Tuesday, May 22, 2007

SEO : Organic Traffic

So you’ve got a blog, you’re posting religiously every day. Perhaps getting a few visitors here & there from rather generic keywords. How on earth do you get the traffic to your blog?
First of all, there’s a number of different ways.
Organic Traffic
Referral Traffic
Paid Search
Social Search / Viral Content
Advertising
In this 5 part of the series we are going to concentrate on what you can do to your blog to increase Organic Traffic. Organic Traffic is referrals strictly from Search Engines for particular search terms.
For example, this blog ranks quite well for Earn Money Blogging.
Lets look at some of the main factors for getting a good volume of Search Traffic to your blog.
Good Keyword ResearchGood Linking StructureOutbound LinksInbound Links
It’s important to make sure you include important keywords in the title of your posts. Try to do some research about your topic before you post. For example say you want to write a post about Adsense, I would usually pop the word Adsense into a program like Keyword Elite & that will show me which variations of the word Adsense get the most traffic & also what the competition is. There’s really no point you targeting a term that will maybe only get you 10 visitors per month when you could maybe get 10x that amount.
This is the basic philosophy that I adopt when making posts.
The second thing I like to do is make sure that I interlink all my pages properly. This is called your internal linking structure. So for example, say last week you wrote about Adsense, then this week you’re writing about Adsense Positioning then you can go back & link the two articles together. I use a nice plugin for doing this called SH Autolink for Wordpress. It allows me to add keywords to a database & link them to a particular page.
For example if I type in Azoogleads, that’ll automatically link to an article I wrote about Azoogleads last week & in turn help me rank for the word Azoogleads
Outbound links on your blog are equally important, well not equally but they help Google decide the relevancy of your page. To do this try & link to other sources that are relevant to your post, the more trusted the source is the better. This way, Google will know you are writing & sourcing a particular topic. It also lets other Webmasters see that you’re writing about them or their site, this can help you set up relationships, trade links & network.
And finally, perhaps the most important method for generating Organic Traffic is getting inbound links to your blog. This can be hard for people just starting out. Try not to just get links back to your homepage, I like getting deep links to particular posts. The Anchor Text of the link will determine what you rank for, this is the text contained within the hyperlink.
So as I mentioned earlier, for the link about Azoogleads the Hypertext is Azoogleads & will help me rank for that term. Remember to do this with your internal linking aswell as your inbound links (which you can’t control all the time).
There are a few good ways to attract links to your posts, for example you can buy links from Textlinkads. But this is a topic I’ll cover at a later date, so stay tuned!
Recommended Reading:
SEO Book
Blog SEO
Recommended Resources
Keyword Elite

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