Watching your stats increase is one of the greatest joys a blogger will experience. Drawing traffic to a website does not happen overnight and expecting search engines to reward you with hits just because you exist is no longer a reality. Before anyone begins the journey of driving traffic to a website that is blog specific I strongly encourage to nail down why your blog exists and what kind of people you wish to receive. The reason this is suggest is for one main reason: If you do not answer those questions early the traffic you will receive will be the wrong kind of traffic that serves no purpose. It is better to have one reader visit your site interested in your blog’s overall topic or a specific posting over having 100 readers who ‘stumbled upon’ you.
1. Make Friends
This is also known as back-links. Back-Links are part of the overall algorithm that Google, MSN, Yahoo and others use to determine the level of influence a blog has online. The internet is literally a net. You must be found in places around the net for the search engines (which drive targeted traffic) to move your blog up with a level of influence. If you have a post about ‘beagle training techniques’ and 500 blogs have similar posts the one that has more friends wins the top spots! You do have to be popular. Your domain must appear in other communities, blogs, forums, etc as an anchored text. It will take the search engines up to four weeks to find these various locations and begin rewarding you accordingly.
2. Search Engine Optimization
Your blog needs to be optimized. Your blog name needs to match your meta tags. Your meta tags need to match your blog postings. Your blog postings need to match your headings. Your headings need to match your content. Having a laser-light ‘keyword’ focus is essential. This is a must! If you want targeted traffic you blog needs to be hitting the target! In fact if I upload a picture into a blog posting I even change the name of the picture to match my keywords! If type a post about ‘beagle training techniques’ you need to include that keyword phrase once for every one hundred words in your blog post. That keyword phrase needs to be in the title of your post. You need to upload a pic with the name ‘beagle_training_techniques.
3. Tell Blog Services When You Update
There are many blog services that exist to help you promote your blog. These are different than social networking sites. These are blog centers and blog bookmarking sites. Digg, Delicious, Technorati, Google Blog and others WANT to know about your latest posting. Search Engines revolve around ‘fresh content’ not old content! Use this to your advantage. Find blog pinging sites (even if your blog tells you they do it for you) and find blog submitting sources that are both broad and specific to your blog’s theme. Again when you submit make sure the tags and descriptions you input into these sites match the tags and keywords on your blog.
4. Write Anywhere and Everywhere to promote your blog.
If you write a blog about ‘beagle training techniques’ you need to write that blog elsewhere as well. Write that blog at ezinearticles, goarticles, hubpages, articlebase, and others. Rewrite your blog in these other article directories. These places allow you to provide a link in your bio or at the end of your article and link to your article. Google LOVES these websites and THEY WILL send traffic to your website. In my opinion this is the strongest resource to send people to your website through the search engines but they will find it because of your writings in other places. But remember people don’t read online they scan and when they see a link people click.
5. Be Relevant and Helpful
Targeted Traffic occurs because you wrote about something that people were curious about or needed help with. Don’t blog about your day and expect that to help people. In your blogging write about relevant topics and offer advice/help in your specific area of knowledge and Google will be sending people your way. I recommend this free tool Google Keyword Tool. When you get an idea of a topic of a blog posting place the idea in the keyword tool and hit search. Google will give you the search results of what phrases people are searching for with that idea in mind. Focus on those keywords to write your posting around and use the above seo advice and in a short amount of time you will receive targeted traffic.
Conclusion
I encourage anyone seeking to drive traffic to their website that they first sit down and think through the purpose of the blog and also the type of people they want visiting your site. I encourage everyone to seek targeted traffic over time that will allow you to build a strong community for yourself as well as others. Above all don’t fall for any of the gimmicks out there that promise to send traffic to your blog that charge money. You can do it for free. Just be patient and write blogs that people are looking for and soon the traffic will be coming your way.
Wade Lowrey’s business solves "the internet business puzzle" as he designs and markets sites via WordPress for clients. Find out more about the Emboss Web Studios owner at www.embossweb.com or by email at wade AT embossweb DOT com
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