Blogs are a great format for a business website: they allow you to showcase your expertise and provide fresh valuable information to your audience. They also work quite well as a branding tool for a website. However, in order to achieve your business goals you need blog traffic. If you’re looking to increase traffic to your blog, there are a few tried and true tactics that work in regards to Blog SEO. Here are eight tips for driving more traffic to your blog through Search Engine Optimization and other tactics.
1. Strong Titles - Your post title has two purposes. It’s there to attract attention and motivate people to read your blog post. It’s also there to help drive traffic to your blog. It’s there to be indexed by the search engines. That means you want to have keywords in your post’s title as well. Consider doing a bit of keyword search to find common search phrases before you post to your blog. The more search engine friendly, the more traffic you will drive to your blog.
2. Comment – One of the best ways to get more blog traffic is to become active on other industry blogs. That means registering and commenting on blog posts. Be sure to use your blog’s URL as your website address when registering. Keep in mind you are commenting on their posts so remain focused on the topic since you do not want your posting to be deleted or considered as spam.
3. Tag your posts – Tags are a way to label your content. Online databases like Technorati use tags to help bookmark content for users. Tagging essentially helps people find your content. It makes your posts more user friendly and helps drive traffic to specific categories and posts.
4. Invite guest bloggers – Guest bloggers bring with them their own audience. They help add credibility to your website and in turn, they drive traffic. Additionally, guest bloggers are sure to promote their posts on your site through social media and their own blog. This means added traffic.
5. Social networking – Link to posts on your social networking profile pages, fan pages and through your posts. Include a teaser or ask a question to motivate social network users to click through to your blog post.
6. Social bookmarking – Sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking sites are great for driving traffic. The mistake some users make is to bookmark every single post on their blog. Instead, submit the top posts only.
7. Use your analytics – Find out what posts are most popular. Look to see where your readers are coming from and explore how they find your site. Then repeat those posts and marketing measures. For example, if you find that most of your traffic is coming from social networking activities and they really like your weekly quotes, then you know you can capitalize on that.
8. Distribute your content across the web – Submit articles to article directories, using the resource box to drive traffic to your site and establish strong backlinks to your site for the Search Engines.
Everyone wants traffic to their website but it is not always easy to get more people to visit your site. Generating the desired traffic takes being creative and innovative sometimes. Apply the ideas listed above and you’ll see your blog traffic will increase. Above all else, focus on creating quality content. The more value you offer, the better. People will naturally link to you and promote your blog.
