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5 Tips To Grow Search Engine Traffic To Your Blog
This article is guest posted by Hendry Lee.
No matter what others have said about natural search engine traffic, it is a significant traffic source for many bloggers. Some blogger friends admit that search engines account for 30 – 60 percent of their entire blog traffic.
It is possible and recommended to diversify and avoid relying your business solely on one traffic source — and company, Google. However, search engine traffic converts and if you can get more of them to your site, and assuming everything is the same, you will increase the sales figures and revenue from ads.
The details about how search engine works may be beyond most of us — in search engines don’t reveal their exact algorithm — but the basic is not rocket science at all.
Here are 5 tips to help you grow search engine traffic. (If you are interested to learn more about SEO, I have a complete article series of blog SEO.
1. Know your keywords
Keywords are the building blocks of a blog and web site. Naturally, you should target just one keyword per blog post. Avoid creating content just for the sake of having the keyword on your blog. You should provide valuable content and impress the visitors. Only then will they consider subscribing to your content feed.
You should be thinking about what the visitors do on your site. Optimizing the result from the same amount of traffic is as important, if not more. But, I digress…
2. Optimize your blog design
You will be surprised that many bloggers claim their blog themes or templates as search engine friendly because the themes were advertised as such. Spend some time to check the template to make sure it has the right title tag, order of content, heading tags and so on.
Your time will be well spent. After all, it is most likely a one-time task. It may make a difference between ranking for long tail keywords and not getting found at all.
3. Restructure your site
Theming with silos is a great way to structure and divide your blog content into subtopics. Many SEO experts represent siloing as simple tiered content. They are quite similar in a few points but nevertheless you should thinking about making your content topics obvious to search engines.
Tiered content without proper linking doesn’t help build topic on your site. For instance, you should only link to a silo (or parent) instead of children cross another silo. Good practice avoids diluting the theme of your site or blog.
That can help rankings because once search engines think your blog is related to certain subtopic, you are going to get more long tail keywords for that subtopic.
4. Gain inbound links
There is more than one way to do it, from article marketing to link baiting, blog commenting, forum marketing and so on. When you are just starting out, every little tactic matters to grow your traffic level to a few hundreds a day.
Your aim is to reach more center of influence. Once you are at this level, every new post will result in a few more backlinks to your blog.
5. Patience
As the age of your domain increases, your blog will also be considered more valuable, especially if you keep it active throughout the time.
Search engine optimization doesn’t produce flood of traffic immediately but it is often worth the effort. Giving up too early in the process is one of the biggest reasons why people fail at this.
Another thing to keep in mind is that traffic from organic search grows gradually. As you target more keywords within your content and gain more authority through backlinks, you will only grow your traffic.
You may be surprised that after several years, I still notice growth in traffic to some of my blogs from search engines. It helps if you aim for the long haul and really drill deep in a niche, because that’s what a real business is.
Hendry Lee helps people overcome strategic and technical challenges in starting and growing their blog. Visit his blog to get more blog tips and strategies.
Carl Ocab is one of the most successful teenage bloggers on the net. But remarkably, Carl was just 13 years old when he rose to fame with his hugely popular “make money online” website: www.carlocab.com
Hi, my name is Carl Ocab or as many call me, the “Kidblogger”. I’m a 16-year old kid from the beautiful archipelago Philippines.
November 13, 2008
8:57 pm
Good post. One very important thing in getting SEO traffic to your blog is planning well in advance. You have to plan everything from keywords to design to content and promotion. Planning well in advance is very useful in the long run.
November 13, 2008
9:35 pm
Well said, Ganesh.
If people just understand that, they will stop buying into the overnight traffic system that promises windfall of traffic by exploiting search engines.
That may work for now, but not for long!
November 14, 2008
10:10 am
Patience is the key to everyone’s success :) Long time no talk, Carl :)
-Mike
November 14, 2008
7:28 pm
It is a very informative post especially for people like me who have just about started blogging. For us, traffic is Google. We know nothing other than that. But it is posts like these that teach us what actual traffic is and how to get traffic to your blog.
November 15, 2008
12:38 am
Patience huh. How long should it take anyway.
November 15, 2008
6:03 am
Thanks for this. I will be checking the blog SEO link too. I really need to know more. :)
Gibo
November 15, 2008
6:45 am
hey carl,
When you say “For instance, you should only link to a silo (or parent) instead of children cross another silo”.
Do you mean to link to the broad topic category or to another specific post?
I look forward to your reply.
Jerry
November 15, 2008
1:01 pm
Great tips. But for people who do things them selves… How do you optimize a websites design. Seems difficult.
Shannon
November 15, 2008
1:10 pm
excellent post way to go. i might add another effective way too.. i think registering to blog networks is another awesome way for traffic.. as soon as i registered for some of them..i started writing topics there..few days later..i found like %50 of my visitor stats were from these networks. they read your topics then they get interested in checking out your blog.and the best thing is, they keep on increasing because everyday there’s more bloggers reading your topics.
Where Bloggers succeed
November 15, 2008
1:27 pm
Great post. I need more details.
November 18, 2008
8:27 pm
I know all the other points, but I need to work on optimizing my blogs (and sites in general) designs.
Thanks,
Franck
The Affiliate Profit Mentor
November 19, 2008
9:41 am
Nice!!! You have given me good ideas in how to handle social network relationship and it helps me a lot in my everyday blogging. Keep it up and I know you will have more succesful days in your life that will come..
November 19, 2008
3:32 pm
This info is very useful. One way that I ranked well in google with my keywords on my blog is by holding a contest wherein a link to my blog is required for every entry. It worked like a charm! :D
November 19, 2008
7:33 pm
Thanks for your comments. You have given me a few ideas on traffic to expand upon for follow-up posts.
Note this post is about growing search engine traffic so I only focus on tactics that bring impact to your search rankings. It is not complete by all means, but if you apply those, I think you will do very well.
@VHE: Only Google and other search engines will be able to answer that precisely. Sometimes for long tail keywords, I’m able to get to the first page in as little as 24 hours but for competitive keywords, it may take years but is it worth it? I’d say yes.
Moreover, you should complement your search engine strategy with other tactics as well.
@Jerry: Most people don’t structure their blog with silos but if you do, you can only link to siblings and if you want to link to another sub-topic, it should be to the parent of the topic, not the child of that other topic.
November 22, 2008
4:17 pm
humm… great tips..
November 22, 2008
6:22 pm
Thanks for the nice points. Now I can see that I have lots of thing to learn! I am just a beginner and will continue to follow your blog updates.
Thanks.
November 24, 2008
12:35 am
good tips for beginner
November 24, 2008
8:51 pm
Thanks, for the tips. Working on some of that stuff now. : )
November 25, 2008
1:04 am
Thks for the valuable info!
November 25, 2008
5:59 pm
I am is new comer in blog posting, I think this posting is usefull for me.
Thanks for your information.
November 25, 2008
8:04 pm
Nice post here! These are really great tips and reminders for bloggers who want to have their sites on top of search engines. Patience is really an important thing! :)
Regards,
Glenn
November 28, 2008
8:40 am
Great post! Bookmarked for future learning! I have tried to optimize my blog using some of the tips here. I am seeing more SE traffic every day! My problem is getting good, target ads. But I will find better ones! Thanks!
November 28, 2008
8:03 pm
Thanks for unselfishly sharing this information, i have been blogging for close to a decade, but seriosly blogging for a year now and the tips are coming in handy! i hope in time to be sub saharan Africa’s first pro-blogger!
December 2, 2008
1:52 am
Great post, I am working on three blogs that really need search engine traffic and i am constantly looking for more information to do so.
December 2, 2008
12:41 pm
Patience is one thing that is short in supply – made worse by the fact that links should be added slowly. The point about “siloing” is interesting and certainly something all of us, not just newbies can learn from. Useful post.
December 3, 2008
10:05 pm
So let me start with inbound links.
Thanks for this post Carl ! :D
December 5, 2008
12:51 am
These are all some very good tips. Especially 4 and 5. Inbound links from various sources are extermely important and the more competitive the industry the more important they become. Patience is also very important because quality search results for competitive keywords do not happen overnight. Also keywords in the titles, heads, sub heads and general copy of the site or blog is also very important but as noted don’t get so carried away with keywords that you content doesn’t sound natural because then readers won’t want to subscribe.
December 11, 2008
8:19 am
great tips. Man, number 5 is the most important for sure, and thats what i am working on right now too. Again, thanks for the tips!
December 15, 2008
12:43 am
good tips dude…!!!
yep…number 5 is the most important exactly…lol
I’m so lazy to do that…huff….
December 18, 2008
12:15 pm
If you get linked by a big site it can definitely help on traffic and pr.
December 22, 2008
3:46 pm
Having patience is a tough one. I’m working on the other point but it would be nice if results came overnight though I guess that’s the nature of the SEO game.
December 24, 2008
4:44 am
Thanks for the tips.
December 25, 2008
8:58 am
Thanks for the tips and congrats on being on page 1 of Google ! Backlinks, backlinks and more is what appears tobe needed too.
December 29, 2008
11:36 pm
This post will be a help to me but it looks like other SEO advise on the net.
January 4, 2009
6:00 am
Thanks for this post. It is very helpful for me as a newbie.
But I want to know other techniques to more traffic to my blog.
January 4, 2009
3:21 pm
A question, so how do you go about checking if your blog is really search engine optimized?? Are there some widgets,or codes that I have to check and see if it really is search engine optimized?
January 8, 2009
11:49 pm
Thanks Carl, These are some great tips for beginners
February 8, 2009
8:22 am
Hi Carl and everyone here,
I want to learn SEO, especially in Blogspot.
Anyone can gimme resources to do so?
any links maybe…
Thx..
February 12, 2009
2:41 am
Thanks for all these great tips.
Carl, you did a great job on your site.