4th Blog Anniversary Celebration for Nelmitravel.com.
Today is a milestone for Nelmitravel.com – a 4th Blog Anniversary. Yes, today marks the day of 4 years of travel blogging. First of all, I would like to thank my followers on all the Social Networks, who comment, tweet or share my articles.
Settling in as a self-hosted site.
This was the year where things started to settle down and I got hang of the ropes as a self-hosted site. It was not all smooth sailing. I focused this past year on implementing and updating security features on my site. Fact is, we focus so much on writing great content, SEO and sharing, that we often forget to assess the vulnerability of a self-hosted site. This is extremely important.
I also started to make regular back-ups. I am much more aware of what I stand to loose after 4 years of Blogging.
The decision to go self-hosted should be carefully considered. It is a lot of hard work. I find myself constantly troubleshooting. Plugins are not working with a theme, or not working after a WordPress update. There is always something. On the other hand. Self-hosting opens a whole new world of possibilities. You have the freedom to change things to suit your own personality or brand.
SEO and your blog.
One of the best free plugins for SEO, is the Yoast-SEO plugin. You really don´t need anything else. Don´t think you can install Yoast on your site and then sit back and let the plugin do the rest. No, you still have to write original content and share on social networks, to be able to rank good in Google. Touching on the subject of Social Networks. Previously people hit the share button and hoped that their traffic statistics would increase. Things have changed. Now you need to analyze your statistics to see what time is the best to share your post. Yes, believe it or not, but there are certain times of the week that will be better to share your post. Schedule it. There are many free sites available to help.
Google has recently announced that they will not be updating the Page Rank in the Toolbar. This means that if you have a PR 2 site, this will not be updated anymore. It was expected. So many people relied upon the PR Rank of a site, especially for link juice and advertising. That will fall away. As of now, advertisers will likely base the quality of your site on Domain Authority, backlinks, referring domains, quality of content and Google cache.
SEO is very important and I found help from Triangle Direct Media. They sppecializes in New Media Marketing Services and SEO Technology including SEO and Social Media Marketing. SEOTool.com is a SAAS model that helps website owners uncover and fix hard to find problematic issues that are preventing them from ranking better on search engines.
Minor changes with a major impact – 4th Blog Anniversary.
After careful consideration I have decided to disable comments on my site. This decision was made after the hacking episode. People had to register on my site before they could comment. Everyday I had more than 200 new users (with no admin rights) and most users wanted to post spam comments on my site. I constantly had to delete users that played no role or had no purpose. The sad thing is that I no longer have a direct opportunity to interact with my readers. Many people use the Facebook plugin but it slows down the site. I need to look at options available.
The year ahead.
I am looking forward to the next year of Blogging. This coming year I would like to invite more guest bloggers to contribute to my site. If you are interested to do a guest post on Nelmitravel.com, please contact me. A big thank you to all my readers, my family and friends who always support me.
This is also my second year of Hosting with HostGator. To celebrate, Nelmitravel.com is offering a 25% discount for all new Hosting packages or Domain Registrations. Simply click on the coupon and enter the coupon code –
AEYGF7K0DM1X
