10 SEO Tricks to Attract More Traffic to Your Blog

As fancy as the term "blog" sounds, it's actually just a website that uses a content management system. While most blog software is more search engine friendly out of the box than many web sites, the opportunities for blog optimization are readily available.

Here are 10 tricks that will increase your visibility in search engines and eventually drive more traffic to your blog.

1) Use keywords in your blog post titles - This is a given for SEO. Most blogging software uses the post title as the url so take advantage of it.

Example: "10 SEO Tricks to Attract More Traffic to your Blog - Search Engine Journal" Search Engine Journal is included on every blog post title tag automatically.

2) Optimize your blog categories - When you create categories for your blog, be sure to use keywords in the titles. When you post, be sure to default to a general category that is relevant no matter what the post is about. Choose multiple categories on each post when appropriate. This will create a "SEO-friendly" url for each post you make.

3) Syndicate your blog - Make it easy for people to subscribe to your blog. Sign-up with a free service like Feedburner and then create a "syndication" area on your site.

4) Offer RSS to email. Anywhere from 10% to 40% of your blog traffic can come from individuals that perfer to read blog posts via email. RSS readers and aggregators can be confusing. Adding email services to your blog isn't. There are several free services available for this including: FeedBlitz, Squeet, and Zookoda.

5) Ping blog search engines - This can be configured with blog software such as Movable Type or WordPress to work automatically. If you're using Blogger.com, then you can do this manually with Pingomatic.com or Pingoat.com.

6) Make comments on other blogs. Your name will be linked to the blog url that you enter. Don't make comments that offer no value to the blog post. Don't use keywords in the field for your name, use your name or blog name.

7) Submit your blog directories. Also submit the blog to regular directories such as (DMOZ, JoeAnt, GoGuides, Google Blog Search, etc) that have categories for blogs.

8) Targeted advertising - Now this doesn't really drive traffic to your site but will make you money. It's possible by using Google AdSense to display highly targeted ads on your blog. Once you've setup an account and placed the ads on your site, just sit back and watch the cash come in. Cha-ching.

9) Snatch up hot keywords - Now before you place ads on your blog, be sure your keyword density is good for the right terms. A great tool to improve your traffic for high-paying keywords is to use a product called Keyword Elite (http://www.seojuice.com).

10) Use track backs - If there is a blog that you refer to or quote and it is highly relevant to your subject, leave a track back. It increases your link popularity and may even score a few interested readers from the linked site. A TrackBack is a mechanism used in a blog to show, around an entry, a list of other blogs that refer to it.

Summary The important thing to remember is that no matter how many optimization tactics you employ with a blog, there is no substitute for quality content. Blog optimization is only as effective as the quality and usefulness of the content you're optimizing. So do not limit yourself to tips and lists. Use your imagination and you will come up with thousands of ways to drive traffic to your blog!

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25 Simple Blog SEO and Traffic Tips

This is a nice concise list of 25 ways to greatly increase your blog's traffic and search rankings.

1) Content is king!

2) Submit your site to as many search engines as possible. After the initial indexing I would recommend resubmitting every 6 months.

3) Comment on as many blogs as possible. Make your comments thoughtful and not spammy.

4) Link up with popular blogs - trackbacks can be good for SEO as well as your traffic.

5) Write a good article and post it on a site like http://www.digg.com, although this won't help as far as traffic goes (you will get a HUGE boost for a few hours, then it will tone back down, you probably won't get any permanent readers from Digg) and it sure doesn't help with your relationship with your web host, it can create some new inbound links.

6) Use http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ . Instead of the GoogleBot searching for your pages you can tell it where your pages are. This is a great way to get your whole site indexed.

7) Content is king!

8) Get listed on web directories like http://www.dmoz.com/. Although many SEO "experts" think it is overrated no one disagrees that it can help boost your site's rankings.

9) Add some links for feed readers and blog aggregators like http://www.bloglines.com/, http://www.google.com/reader/, and http://myweb.yahoo.com/.

10) Add some social bookmarking links at the bottom of each post

11) Make it easy for your users to find your RSS feed

12) Add a "E-mail This!" link either on the header or the footer of each post

13) Content is king! (see a pattern?)

14) If you write a really good post try e-mailing the URL to some big-name bloggers with a short personalized message. You never know, they might like it and link to it.

15) Try asking some big sites who are in your niche if they would like to trade links. More often than not they will say "no", but at least give it a try.

16) Don't obsess over "get rich quick" schemes.

17) Don't obsess over "get lots of traffic really quick" schemes.

18) Submit your RSS feed to a bunch of RSS directories, http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-directory.htm has a large list of popular directories.

19) Use http://pingomatic.com/ to notify a ton of aggregators that your site has been updated.

20) Don't obsess over the numbers - it takes time to build up a good reader base.

21) Make your posts as keyword rich as possible. Whenever you can use a word that has to do with your niche, use it!

22) Use lists, especially if your site is targeted towards more tech-savvy users

23) If you have a MySpace page or a home page on a similar service put up a link to your blog.

24) Tag important keywords, using this site ( http://www.richardrodger.com/tags.htm ) you can tag keywords.

25) Last but not least, offer free stuff. Everyone loves free stuff!

The really important thing you have to remember is, just have fun. If your blog is causing you to become stressed out then it probably is not a good idea to continue blogging.

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5 Quick Tips For Website SEO

There are many ways to utilize SEO to make your website more search engine friendly. Here are five quick tips that people often miss:

• Meta Tags- I know some readers are thinking: “Yes, I’ve got my meta tags filled out…tell me something new!” Well just having words in them doesn’t mean that the value of what they can do is being maximized. You want to make sure your primary keyword or phrase is in the title tag. Also, pack your description tag with your keywords. Of course not to the point where it sounds unnatural to read, but a good description tag with as many keywords as you can reasonably use works wonders for the search engines. And one last important thing: complete meta tags for each page in your site. Target different keywords for each page. Depending on what’s in that page, make each tag in each page fit the keywords and relevancy of that particular page.

• Links- Hyperlink a few of your keywords to outside authority sites. For example if one of your keywords is “search engine”, then link that word to an article or story about search engines on CNN.com. Wikipedia is another good authority site to link to. And of course you can find ample pages to link any given keyword to it.

• Sitemap- Search engines love sitemap pages. If you don’t have one, make one! For example: www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml. This needs to be the last thing you do when building your site so you can include all the completed pages in it. When making your sitemap, double check to see if all your pages have proper meta tags filled out. And be sure to have a link in your website to your sitemap page. There’s a great sitemap tool at www.xml-sitemaps.com. You can simply give them your URL and they will automatically generate a sitemap page for you.

• Offpage Intelligence- Obviously the more inbound links to your site, the more authority your site will have. But how you go about getting those links is important. They need to seem natural, like they are from the everyday use of exchanging information on the internet. For example if you get hundreds of inbound links pointing to your landing page from link directories within the span of a couple days…your site might be frowned upon by the search engines. So do a natural mix of link directories, postings on authority forums and articles that link back to your site. *Very important: When making inbound links, use your primary keyword or phrase less than 10% of the time- use other creative words and phrases instead. And make sure to send most of those links to internal pages in your site rather than your landing page.

• Updates- Have a few pages that you can update. For example a blog that you can post to every few days. Other ideas are to have videos that you can change or add to, or a page with articles. You can always easily find new relevant articles to add to a page or directory in your site that will both enhance the value of the content in your site as well as make it appear to be a lively, evolving site. Search engines love this. If things are changing and growing every time the search engine’s spiders crawl you site, it will look like your site is getting a lot of quality traffic and things are progressing nicely.

• *Bonus Tip- Press releases are the best backlinks. Do several press releases a month. Search existing PR’s in your industry to get ideas. And make sure to visit prweb.com to help make this happen.

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