Bloggiesta Mini-Challenge: Grade Yourself

 

Smash Attack Reads (which, by the way, is an awesome blog name!) has a really helpful Bloggiesta mini-challenge, Grade Yourself!  It guides you through using a website/blog grader that also gives useful hints on improving traffic and, if your website is for a business (mine is not, obviously), increasing revenue.

I ran my blog through the website grader and got a score of 79.  Based on the action items it came up with, I have a small to-do list for improving traffic.  I decided to share it in case it may be helpful to some of my other readers:

1. SEO: Add alt tags to my images.  This helps bring traffic from things like image searches on Google.  Update - all done!  With almost 100 posts, most of which have at least one image, it took over an hour to do this, but it was worth it I hope! 
2. SEO: Figure out if/how I can add page descriptions to each of my blog pages (Pagan Musicians, Chants, etc.)
3. Social Media: Add twitter/Facebook/G+/etc. share buttons to individual posts.  (Anyone know how to do that?)

I think I may have to do a little more research on this SEO (search engine optimization) stuff!

     4.  Update #2: After some quick research on SEO for Blogger, I'm adding another one that will be ongoing - adding search descriptions.  An explanation of search descriptions is here: http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2472666

     - You can add a search description for your whole blog.  Go to Settings -> Search Preferences, and click in the text box for "Description" near the top.
     - You can also add search descriptions for each entry - in the post settings, click on "search description" to bring up the search description box