This is the first article in what will hopefully be a long line of articles on how to optimize your blog to receive more traffic from search engines. In my last diatribe I mentioned how getting indexed by Google is just the beginning after which you’re still left with arduous struggle to get your blog to the top of search engine results, because websites that are at the top receive practically all the users who are doing the search for a given term, or should I say keyword….

First question that everyone who starts a new blog asks is “when will my blog show up in Google”, but that’s not the right question that should be asked. More appropriate question that new blog owners should be asking is “when will I start getting traffic from Google”. Just because your site is listed in Google search engine, that doesn’t mean that you’ve succeeded so the question when will my site be listed is pretty much pointless….

When a blogger creates his or hers first blog, everything is just the way it should be, design is perfect, great content is posted and blog has been accepted into Google Adsense, right after everything is in its place, people decide to share their blog with their friends on Facebook, Twitter and other popular social networks. Okay, majority of bloggers does this, if you’re not one of those who do, then great, because today I’m here to tell you why that shouldn’t be practiced, at least not when your blog is just starting, when there is still not many visitors coming your way and your friends can be easily isolated from the rest of the people who stumble upon your blog…

Something that is probably bugging every newbie in the world of blogging, well every newbie who is interested in displaying code in his/hers WordPress posts, would be how to prevent code from being executed by the browser and just be displayed as text. If you participated in forum discussions you’ll know what I’m talking about, those nice little code tags that can be used to display code, same thing can be done in Wordpress, you just need to install a plugin since support for something like this isn’t included in the default Wordpress install…

I’ve been reading up on how the popular WordPress comment blocker Akismet works and I’ve discovered something that could potentially cause you not to receive genuine feedback, something that could cause real comments from being displayed because they get blocked by Akismet. There’s a scenario, (one that I though of, who knows, maybe there are more) which could cause genuine comments to be flagged as spam and be deleted from your blog. This way your readers might not be heard and you could lose potential return visitors, who will think that you are ignoring your audience…