This is a guest post from Dot Com Dud, a blogger who catalogues his journey towards earning a full-time income online on DotComDud.com. You can also follow him on Twitter.

If you look at my traffic you’ll see that Entrecard is responsible for the majority of the visits my blog gets, so naturally you’d think that I am a huge fan of the service… well you’d be half right.

Entrecard has seen it’s fair share of praises and criticism but as time goes on the arguments seem to be piling up on the negative side. For those who are new to Entrecard, this post aims to introduce you to the service and explain some of the advantages and pitfalls you should be aware of.

What is Entrecard?

The basic premise of the system is this; you install the Entrecard widget on your blog, usually in the sidebar and the widget will display a 125 x 125 ad. Other Entrecard users can ‘drop’ on your widget which will give both you and the dropper 1 Entrecard credit (or EC). You can also go around ‘dropping’ on other blog’s widgets (earning up to 300 EC per day). Once you have accumulated enough credits, you can spend them to have your 125 x 125 image appear on another blog’s widget for a day at a time. The whole thing is simple to set up and easy to use, you’ll be up and running in no time.

The idea is that traffic is generated not only from other blogger’s coming to your site to drop on your widget but also from the readers of other blogs clicking on your 125 x 125 ads. This idea is great in theory but in practice it’s not without it’s problems, when it comes to Entrecard there is both good and bad news.

You Will Get Traffic

This is the good news. Just having the widget present is going to get you some hits, maybe not thousands but traffic you didn’t have before. If you actively drop and advertise then the amount of traffic you’ll get will increase, you can count on that. Still we’re not talking about thousands here (for most blogs) but if you use the service right, getting 100+ visitors a day from Entrecard is possible.

So what about the bad news? Much of the criticism aimed at Entrecard revolves around the actual quality of the traffic rather than the quantity. The fact is that a lot of the traffic you get through Entrecard only come to your site for one reason, to drop & run. This leads to high bounce rates and low conversions, hit & run droppers don’t stick around to read your posts, let alone comment or subscribe.

Is It All Bad?

No, some of the traffic is genuine. If your content is at all interesting then you should get at least some passing comments, maybe even some subscribers. It’s really up to you if the effort in earning credits is worth the results you get but there are some things you can do to improve the situation.

The thing about droppers is that you already know what they want and where their attention will be. I’ve had some success gaining subscribers by giving away EC because it’s much more tempting to win a few thousand EC than dropping for them. Also, by placing things around the widget that you want to draw attention to, you can increase the probability that droppers will be enticed by them.

Is It Worth It?

For new and developing blogs, I’d recommend it in a heartbeat. The amount of effort you put into it is up to you and while you do get more out of Entrecard the more you put in, the return may not be worth the investment. Personally I still display the widget on my blog but I don’t spend much time dropping to earn EC anymore.

However, once your blog is gaining enough traffic from other sources then Entercard might be not worth the effort and eventually it isn’t going to be worth the space it occupies either. These are things you’ll need to address once you’re blog reaches a decent level of traffic though, so you can cross that bridge when you get to it.

To Conclude…

Yes Entrecard will bring you traffic and some of it will be genuine. The rest of it is largely hit & run traffic which you’ll need to get creative with if you want to make them stick around. If you’ve got the space for it out then it’s worth trying out.

What next?

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I was recently told about this website called Raven SEO Tools. It’s a free website where you can get your website analyzed a bunch of different ways (it cost money for more than one website). I ran a Design Analyzer on my site SwimUniversity.com and it came up with some startling results.

I was blown away by this. I thought if anything I had the website part of it down pat. But I kept reading and this is what it said.

I have been building webpages using HTML tables for years and now I come to find out that you should not build your website using nested tables for SEO purposes. Now I know that wordpress doesn’t use tables but I really didn’t want to learn how to re-build my entire website using CSS and DIV tags. I use CSS but for fonts not for the complete design.

I started trying to redesign my site in CSS using DIV tags and I was able to it pretty quickly. The problem came when I realized that my entire website was dynamic and I didn’t want to screw it all up. Especially because my title were dynamic too.

So I did a little research and found out that using CSS and DIV tags are the ideal for website design because you can make one change to a CSS file and it changes it across the entire website but it DOES NOT EFFECT YOUR SEO. Which to me was the most important part. So I have decided not to re-build my website in CSS right away but I am going to slowly construct a test site just so I can build my knowledge about DIV tags and CSS.

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Here are a few bullet points on what you should do before you start building a website. Before I start building I like to draw the entire design on a piece of paper and build it from there. That way you can you can save time instead of editing in the computer. Here is a simple checklist I follow when building a website.

Layout

-Consistent navigation bar and main logo.

-Page footer that includes copyright information and a contact email address.

-Remember that most people use an 800 x 600 resolution so you should design your pages to be no less than 750 pixels wide.

-Make sure the text on the page is easy to read. If you use a black background it is best to use white text so that people can read it.

-Grab attention with the homepage. Put as much relevant information on the main page as you can

-Check Browser Compatibility

Navigation

-If you are using buttons as your text, add links to the bottom of your page. Some people use text browsers and search bots only look at text not pictures.

-Make sure the homepage is under 50 kb for fast loading

-Navigation should be big and simple and easy to find

-Check Links to ensure they are not broken

Search Engine Optimization

-Make sure your meta tags are defined (title, keywords, description)

-Make sure all your alt tags are filled in

-Make sure there are plenty of links and they are not broken

-Preview you pages in a text browsers

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I have been slowly compiling this list for 3 days. These are all tips that I used to build my websites and even this one.

1. Redirect 404 Page
2. Use Header Tags <h1>, <h2>, <h3>
3. Make your links the color blue, so that visitors know that it’s a link
4. Use CSS, for site wide customization and website speed
5. Use short meta data. Every page has to have a title, about 5 Keywords and a brief description
6. Use Google Analytics to track visitors on your website. It’s free.
7. Start a blog using wordpress (it’s the most SEO-Friendly)
8. Use a robot.txt to blog google from going into useless folders on your server.
9. Create an xml sitemap and submit it to Google’s Webmaster Tools.
10. Use large text.
11. Create great content. Content is King!
12. Twitter!!!!
13. Sign up for Stumble Upon
14. Sign Up for Delcious
15. Use flash animation sparingly. Google doesn’t read flash…yet.
16.Choose an easy to spell domain name
17. Get a .com screen name. All the others in my opiniion are worthless.
18. Be consistent in your design across all your pages.
19. Use alt tags on all your images.
20. Check your spelling
21. Create an about us page
22. make sure your webpage works on every browser.
23. Do not play music on your site. If you do make sure it’s the users choice to play it
24. Stay away from intro pages.
25. Add Search function to your website
26. Animated Gifs are tacky, don’t use them
27. Intralink within your website. If there is relevant content related to a page, link it
28. Less images = Faster load times
29. make sure every page has a different page title, keywords and description to match the content
30. Have someone else proofread your work
31. Do not submit to crappy directories that mean nothing
32. Review your website every week and make changes

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A fellow twitterer was nice enough to review my websites out of the kindness of her heart. She has brought something to my attention with one of my websites which forced me to look at my other ones. My one website PoolPuppy.com is a swimming pool company directory. It has a slim amount of content but I really haven’t promoted it that much or have added the features to it that I want to yet. But she told me that if you typed in “Puppy Swimming Pool” in Google, that PoolPuppy.com was the first one to appear. I was shocked and felt like a freaking idiot. How did I miss that? I don’t sell Puppy Swimming Pools but the name alone pulled the wrong information. She told me to go back and re-evaluate my alt tags and meta tags which I will do tonight. I think I am going to completely remove the word puppy as much as I can. It’s just a brand I came up with.

That also brings me to my other site which is called SwimUniversity.com. I think with this site I am going to have to get rid of all my meta tags and alt tags that have to do with a University. I do not run a college, I run a swimming pool care website, but I can see where Google can get confused and not give me the ranking my websites deserved. So again thank you for the tip @yuyudin. What a big help she was today. See this is how Twitter can impact your life.

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