Blogging For Search Traffic
For those who are everyday bloggers this article will be nothing new to them, but for those who are just starting out you may find this information helpful. Just what is blogging for search traffic anyway? This has a fairly simple answer, all this really means is that your blog post are meant to do two things. 1: Rank in the search engines, and 2: Turn those rankings into traffic. That sounds easy enough right? Well creating the article is the easy part, ranking in the search engines is another matter. With some careful planing you could rank pretty well but it all depends on how you target your keywords. The trick to ranking well is to be the first one to blog about a certain topic, for example the other day I did an article on the owners of My Therapy Journal the reason for this was because I like what they are doing, the other was I that I was pretty sure that after these guys got their few minutes of fame from the t.v. show Shark Tank their search numbers would be up. Within 5 minutes of posting the article it was ranked #3 for the keyword My Therapy Journal, and the traffic I got from it was pretty darn good. Now of course I did not receive any sales or new clients from this but that was not the point of posting the article, again the point was to produce more traffic to my site.
In my mind all traffic is good traffic no matter where it comes from, the more I can get the better it will be for the site. I’m sure the main question here is how do you get your article to rank so fast for those type of keywords? I’ll never tell, just kidding. The answer to this one is not that easy, but here are a few tips that should help when you are posting your articles.
1. Chose the best title possible. You want a title that people will put in the search box but at the same time is not that competitive. For example, instead of saying “Wordpress Plugins” you might say something like “5 Easy Wordpress Plugins”. I know that may not be the best example but hopefully you get the picture..
2. Get some links. I know this one is a no brainer but I’m not really talking about the kind of links you get from submitting your post to directories or anything, I’m talking about links that are instantly created once you create your post. The best place to get these kind of links are going to be from your own site provided that you have it set up in a fashion that allows your new post to be linked from all of your pages. The other place to get these links are from forums, there are forums out there which allow you place a link to your blog feed which will show your most recent blog post. These are very helpful if you have made alot of post on the forum, and it can also attract new readers to your site. You can also get these links from a few comments on other blogs, some blogs allow you to not only link to your main site but also to your latest blog post, I found this on most blogs that use the Comment Luv plugin.
3. Be the first to post. This one can be tricky and requires some careful planning. When major news happens you can bet that the Seattle Times and other major sites will be right on top of it, so to a degree you will need to do the same. If you have a story lined up and ready to go don’t wait to post it, go ahead and send it out, unless you don’t have all of the facts just yet. The quicker you get your post out there the more likely you will not have to battle to many of the major sites which will also be competing for the same traffic. Plus you have a much better chance at grabbing the traffic while the story is fresh.
Those are just a few things that you can do to push more traffic to your blog, but keep in mind that these things do not just happen over night, you still need to have a pretty good website that is also well linked from other sources, this will help to push the site a little higher when you are targeting some of the keywords you are looking to get traffic from. Again, remember that the goal when doing this is only for traffic, there is a good chance that you are not going get clients from people who are looking for the latest info on Obama, but if you can put your site up there with an article that is relevant this will open the door for new readers and maybe even a few adsence click throughs if you have those on your site. Hopefully this will help some of you who may be struggling a little with traffic to your blog, it is not the best solution but it is one that works for me and for the most part brings in some pretty good results.
As always, thanks for reading and check back soon.
