Part 3: Traffic-Traffic-Traffic Traffic is the bloodline and life of your blog.
In order to attract people, you must offer attractive information.
However the trick here is to think in reverse gear...
what am I getting at?? Well...
The most common place to get information on the www is at the search engines right? So you will head off to places like google.
com, yahoo.
com, bing.
com, alexa.
com the list goes on hey...
So in order for the millions of visitors to the www to see your blog you need to rank high in the search engines for them to find you.
Now in order to get a high ranking you need to learn a few tricks of the trade, those being ON PAGE SEO...
(Search Engine Optimization) and OFF PAGE SEO.
Now this can be a hard a complex subject to master but that's why you are here right...
to learn the basics...
which I shall teach you in no time.
On Page SEO: This is basically using certain keywords in your blog title and other parts of your blog/website, so when someone Google`s a certain topic you want your blog to come up first..
Take Blogspot.
com for instance at the time of writing this article it had a search index of 358,000,000, now what are the chances of beating that at your first attempt? You need to find a key word with high search listings and have them in your Blog, if you can get it into your title then you are already half way there...
You can change the title of your blog in the blogger control or with wordpress when you are creating your blog.
Try and mention that same keyword in your blog 3-5 times if possible and the reason I say if possible is coz if the search engines think you are spamming(by putting that keyword in every 2nd sentence) they will drop your rankings...
Don't forget you are writing to people not search engines.
If you know how to use HTML you can use this on other blogs as well.
So word of advice...
learn a little HTML it can`t hurt can it? And it will defo help you in the long run.
Other than that, your page heading should also contain the term you're optimizing for.
The page heading is the bit of text in your code that is enclosed within the and tags.
This is important as it tells the search engines what your page is about ("your blog title" "Keyword you using").
Since we're posting a blog, the tags are usually the post titles, so remember to include the term there whenever relevant.
Off Page SEO: OK so now we're moving and on to Off Page search engine optimization.
These are factors that are not on your blog but affect your search engine rankings a vast amount.
There are many factors to Off Page SEO but the most important one I think is the amount of links to your blog or website.
The more links to your blog, the more the search engines think you are an authority in that particular niche and hence the higher they rank you.
However it is also the quality of links to your website and not just the number, so try get links from relevant blogs/websites in your niche and not dating/gambling sites as these have no relevance to your knowledgeable blog.
Unless your blog is about how to find the best man/woman, or how to cheat the casinos? Bottom line is to have good quality content that is original with quality info then approach respectable sites and ask them to add your links...
you of course will add theirs in return.
Now it's essential to put a lot of thought in, when requesting links from other webmasters as you want them to link to your blog with appropriate keywords.
Example...
Use the same sort of keywords that would relate to your blog/website.
OK, moving on swiftly, we are now gonna talk about Google`s page rank system.
All this is, is a scale in which Google ranks websites.
You can get the full down low on this at google.
com/technology/.
So in a nutshell the higher the page rank of a website the more often Google`s Spider/Robots will index it, so with a higher page rank you in turn get a higher search engines result.
Getting high-quality links to your blog will help direct targeted visitors who are interested in your niche to your blog, thus enabling search engines to find you faster and index your blog which will ultimately rank you higher in page rank and search engines.
You can also utilize the "blog and ping" technique that everyone's talking about.
Basically, when you update your blog, you can let blog portals such as technorati.
com know by pinging them.
You can ping a lot of portals at once by using the free pingomatic.
com.
Other ways to get links and traffic to your websites will be to turn your blog submissions into articles and submit them to as many article directories as you can, you will of course have links directing them back to your blogs and websites.
Some good article directories to get you started: Ezine articles, ultimatearticledirectory.
com, submityourarticle.
com Join forums my friend...
another great way to interact and get your name out there, if you have the time of course...
but if you are serious about making blogging your new job then I suggest you make the time and join lots of forums related to your blog/website.
Besides the techniques described here, there are also paid methods like buying links from high-ranking pages or buying banner advertisement space.
A thing to keep in mind when buying paid traffic is to always weigh your profits generated from the paid ads.
If your profits do no offset the expense, you will end up losing money, so choose wisely.
If you have anything to add kindly let me know and I will "quote" it in my next post with your relevant links of course.
Next I will be speaking about how to make money from your blog or as they say...
Monetize it...