There's no secret to increasing traffic to your blog. Just follow these five simple rules for blogging success.
5. Write Laser Focused Content
It's important to remember that in order for someone to come read your blog, you need to be fulfilling some sort of need. People will find their way to different blogs for a variety of reasons, whether it's to read a review, find an answer to a question, or just look for new and great things. Writing laser focused content means your blog posts will address one specific need in the best possible way. Not only does that make great content, it actually helps your blog's visitors. Since your content is so focused on a narrow term or situation it will be friendly to search engines where people search with their own laser focused queries. When your blog posts are all laser focused around related ideas you become an authority in that topic and people will want to come back to read more.
4. Do Keyword Research
SEO is a bit of a dark art. If you spend any amount of time researching it you'll find yourself on a lot "blackhat" websites. Keyword research doesn't have to be shady or disruptive. Used responsibly it will greatly increase your blog's potential to get traffic from the search engines. The reason why keyword research is important is two fold. Firstly, ensuring a keyword, phrase, or topic has a presence in google trends and google's keyword tool guarantees that the topic you're writing for has real people, really searching for it, using that exact phrase. Secondly, it helps give you a laser focused topic to write about that will fill that specific need. Again, this makes for great content. Keyword research can be a little confusing if you're new to it. I use a program called Market Samurai that helps me aggregate and sort through information aggregated from Google's, Yahoo's, and Majestic's SEO tools. If you're savvy with understanding the numbers you can just bounce around these websites and tools yourself for the same results.
3. Write Well
To increase traffic to a blog is to have a successful blog. No blog will be successful unless it's well written. Take the time to reread your posts before publishing them. Fix typos and try to keep your punctuation in order. Even small things, like comma splicing, where you put too many commas, or run on sentences, where you go on a mini tangent, can make things, very, difficult to read. If your writing isn't intelligent or useful people aren't going to want to read it, and search engines aren't going to find it well.
2. Promote Yourself
Backlinks from other websites pointing at your blog are important. Not only do links from other websites give a path for visitors to get to your blog, it helps search engines determine the importance or usefulness of a web page. You really want to spend time building good quality links to yourself from other websites, otherwise people will not find you. You can promote yourself with no restrictions on things like facebook and twitter, you can add your website to relevant directories, and you can use social bookmarking services like StumbleUpon and Reddit. Promote your website as a whole, and promote your individual blog posts as well. Remember, people are looking for laser focused content that adds value to their lives, promoting your useful and well written blog posts is a service that makes people's lives better. You'll want to publish an RSS feed and maintain an email list as well. Self promotion work is never done, and it's an integral part of part of building your traffic.
1. Write Often
It goes without saying that writing more blog posts will result in the search engines having more things to find for users. Writing often has some other interesting effects as well. Google will scan your site for new information more frequently if it thinks there will always be fresh content. Users who enjoy your blog will come back often to see the latest entries. People finding your blog for the first time will feel comfortable that the content is well maintained and legitimate. In other words, increasing your blog traffic means doing work actually writing blog posts. With time and effort frequent writing will help increase your search engine presence and ultimately provide a resource of important information for your readers.
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