Increasing Traffic to Your Blog – Part 2
In a previous post, I looked at how to increase traffic from an SEO point of view: Increasing traffic through search engines. However, this is only one aspect of creating a successful blog, if we are focused only on search engines we may struggle to develop the blog in other ways.
Growing your blog organically doesn’t mean using lots of horse manure (apologies for feeble play on words). Organic growth comes through attracting a regular and loyal readership. This is visitors who come to see your latest posts, because they expect good quality content. In many ways, this kind of traffic is preferable to a search engine visitor. Visitors from a search engine often leave quite soon, because it is not what they were looking for. Regular readers, however, are coming because (hopefully) they like your content.
Ways to Attract a loyal readership
1. Good content.
The most important thing is that the content has to be good enough. If your blog is informative or interesting people will keep coming back. If the content is poor or recycled, there is not much you will be able to do.
2. Focus on a certain Niche.
If you blog on everything under the sun, you will lose readers. People don’t want to have to wade through several articles on cycling gear ratios if you blog is about writing and seo. Regular readers will expect a certain type of post, if they start getting different topics they are likely to unsubscribe.
3. Interact with your Readers.
One of the main attractions of a blog is that it enables a two way communication. Successful blogs are ones that engage with their readership, rather than just blogs that talk to readers. This means, if people leave comments, take time to respond; this is especially important if it is their first comment. In this regard, I should do this more often. John, for example, is a top commenter on blogs. I admire his enthusiasm for leaving comments, and responding to others.
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There are 2 Main ways of getting higher traffic levels:
1. Increase traffic from Search Engines.
2. Generate a loyal readership.
In many ways they are interconnected. Good content generates a loyal readership, if people like your blog in the long term this will help search engine results. However, this post will concentrate on the first part.
Increasing traffic From Search Engines.
1. Create a big Site.
It may seem like stating the obvious but small sites generally get low traffic volumes; large Sites have much more scope for attracting traffic. Be patient, but try to commit to a regular publishing schedule to build up your archives. As a general rule, I aim to create 10 new Internet pages every day; that’s an average of 4,000 pages a year. Some of these pages will be time consuming articles, others will be shorter and quick to generate. The more pages you have, the more chance people having coming to your archives via a search engine.
2. Choose carefully the titles of blog posts.
The title of a post is very significant for determining traffic levels.
1. You need to include keywords that people search for.
2. You need to choose a title that does not have too much competition.
“economics” is a very popular search phrase, but a new blog will have no chance of getting listed in search results. However, if you specialise and choose, for example, “UK economy 2007” you have a good chance of getting traffic.
There is of course a balance between getting traffic and your readers. If you always come up with titles like:
“Free Online Tips for Increasing Traffic to your Blog” you may lose a little authority. But, it may be looking at titles of old pages and seeing whether you could tweak the title to make it keyword rich. Generally speaking longer titles are better than 1 or 2 word titles.
To help find best keywords, you can use programmes like Wordtracker and 103 Bees – (103 Bees is free)
3. Check Statistics to see which Keywords work.
Statistics pages are very useful for finding out the most popular ways people come to your site. For example, on my mortgage site, I found the most popular keyword was “Housing Market”. Therefore, I created blog entries related to these keywords; like for example “prospects for UK Housing Market” “Is UK housing Market heading for Fall” e.t.c.
As you can imagine this Mortgage blog makes for pretty interesting reading…
4. Increase Links to Your Site.
This is worth a post of its own “How to Get More links to your site”. Basically, the more relevant links you have, the more the search engines will trust your site. However, be careful some links are much more valuable than others. The main rule is that incoming links should be relatively natural. – Links from a range of websites, increasing over time e.t.c.
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