With John’s recommendation, I decided to add the Optimal Title Plugin to my WP installation. I think that it should help increase the traffic from Google and other search engines.

The Plugin is simple in that it rearranges the title so that the post title appears first in the postings on the site. In theory that should result in an improvement in the search results. Well, having figured out how much traffic as a percentage I get from Google, let’s see if this will really work!…

Over the next few months, I’ll be trying different ways to generate traffic, as well. So look out for them. Other suggestions will include reducing and simplifying the number of categories, including more Technorati Tags, improving the Meta Information, and so on. This will take place gradually. In addition, I’m planning to change the theme and include a lot of changes to the presentation. Should be exciting. I’ll make the changes within a few weeks, I think.

Many blogs now display Text Link Ads (aff) and for many bloggers this has been a boon to revenue generation as it has provided a more or less stable income for many blogs. In fact, up until now it has generated about $75 for this blog. For other blogs, like John Chow’s, it’s been a lot more, in just March, he earned $1,308.06.

However, today I noticed a seamier side to the way text links are administered. It is possible for text links to become more ‘adult’ themed. Take a look of this screen shot from John’s site. I don’t know if it’s just one of those ads that slipped through the net, or if it was via a different system from TLA. There are a variety of services now providing text link ads.

However, I noted on TLA’s website that they claimed: “Reminder: TLA will not publish any adult, pharmacy, gambling or any site we feel is inappropriate.”

I guess I wouldn’t have noticed as much but since my blog is getting more popular, there have been a lot of very nasty spam comments (thankfully caught by Akismet), and so I couldn’t help seeing this one.

If you’re blogging and use TLA, you have a choice in their program about whether such ads appear or not. You can visit their Ad Approval Section and choose between one of two modes to approve ads:

Approval System A
Allow TLA to editorial approve advertisers to your website. Reminder: TLA will not publish any adult, pharmacy, gambling or any site we feel is inappropriate.

Approval System B
Receive an email notification every time an advertiser purchases a link off your website and have the ability to reject that advertiser. If advertiser approves the ad than the ad is immediately placed. If we do not hear back from you in 24 hours the ad will be reviewed by our TLA editors.

Naturally, their system is designed to generate revenue so they will tend to err on the side of the advertisers in their judgments, but at least you have a window of opportunity to reject advertisements you don’t like. Of course, if these advertisements are successful, more will follow. That, in itself, may be a problem.

In the meantime, I wrote John an email asking him about this advertisement. I’m looking forward to the resulting discussion (hopefully, controversy) as it should be good for traffic to our blogs! So, John, fire away! You know controversial topics and postings bring extra traffic.

Is this kind of advertising okay with readers? If so, would you visit the website? If not, why not? What would happen if all of our text links became like this? Naturally, some ‘readers’ might feel the need of such websites, do such website represent anything more than snake oil?

Sometimes tweaking and prodding a blog with add-ons and plugins and javascripts and so on can really slow down the blog loads for readers.

Typical Add-ons

1. Alexa box
2. Google Ads
3. Directory Images/Code
4. Community Plugins like mybloglog
5. Technorati Javascripts for displaying stats…
6. Images and stuff from other website like YouTube.
7. banners for ad rotations

So it’s important for your blog to limit the number of add-ons you can, utilize your server for as much as possible so that you don’t have to load stuff from other places, this all can slow down your blog.

I noticed my pages loading much more slowly than before, so I checked the features that I had added. I decided to drop as many as possible to speed up pages, especially since some of the features were quite redundant really.

Out went Technorati scripts. There is no need for them really, in the short term. The feeds are logged anyway, as I’m a member, and I don’t think many members really go to Technorati from my blog anyway.

I don’t have any Google ads right now anyway, so that’s okay. But the Alexa box is necessary. Unfortunately, it is quite often slow to load on my page, and I can’t cache it. Still it helps to keep the stats on Alexa rankings uptodate, so I need that.

I had a referral image from Payperpost.com that slowed down my blog, but wouldn’t allow itself to be cached as it was a script! Goodbye!

Those are the items that went out with my garbage. See if the site loads faster for you now!

So make sure that your website doesn’t have too many items stored on other servers! It can make a difference!