substr($item[’title’],0,30).” … “;

These are lines copied out of the .php file. The 53, 54 and 55 represent the line numbers in the file. If you would like to only display 20 characters, yes you guessed it, replace the 30’s with 30’s in the file. Save the file, and upload it as you did before.

That’s it for today, a nice long post, I hope you make use of these useful syndication techniques! Let me know if you come up with other unique ideas based on these concepts.

The Webtrepreneur

One of the key factors to running a successful blog is making contacts and friends. Not a day goes by where I meet new people online, who also blog, who are keen to learn, share knowledge and link up. Creating your own kind of cummunity creates an excellent opportunity to have people returning to your website.

When someone places a comment on your blog, there is a good chance they will return to have a look and see if someone has commented back. If you run a blog, make sure you write back to comments visitors leave. This opens up the website to discussions, which often lead to new visitors via word of mouth. A busy blog is often a successful blog, people are like sheep, they learn and copy others, and therefore if your site has regular commenting, your chances of others commenting are higher, thus increasing your returning visitors.

Blogging communities are a great place to meet other bloggers. MyBlogLog is probably the most popular place at the moment when it comes to blogging communities. The website is packed with hundreds of little goodies, including the widget on the right hand side of my website, which shows who has been visiting my website. When you see someone new visiting your website, give their ‘face’ a click, head on over and take a look at what they blog about, and leave them a message saying thank-you for visiting my blog - this shows interest, and the chances are, the person will revisit your blog at some point after receiving your message.

Once you have made a couple friends, you can suggest a link exchange with them. If they are a regular or fairly regular reader of your blog, and enjoy swapping ideas with you, the chances are they will be keen to do a link exchange. I have talked about link exchaging and its importance before, you cannot go wrong with this friendly approach, both parties score.

All in all, blogging is about sharing - sharing adventures, sharing knowledge and creating new ideas. Go out, meet some people with similar interests, learn from them, link to them, and watch your traffic increase steadily.

We all want to find out the tricks of the trade when it comes to getting your website ranked with the popular search engines. There are so many different ways to do this, and one which cannot be forgotten about is using a robots.txt file to let search engines know that you have agreed to let them crawl your website.

The process is very straight forward, create a text file and name it as robotss.txt. Once you have done this, all you need to do is add one line of text to the file, as shown below..

Sitemap: http://www.yourname.com/sitemap.xls

Then save the file, and upload it to your website. As simple as that - create, point, save, upload!

Using Google webmaster tools, like I talked about in preparing your website Pt2 is still a good idea, there is no hard in using both methods, the Webtrepreneur reckons it’s probably best to do both methods!

You can read more about the use of robots.txt here.