In spending the last several weeks leveraging and learning Google Web Master Tools, I have found and delved quite deeper into the “Content Analysis” section of Web Master Tools. This is under the “Diagnostics” section of Web Master Tools.

When clicking on Content Analysis you will be presented with a list of Meta Description Issues and Title Tag Issues. Listed will be the number of pages listed by Google as not being optimized or having most efficiency.

Here is the summary list:

Now, I decided to investigate the Short Meta Descriptions which for my Dragonblogger site had 13 listed. In clicking on the 13, I am now taken to each page that Google thinks does not have long enough Meta Description as seen here:

Now I can go in an edit each one of these posts and increase the meta description length to where it falls in the optimum range.

Using this tool you can make sure that all of your posts are optimized, if you start seeing many errors you may find you are making a pattern mistake that may cost your site a little bit. I would make sure you keep your errors to less than 10% of your total site POSTS. If you have 150 posts, and you have 60 pages with issues, you know you have a problem with how you are doing titles, tags and/or descriptions.

Hope this information helps my fellow bloggers.

-Dragon Blogger

I have been using Feedjit as not only a means of tracking who visits my site, but it is also an invaluable tool to help me determine where users are coming from and how they are arriving on my site.  I do spend some time each night watching Feedjit’s live feed to see people pop on and off my blog.

You see I was very worried that too much of my traffic is artificially created by Entrecard droppers, and though it is great to have the visitors and have them drop.  If entrecard were to crash for a few days as it did today, I was worried my traffic would vanish with it.

So I was feeling a bit better after reviewing my Feedjit traffic tonight here is a snapshot of 13 visitors to my site, and only 3 of them were directly arriving from entrecard.  Most of them arrived from doing Google Searches and a few of them arrived directly, which means they either typed my URL directly, or have me bookmarked.  Here is a snapshot from Feedjit live, click on image to make larger and see details:

This is another tool you can use for your blog to analyze visitors and watch your traffic in real time.  It is an excellent tool and I recommend anyone to download and use Feedjit if they don’t already.

-Dragon Blogger

I have received numerous requests via email on how I have gotten my blog to under 1000 IzeaRank in only its first 35 days of existance.  I have to say that one of the biggest tools that I use to achieve this is Entrecard.  First of all, I want to say that though my visitors to my site are high, I have a high bounce rate of 84%, which means that if I were to stop using these social networks, I would lose 70% of my traffic within 3 or 4 days.  I don’t have sustainable traffic yet, it takes about 1-2 hours of upkeep per day to keep this much traffic coming into my blog at this point.  I still strive for blog sustainability and I only believe this will happen with time and high quality posts about topics readers want to read about.

Here is an overview of Entrecard.

First you have an entrecard account, I recommend an account for each and every one of your blogs, but you can link them all together (more on that a little later).

You create a 125×125 pixel ad for your blog, make sure you have your blog’s name or URL inside the 125×125 ad.  Having a picture with no blog name or URL makes it hard for people to know who you are or what your blog URL is.  You want this to stick in their mind even after they see and recognize your entrecard picture.

Once you create an account you will go into your dashboard as seen here:

The biggest thing to note about your dashboard are the following:

1. The amount of credits you have (this is your advertising credits, EC’s)
2. The amount of cards you dropped today / all time
3. The amount of credits it costs to advertise on your blog
4. The amount of cards dropped on you today / all time

• Entrecard Credits (ECs)

These are advertiser credits, like online dollars. Each site you want to display your entrecard on costs a certain amount of ECs per day. You purchase advertising in 24 hour chunks for a set # of ECs from a blog site.
The more popular a blog is (the more drops it receives) the more it costs to advertise on that blog.
You get 1 EC for each drop you perform on someones blog, and you also get 1 EC for each drop that is made on your blog. You also get ECs from advertisers who purchase spots on your blog, but these ECs are paid only when the advertisers AD is displayed not at time of purchase.

• Dropping Cards

Dropping cards is one of the best ways to get ECs as well as get your blog visited by other Entrecard users.  When you first start out and link a blog, you will use the “Campaign” button at the top and do a search for blogs related to your blogs topic.  If you write poetry, do searches for “Poem, Poetry, Writing”…etc and then visit each and every one of these blogs sites and drop on them.

Tip:  Hover over the little Entrecard of the Site and hold Control Key and then click on “Visit Site”.  This will open the site in a new Firefox or Google Chrome tab.  This allows you to mass open a bunch of sites at the same time, then flip to each of the taps with Control - Page Up or Control - Page Down, click the drop, then Control + W to close the tab.  This is a little trick which allows me to make dozens of drops very quickly.

Here is another note, look for sites that say “Drop For Life” or “Drop U Back”.  You know these people will almost always pay you back with a drop.  Secondly, look at blog post before you drop.  If you visit a blog that has a last post > 30 days ago, pretty much assume there is a good chance it is a less than active blog.  Drop if you like the topic but don’t necessarily expect a drop back.

I always try to read some of my dropper’s posts on their main page before dropping, and I comment where appropriate.  This is because even though they appreciate the drop, dropping and running will give the blog a high “Bounce Rate” and though they get the Unique Visits, it shows that their content isn’t keeping people on the site for a follow up click.

• Drops Inbox

After you have done many drops and you notice people start dropping on your site, go to your Drops Inbox as often as possible, at least daily.  Remember you can only drop once time per 24 hours, and if people are doing 2 drops on your blog but you are only returning 1, they aren’t inclined to keep dropping as often.  Entrecard requires a little bit of work, try to drop on all people who drop on you every day.  I set aside 1 hour per day to just perform entrecard drops and advertisements.

The funny thing is, when I was doing multiple Entrecard drops per day, I was losing track of which droppers I was returning the favor on.  I now use the “Show only people I haven’t dropped on” drop down menu, to show all the Entrecards of visitors who I haven’t dropped in the last 24 hours.  This way if you check your Entrecard several times a day, you know who is left to drop on for that day.

• Advertising

Okay here is the fun part, when you start off a new blog you need to advertise it, but you won’t have very many EC’s so you want to click on Campain, and click on Search, then Sort by Cheapest. But beware, many of the cheap blogs either are decomissioned or have never updated in months so they are cheap for a reason. New blogs sometimes don’t have a badge setup yet. Visit every site before you pay to advertise on the site, make sure the site is up, the site works, and doesn’t have content that conflicts with yours. Also visit their profile and see how often they accept or respond to advertisers, and note what their reject rate is.

When people advertise on your blog, visit their site first before just accepting.  Make sure its content is appropriate.  Secondly, reject some way off topic advertisers.  By doing some rejections, you actually make your blog more popular in the long run as you don’t look like you pander to just anyone.  But don’t reject too many or people won’t even try to advertise.

• Handling Multiple Blogs

This is one of my favorite parts about Entrecard is the ability to have multiple accounts and link all of the blogs together so you can switch back and forth between your Entrecard accounts.  You can only do 300 drops per day on one account, but if you have multiple accounts you can drop up to 600 cards per day.  I often try to get 300 drops per day, and I usually do at least 20-30 additional for my secondary blogs for about 400 drops per day.

The switch tab near your email at the top is very useful, this lets you see linked accounts and transfer ECs between your blogs so you can give your baby blogs more advertiser credits.  This also allows you to easily switch back and forth between your accounts, to check their dashboards for advertisers, and visit the drops inbox to return drop favors.

• Dragon Blogger Tips

Last but not least now I will explain how I use Entrecard.
I always drop everyone who drops on me, and if there wasn’t enough people dropping on me to fill up 300 drops, then I start campaign browsing. Honestly, I sometimes do Random searches, and drop on random people. I always give preference to bloggers who list “Drop U Back” or who list their Top Droppers on their blog, as these people tend to show more odds to return the favor. Secondly I drop on my advertisers, even if they aren’t in my drops inbox, because they advertised with me, I drop them. I also sometimes blog chain, and I can knock off lots of drops this way. This is when you visit a blogger’s site, and open the entrecard ad in their site to another site, then do the same over and over again. Dropping on each site as you go. This causes me to reach out to random blogs, but it also lets me see the blogs who really are advertising like crazy out there. When I see one blog having ten or twenty ads on other blogs I know they are heavily promoted.

I buy advertisments on expensive sites where I can, and cheap sites when I don’t have the credits for the big sites.  If I don’t have any ads running in the next 24 hours, I will sort my searches looking for blogs that have no ADs in the queue.  I try to have at least 3-4 ads running every day on someones blog somewhere.

I do visit the Statistics page and look at top droppers…etc and I will do a follow up blog on leveraging the Entrecard Analytics.

Happy Dropping my friends,

-Dragon Blogger

I have been promoting my site heavily over the past month since its conception and creation. My blog is still billed as 50% technical, 25% entertainment, and 25% paid content. I am doing my best to keep with those statistics and so far I am doing well. I am proud to say I have been consistently being viewed by over 100 unique visitors per day, but I had an explosion of visitors in the last 24 hours.

This is in part due to my posts of the NBC Heroes website. I wrote 2 reviews of the first 2 episodes of Season 1 and Season 2 (you can search for them in my search bar). I also posted my reviews on some NBC Forums and IMDB.com and I have jumped from my average of 100 Unique visitors per day to almost 300 unique visitors yesterday. Most of them have come to read my review of the NBC Heroes TV Show.

That being said, I have decided to write a post each and every Monday night or Tuesday morning devoted to each Heroes Episode, since it clearly is very popular and is a good thing to blog about. I realize spikes in traffic come and go depending on the popularity of your articles and genre of topic so I don’t expect my numbers to stay at 300 per day.

I notice my Bounce Back rates are very high, Entrecard brings in many unique visitors, but they just click the Drop button and move on (as I do on most of my drop sites). This does bring in unique visitors, but also gives you a high bounce rate, which means people aren’t staying more than to casually scan your front page and are moving on.

Here is a snapshot of my Google Analytics from this morning showing my blog over the past 30 days. I only started with analytics in early September and had a 2 day outage due to analytics code being wrong on my site. (See my Analytics Blogs) for how to setup analytics properly.

My good friend Damien Riley who runs 3 blogs including Postcards From the Funny Farm showed me a tip with analytics this morning, if you click on the email symbol at the top, and email yourself a PDF output of your statistics, you get all the information you want without having to sift through the HTML links.

Thank you Damien for the tip.

Here is my current statistics, click on image to view it larger and in more detail.

-Dragon Blogger