Beginners Guide to Pumping up Blog Traffic

Blog Traffic

 

 So you have a brand new website or blog. Now how do you make people visit it? On this article I’ll outline some of the ways you’ll get your traffic count going.
Traffic is the number one thing on the online marketing business. Once you have traffic, you can think about monetizing that traffic and start making money. Until you reach a steady traffic flow, you shouldn’t even try to place ads or anything on your site because if you don’t have traffic, then you can’t generate clicks and therefore placing ads on such a new site is superfluous.
First and most important of all, is organic search engine traffic. This is the traffic that comes from people doing searches on a search engine, and of course that the most important one of all is of course Google. If you can get your sites pages to rank highly on a Google search, then you are practically guaranteed to get traffic. Now this is not as easy as it looks since Google uses a complex algorithm that defines how your page should be indexed and how high or low it appears on the search engine results. You will be found on Googles search results for keywords that appear on your site. Keyword optimization is key here, and when your adding content to your site or blog always keep in mind that in order for people to find it, they will need to search for a specific set of keywords and therefore you should use those keywords on your content and titles, that means that if your posting about, let’s say, a software product then you shouldn’t make the posts title something like “Great software” but instead, use the software’s name, and title it something like: “Photoshop – great image software”. That way it’s more specific and that insures that you get higher quality traffic, high quality traffic are visitors that actually finds your site useful, in this case people that were actually looking for posts about photoshop and not people that were searching for some other software.

Even without keyword optimization your site will eventually be indexed on Google and people will find it for a whole set of different keywords, some that you didn’t even plan for, but in the long run you will probably want people to find it when they are searching for a specific set of keywords, and that is when you should start thinking about writing with search engines in mind. This doesn’t mean you should write robotic language or repeat the keywords 50 times, it just means that you should be conscious about it and repeat the keywords a few times and ideally use them on the title. Just don’t over do it. Always write for people. But always keep the search engines in mind.
Just writing keyword optimized content and hoping for the best won’t get you much success since there is almost no use in being on the search engine results if you’re on page 56 of the results. One very important factor that the Google algorithm takes into account are backlinks. This is the most influential factor for getting listed highly on search engine results. Why is this you ask? Well if you think about it, it makes sense that a page that has a lot of other websites linking to it has a higher content value than a page without any other sites linking to it. And the bigger the site that links to you is, the better. So if there’s a site that has 20 other smallish sites linking to it, that is not bad, but if you have a site that has only 2 or 3 sites linking to it, but those sites are very popular and authority sites, then that is even better. The size and authority of the site that links to your pages makes a big difference.
So now, how do you use this knowledge to bring your site more visitors? Well first of all there is one thing you need to have and that is patience. You won’t get ranked highly on the search engines in a day or a week. You’ll need to build backlinks for your site, and you can’t stop building them anytime soon. How do you build backlinks? Well, there are a huge range of options here, you could post your site on social bookmarking sites, register and post on forums related to your site and put your site’s address on your signature, submit articles to article directories and link to your site in the end, submit to link directories, add your best posts to social news sites like digg and reddit, ask other webpage owners to link to your site, post on classified sites, etc etc. There are numerous amounts of ways to build backlinks but we won’t get too deep into that for now because we’ll go into it in greater detail on a future post.
What you should try your best to do is to make your site worthy of spontaneous linking. What’s that you ask? Well, if you have good content, nice articles, funny stuff on your site, then people will eventually just naturally link to your site. Those are usually the best links because they give you no work at all to get them and many times you’ll have some big sites linking to yours and that will certainly give your site a boost on the search engine rankings. In the beginning it’s hard to have people spontaneous linking to you unless you have some great idea or a great article about something interesting. Even then it’s hard if your just starting out because you haven’t got too many visitors and therefore not many people with sites to link to you. But fear not, with time you will.
So that’s it for now, just a quick intro on how to prepare your site for traffic. Just start adding good content to your site and take a few minutes or an hour everyday to build some backlinks. Add your site to a few link directories per day, make some forum posts with your link on the signature, make worthy comments on other peoples blogs, etc.
You should never stop promoting your site, and taking a little time everyday to do it it will bring you good results after a while.
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