Getting traffic to your blog

I was reading a post the other day about blogging techniques for building traffic and thought I would enter in a  few of my thoughts on this subject. Some of these ideas I discovered as a result of trial and error. I would think most of this is common knowledge, but perhaps not so we’ll go over a little bit of it. I’ll try to give credit to the people I learned these techniques from, but the truth is most of the stuff I don’t know where I picked them up.

First tip is a result of reading Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger.net blog. I don’t remember if Darren actually wrote about this or if I just noticed that he does it extensively. That tip is cross linking related posts. If you are making a post that is either an extension of another post or something that is closely related, then just refer to your previous post and link to it. This helps your blog in a couple of different ways. First it engages your reader to read more of your writings. The longer you can keep a reader on your pages then the better chance you have of turning them into a subscriber . This will also help long term with your revenue generation as the longer a visitor stays on a site the more likely they are to perform an action that generates revenue.

Second benefit of cross linking is Search engine optimization. A lot of people refer to the Google sandbox and blame it for their sites not ranking in the search engines for months. I personally don’t think the Sandbox is real and this has been debated on forums all over the net. I won’t debate it here, but just give my view. Search engines, especially Google judge the worth of a site by the number of links it has linking to it. They judge based on content too, but initially they find your site through other links. Most of the bots will only read a lines from each page it finds on the initial reads. It starts at the top and reads through the page up to the number of characters its programmed to read. This is where cross linking and just good SEO helps. If you have a link at the top of a post that leads to another one of your posts, then you just got two posts read instead of just the one. If there is a link on the second post, then you have three and so on. There is some debate about how many characters the engines read on these initial scans, but I’ve heard 1000 and I tend to go by this number. I try to ensure my main keywords for each post is in the first couple of sentences of the post as well as the title. Once you have a decent number of backlinks to your site and your individual posts then the SE’s will read more of your text.

Another thing I do that helps with this is the use of the more command. I usually divide my posts so you have to click the title or the read more to read the entire post. This gives the Search engine bot another link to follow as well as allows the bot to read more than one post.

While we are on SEO, make sure you bold and use italics on your main keywords and secondary keywords as that will help you with ranking. I do that a lot and its not just to make the posts look better, there is a reason I put in that extra effort. At the time of this writing this blog is less than a month old and I already have #1 positions in several search engines for some of my words. Now these or not high traffic words, but they are still number one positions.

We have already covered Social bookmarking for traffic previously so I won’t cover it again other than just do it. Bookmark all your posts in multiple services. This provides instant traffic as well as helps you gain back links in the search engines. Some people argue that because of the nofollow tag this is not effective for backlinks, but I’ve done some testing that says the SE’s may not follow the tag, but they still count it as a backlink.

One more tip before I close out this post. Read other blogs and communicate with other bloggers in the blogsphere. This helps you to position yourself as well as provides for additional backlinks. I read more blogs posts  than I make of my own. You can have conversations with other bloggers and gain inspiration from those blogger’s posts. I get most of my topics from other bloggers and forum posts. If you find another post that you would like to comment on then write a post and reference that blogger’s trackback link. This will give your blog exposure on the other blog as it should create a comment if they have it set up to receive comments and it will also alert the other blogger to your blog. This way you can create relationships with these other bloggers and help one another out. Over time this will help your blog gain loyal subscribers and repeat visitors.

These are just a few of my tips for helping build blogs. I’m by no means an expert at this, but I have had some success and following these tips will ensure this blog does not become another piece of digital dust.