“How to increase blog traffic” currently generates over 44,900,000 search results from a quick Google search. So, where do you begin looking for the answer to that question when there are so many search options available?
This is the first in the three-part series in which I will provide you a few insightful tactics that continue to help my clients and friends naturally increase the organic traffic to their websites.
How to Increase Blog Traffic | SEO Techniques
Set your goals.
Why do you desire more readers? Understanding your core motivation in wanting to increase the number of people reading your blog, you will have a clearer perspective in your development of goals that could include:
- to increase the discoverability of your blog with a targeted niche of readers
- to establish relationships with specific users in order to get them coming back
- to encourage people to begin sharing your content with others
After you have identified your objectives, you can easily determine how best to position the following SEO techniques in order to reach new readers with your blog’s content:
General SEO techniques.
Search engine optimization (SEO) tactics provide a solid way to naturally increase the discoverability of your blog by potential readers, who may enter your targeted keyword/phrases into Google (or another search engine).
If your blog is built on the WordPress platform, YOAST is a fabulous SEO widget that efficiently helps to optimize every blog post. The red, yellow, & green lights within the application make it very helpful for users to easily know when their posts are optimized and ready to publish.
Of course, you can opt to manually optimize your blog as well by simply implementing these effective SEO tachniques within every blog post:
- determine the keyword/phrase that primarily describes your post
- enter the keyword/phrase into Google’s KeyWord planner to determine those keywords/phrases related to your topic that have the highest number of searches and are low competitive keywords
- naturally insert the selected keywords/phrase within these key areas of the blog post:
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- title & url-plug
- header & subheader tags (H1 & H2 tags; you may also consider using H3 tags))
- meta description. Though there no real SEO value here, the description will be displayed within your users’ search engine results page. This will be the text that entices users to click the link on teh SERP to access your web page, so – yes, it’s important to include the selected keyword/phrase
- image alt tag. Please consider also saving the actual file to your computer by using the selected keyword/phrase as well.
- anchor tag within the content. Within the blog post, link from one of the keyword/phrase mentions to another area within your blog where readers may access more information on the topic or link offset to a higher ranking website in order to provide more value to your readers.
By actively applying the above SEO techniques to the individual pages of your blog, the search engines (i.e. Google, Bing, and Yahoo) will begin to index your website and begin displaying your blog within the search engine results page for potential readers who are searching for your targeted keywords and phrases.
With the above SEO best practices regularly being updated within the new posts of your blog, you can begin to focus efforts on the next step in how to increase blog traffic:
How to Increase Blog Traffic | Build Relationships
Stay tuned for these follow up articles on How to Increase Blog Traffic that release in the coming days:
Part 2: Build Relationships
Part 3: Content Marketing
image credit: Creative Commons via http://expertpcz.blogspot.com