So you have a nice blog all set up with nice CSS, you’ve modded it to match your site and you’re making posts. You decide to go and check to see if you are showing up in Google’s index one day using: site:http://www, only to discover you’re not there.

In case you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m speaking from experience. I had my blog pages in the sitemap xml file I sent to Google through my Webmaster Tools, and kept waiting for them to show up in Analytics.

I submitted my blog to Feedburner.

Still nothing.

It turned out that a setting inside of Wordpress under the Privacy tab was the culprit. Even though I had everything correctly set up, I had not selected a checkbox in Wordpress to allow search engines to find the blog. Imagine that! A little check box can make the difference between people seeing finding your blog, and not finding it.

So needless to say, I checked the box. Maybe you should log in to your own Wordpress blog and see if it’s checked.

UGC- User Generated Content has been a buzzword lately regarding the future of the web. In the old days it was all about building pages that looked cool with annoying flash intros leading the way. If you are still on that bandwagon, now’s the time to jump off. One of the best ways to build traffic to your site is to add a bit of user interaction to it.

Of course there are a lot of other things you need to do to build traffic and here is a great article from Ian Lurie that I highly recommend.

Here are seven tools I think are extremely valuable to help build up user interaction and pave the way towards returning visitors.

1. Wordpress – Wordpress, in my opinion, is the best blogging platform available. It is very easy to customize to match the style of your regular website and can be installed on your own hosting provider account. This blog is using Wordpress and is hosted on my account with GoDaddy. I modified it a bit to match the rest of my site. Blogging is very important for keeping your visitors in the loop. Don’t think that every day the same people will visit your blog page on your site. Most likely people will subscribe to your blog through an RSS feed. An RSS feed pulls your blog posts from your blog into a feed reader where someone can monitor your posts from another site. I use a service called Netvibes and have at least 15 different feeds coming in that I check every day.
2. Clearspring - I highly recommend Clearspring and would say that they offer the best widget creation and management tools around. What is a widget? A widget is a little tool that people can install in Netvibes, iGoogle or even their own web page, that can pull in virtually anything. Think of a widget as a wrapper. In that wrapper, you can pull in news, a flash-based tool, images, ebay listings, the weather or a calculator. I created a guitar tuner widget which I make available at http://www.guitar2ner.com. To date, there has been over 4,000 installs. In the widget, you can put a reference or link back to your main site. BAMM!! Instant advertising that people will see every day when they install your widget.
3. Wufoo - Wufoo provides an nifty way to place forms on your site and track them very easily. Forms are a pain in the butt. They always have been. With Wufoo, you can create drop downs, multiple choice options and more in a few simple steps. The form styles can be easily altered to match your site and you can customize the redirect web page and confirmation messages. Required and hidden fields are a breeze as well.
4. Buzzdash – If you want to add some quick interaction to your site while getting some valuable target information, take a look at BuzzDash. Easily create a poll and watch the votes grow as you see what people really think about well…anything.
5. Ning – I’ve got three words for you: Customizable Social Network. If you have a niche site and you know you have some contacts who would really enjoy being a part of something, you can create your own branded social network through Ning. Ning allows your users to add friends, write posts, send messages and more. Now you can create that social network for Hairy Guys with Modified Snowblowers.
6. vBulletin – vBulletin is perhaps the best solution out there for creating forums. No it isn’t free like phpBB, but it offers more flexibility and customization and is worth every penny of the license you’ll need to use it.

One other note about forums: You can actually install a forum on Wordpress as a plugin so that you don’t have to have two databases going that have to talk to one another. You can integrate a forum with Wordpress using the Simple:Press forum plugin.

There are many other useful tools out there, some of which I will talk about in the future. The tools listed above are specifically related to user interaction that can be generated from someone’s own website. Please feel free to leave questions or comments, and I will do my best to respond.