Increase Blog Traffic
The point comes for every blogger when they realise that they need to find more traffic for their content. There are many ways to increase blog traffic, and this post aims to deal with the main ways you should concentrate on in order to build a solid foundation for your blog posts & increase blog traffic.
How to Increase Blog Traffic
The main methods of blog traffic creation are;
1. SEO and Search Engine Traffic
2. Guest Blogging
3. Blog Carnivals
4. Social Media
5. Video – YouTube
6. Blog Commenting
7. Forums
8. Social Bookmarking
Being a successful blogger is all about writing great quality content and promoting that content so that it gets seen in lots of places, this is the main long term way to increase blog traffic.
The more places your content is seen, the more people you increase blog traffic and grow your blog.
SEO and Search Engine Traffic
SEO is a massive driver of traffic for websites and blogs. Everyday, millions of people search for millions of different keywords and phrases about many different topics.
In order to get on the front page of Google and increase blog traffic, all you need to do is to find out the keywords and phrases that people are typing in volumes that will benefit your blog, and then position a post in front on that traffic (in the top 10 results in Google).
Sounds straightforward enough….. but there are a few things you need to consider……
Firstly, the more traffic a keyword has, the more competition you will have for that term.
Because of that, it is often more productive for young blogs to target longer tail phrases with smaller traffic volumes as these are often easier to achieve.
You are better off getting into the top ten for a term with 200 unique searches a month than you are targeting a term with 10,000 uniques and being on page 5 of the results.
To optimise your blog posts you need a few things;
1. Google Keyword Tool – (if you sign into a Google account you will get 800 results, if you are not signed in you will get 100 results)
2. SEO by Yoast for WordPress (This is a free plugin that will easily let you optimize each post for Google search) – See this post for how to use SEO by Yoast
To successfully get your posts into the top ten in Google for keywords or phrases with real traffic, all you have to do is this;
1. Write a quality, unique post with a keyword rich title
2. Optimize it using SEO by Yoast
3. Link to it from Guest Posts, Social Media, Blog Carnivals, YouTube, Forums and Social Bookmarks.
4. Link to your Guest Posts from Social Media, addition blog posts on ‘additional’ blogs, social bookmarking, blog carnivals etc
The reason that you need to link to the Guest Posts that you create is because Google favours links from places that have links going to them.
If you just write a post and get it published somewhere then it is ‘the start point’ of a linking chain. If you link to the guest post then the guest post is being supported by links from other locations and as a consequence it will have more ‘authority’ and will aid your rankings further, allowing you to increase blog traffic.
All the posts that you create need to be indexed by Google in order to carry any value for your main site posts. To achieve this, you need to link to each post that you create, where ever it is.
If you follow this strategy then you will soon have a linking network pointing to your blog posts that will push your main blog posts up the search results, giving you more traffic that you need.
In the next post we will discuss ‘Guest Blogging’ and how to find suitable guest blogs to submit your content to.