10 Tips to Increase Traffic to your Blog

[businessminder]

Traffic is the soul to any online business, including the recent trend, the blogs. If you imagine it this way:

You have a business in a mall. Customers find information about your business through coupons. Customers come to the mall and go into your business. They look around and decide if they should purchase or not.

The concept is the same with any online business.

You have a website. Visitors (traffic) find information about your website through advertisements. Visitors search on search engines, find your website and click to your website. They look around and decide if they should purchase or not.

If you compare two together:


Online Business vs. Offline Business

Traffic = Customers

Online Ads = Coupons

Search Engines = Mall

Website = Storefront


No traffic to a website is the same as no customers coming into the mall.

No traffic / No Customers = No Sales in both cases.

Blog-driven websites are becoming more and more popular. If you have a blog, pay attention to the tips below: (not in particular order)


1. Choosing the right platform, domain, and internal tagging (categories)

CMS (short for Content Management System) is a computer application used to create, edit, manage, and publish content in a consistently organized fasion. A Blog is a CMS application. The right blog software can make a huge difference. If you use blogger or wordpress templates, make sure they are designed with search engine optimized in mind.

Domain should be carefully thought through before going for it. A domain is not just an URL. A domain represents your brand! It should be unique and easy for people to mention to each other. Don't make it too hard to pronounce. Ideally a domain should have the most important keyword about your business in it, and it should be no longer than 20 characters. You should also always aim for dotcom domains first, simply because "dotcom" is more well known compared to dotnet, dotorg...etc.

Proper internal tagging is very important for both search engines and users. Internal tagging enables search engines to better crawl the various content within your website. Internal tagging also allows users to navigate your website a lot easier, as they can just choose and display certain categories of their interest.


2. Write Title Tags and Content with both Search Engine and Visitors in mind

Search Engine is all about relevancy. The more targeted keywords you have in your content the higher you will rank in search engine results for these targeted keywords. Title tags and content should have your targeted keywords in them. The more the better, but avoid spamming.

This is why you should also write with visitors in mind. If you mention too much of the same words, it's actually quite annoying. Write with honesty and provide quality content to the best of your ability.


3. Proper bolding and underlying

Your writing has to please your readers. Don't make your font too small to read. Use proper bolding and underlying to help readers read more efficiently.


4. Use more than just Text

This is self-explanatory. You will see popular blogs or websites make good use of graphics, audios, and videos, just to remove the boredom of plain text.


5. Pay attention to your site stats and focus on topics that's popular and needs attention

If you pay attention to the traffic logs of your site, you will be able to tell which posts and topics that your audience like the best. If you find posts and topics that draw the most traffic, they are probably what people are looking for. If you focus on these topics you will be fulfilling people's needs, thus, increasing your readership and building your authority in these topics. Of course if would be even better if these topics lie around your targeted keywords.


6. Invite Guest Bloggers / Posts

It's a good practice to invite guest bloggers to post on your blogs. This will improve the variety of the content on your site. Of course, these guest posts should be relevant to your site.


7. Implement Search Feature

I can't tell you how important the search box feature is to a website, especially for blogs with hundreds of archived posts. These archived posts may still be valuable to your visitors. By implementing a search feature on your website you are connecting related content with respect to your visitors' demands / needs.


8. Praticipate in Social Media, Forums, Blogs and Article Directories

Most social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, can allow you to automatically update content to your profile with your blog's RSS / Atom feeds. These Social Media, if used properly, can bring you tremendous amount of traffic.

Participating in forums and blogs related to your niche will help building up your authority and your voice in your niche. Not only that, you will also get backlinks to your website if you have your website URL in your signature. Also, a lot of people on these forums and blogs will click on your signature URL out of curiosity. Same effects can be achieved with submitting articles to article directories.


9. Include Keywords in your Links

A lot of people only include their direct website URLs in their links.

Example: <a href="http://websiteURL.com">http://websiteURL.com</a>

This is a simple mistake that most people make which dramatically reduces the quality of their backlinks. As previously mentioned, search engines are all about relevancy. The quality of a backlink depends on the relevancy between the linking text of the backlink, the title and the content of the website. If your website is about travel (targeted keyword), make sure the keyword "travel" is mentioned in the linking text.

Example: <a href="http://websiteURL.com">Travel Opportunities</a>


10. Building your Brand

Your brand is like the purpose of your blog. Your readers share the same purpose as you and their loyalty are built based on their level of comfort with your brand. Sticking to your brand is very important as you will be consistently building up your authority and voice within your brand, your community. Your readers follow your brand, and you want loyal, quality, and focused readers.

You can, of course, diversify your website but it takes a lot more work and dedication to build up authority in multiple areas. It also takes a lot of work from the search engine optimization point of view since the relevancy of all the content on your website dramatically changes.

If you already have a solid readers to your existing brand, introducing a completely new subject can be offputting for them.

[dsorr]

Thanks, Businessminder.
From a totally new beginner, I appreciate the advice.
And I look forward to checking out your blog too.
dsorr

[star123]

Thanks Dude for excellent tips and I think I have been made some mistake and I am sure this tips will help me to make my blog more better then now.

[youbetcha1018]

I am a puppy when it comes to blogging. This article or tips help me think that I can do better and increase traffic to my blog. Thanks much.

[businessminder]

Thanks for the encouragements. All I did was putting things together in an organized manner (sort of) for ease of reference I am sure a lot of you probably know some (if not all) of the tips mentioned but I find it's a good practice to be reminded once a while

[mirage2009]

Hi businessminder,
That is correct, it's always good to have what we know documented for referance.

[emmamba]

Dear Businessminder,
I appreciate you taking the time to post your tips. This is exactly what I need for my sites. I have to read it a couple of times.
Your success
Emmanuel Mba

[CCMode]

Thanks so much for taking the time to type up this valuable information!

Being new to blogging - I am stumbling my way through understanding all this blog-speak, so I found your post particularly useful.

Using WordPress, does anyone know how to track visitors/hits/visits? For the life of me, I have not been able to figure this out...

Thanks again!
CC
Beauty Go-To Girl
Tips, Advice & Recommendations From A Seasoned Pro In The Beauty Industry For 20 Years!

[tmarek]

Yes, you are able to track that very easily. If you have a wordpress.com blog, the stats are viewable right from your dashboard. If you have a wordpress.org blog, you will have to get a stats plugin from the plugin directory found here: WordPress › WordPress Plugins

[CCMode]

Thanks so much for the info on installing the stats plugin!

CC
Beauty Go-To Girl