25 Simple Blog SEO and Traffic Tips

 

We love blogs! And we really want your blog to be everything you want it to be. This article gives some really effective, practical tips on giving your blog the best chance to work, and points out the key to any successful blog - or any successful site for that matter - content. On blogs, the more content the better - stories, links, photos, videos and, most importantly, new stuff. Make it fun, interesting and relevant. Post often and link your posts to other sites with similar ideas to create a strong readership. Google loves blogs, and bloggers love fun, fresh content.

 

by: Jeremy Steele

This is a nice concise list of 25 ways to greatly increase your blog's traffic and search rankings.

1) Content is king!

2) Submit your site to as many search engines as possible. After the initial indexing I would recommend resubmitting every 6 months.

3) Comment on as many blogs as possible. Make your comments thoughtful and not spammy.

4) Link up with popular blogs - trackbacks can be good for SEO as well as your traffic.

5) Write a good article and post it on a site like http://www.digg.com, although this won't help as far as traffic goes (you will get a HUGE boost for a few hours, then it will tone back down, you probably won't get any permanent readers from Digg) and it sure doesn't help with your relationship with your web host, it can create some new inbound links.

6) Use http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ . Instead of the GoogleBot searching for your pages you can tell it where your pages are. This is a great way to get your whole site indexed.

7) Content is king!

8) Get listed on web directories like http://www.dmoz.com/. Although many SEO "experts" think it is overrated no one disagrees that it can help boost your site's rankings.

9) Add some links for feed readers and blog aggregators like http://www.bloglines.com/, http://www.google.com/reader/, and http://myweb.yahoo.com/.

10) Add some social bookmarking links at the bottom of each post

 

Social bookmarking is a great tool that not everyone is using. It is a great way to drive traffic and instigate some amazing viral marketing for your blog. We have some great plugins available for this, and you can also find some great ones online. We recommend this functionality for anyone trying to build their blog readership. Check out one of our great examples at http://ipodsecretdownloads.com.

 

11) Make it easy for your users to find your RSS feed

12) Add a "E-mail This!" link either on the header or the footer of each post

13) Content is king! (see a pattern?)

14) If you write a really good post try e-mailing the URL to some big-name bloggers with a short personalized message. You never know, they might like it and link to it.

15) Try asking some big sites who are in your niche if they would like to trade links. More often than not they will say "no", but at least give it a try.

16) Don't obsess over "get rich quick" schemes.

17) Don't obsess over "get lots of traffic really quick" schemes.

18) Submit your RSS feed to a bunch of RSS directories, http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-directory.htm has a large list of popular directories.

19) Use http://pingomatic.com/ to notify a ton of aggregators that your site has been updated.

20) Don't obsess over the numbers - it takes time to build up a good reader base.

21) Make your posts as keyword rich as possible. Whenever you can use a word that has to do with your niche, use it!

22) Use lists, especially if your site is targeted towards more tech-savvy users

23) If you have a MySpace page or a home page on a similar service put up a link to your blog.

24) Tag important keywords, using this site (http://www.richardrodger.com/tags.htm ) you can tag keywords.

25) Last but not least, offer free stuff. Everyone loves free stuff!

The really important thing you have to remember is, just have fun. If your blog is causing you to become stressed out then it probably is not a good idea to continue blogging.

If your readers can tell you are having fun while providing good content they will become permanent readers.

Love what you blog. It is just like your work...if you don't love it, you won't want to do it. And if you don't take care of your blog and give it lots of attention, it will never be as great, functional and profitable as you want
it to be. This guy has some great tips that we agree with! We give our clients the same advice each day. For more ideas and tips on being a blog queen or king, contact us or check out http://beersdesign.com/blog. Happy blogging!

About The Author

Jeremy Steele started his http://www.nusuni.com/ website in mid-2002. Since then he has joined the blogging community and runs four successful blogs.

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