Increasing Blog Traffic

One of the greatest deceptions regarding website administration is the belief that quality content is enough to generate large volumes of traffic to a website. SEO gurus and industry experts claim that as long as you write great blog posts on new, innovative and interesting topics you will get noticed, linked to etc. This article recommends a different, a bit more diverse approach – introducing the importance of backlink building and onsite optimization.

If you know what’s good for your blog, PageRank and Google rankings you’ll give what we are about to say some considerable thought.

Natural backlinking to your blog

Interesting articles, never-seen before images/videos and content that gets the visitor’s attention get links – backlinks to use industry terms. However, getting natural links back from other websites to your blog is rather ineffective and normally only generate a small number compared to how many links you can get back with some extra effort.
Building backlinks

The leading and most popular websites have a large number of natural backlinks. A lot of people and website administrators link to Wikipedia.org for example, a non-profit site that depends solely on its users. More commercial sites however, also spend a lot of time and resources on “building” backlinks rather than just sitting back and hoping that people will link to them.

Search engines like Google rates a website 80% based on its value in proper backlinks, so it is safe to say that working to get relevant and proper links to your blog is the safest way to increase traffic and pagerank. This is how you do:

Go to Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool – get relevant keywords that match your blog post’s topic. Implement them in the title, meta data, headers and subheaders. Diversify, so that your post may rank on as many search terms as possible.
Contact a site owner

Start by contacting other blogs that feel relevant to your own and ask the site owner if you can contribute with an interesting blog post. By scrolling through blog engines you will find relevant blogs to contact. Wordpress.com or Blogspot both host a large number of blogs. Make sure to contact many blogs, since you will only get replies from a small percent of them.
Link back

After you have communicated with the site owner, decided on a topic, the fact that you will include some links and actually written the very interesting blog post, insert one or two links back to your site. Depending on the size of the post you can add more but normally two links is good. Link back to your blog using any of your selected keywords, to increase your Google ranking and post PageRank on that search term.
On site optimization

The importance of a search engine optimized website cannot be excluded. By building backlinks you will increase your blog’s availability in the search engine. But to tweak your own pages and posts to perfection make sure you always fill in the meta data and include keywords in titles and headers.