How to Blog: 9 Tips on Increasing Blog Traffic
Below are 9 tips on increasing your Blogger (yeah, the one by Google) blog traffic. There are a lot of other things you can do, but this is a good start. Some of these work for other types of blogs as well, but is mainly focused on Blogger blogs.
How to Blog: Putting Adsense On Your Blog
1.) Don't put any Adsense on your site for awhile, and if you have any on yours now, get rid of it. Google doesn't like un-established sites that have a lot of ads. Google trys to keep it's search customers happy and trys not to include stuff that it thinks is spam. Wait until you have several hundred hits per day before you add advertising. Also, if you put a lot of ads on before you build credibility with your readers, you are apt to scare them away. Don't be greedy, just wait.
How to Blog: Adsense & Clicking Your Own Ads
If you do have Adsense on your site, NEVER CLICK ON YOUR OWN ADS! Google will ban your forever!
How to Blog: Write Original Content| Don't Copy and Paste Old Content
2.) Write ORIGINAL content frequently. By original I mean in you own words. NEVER copy and paste large sections of content from other sites. DONT use the E-Zine Articles (the have articles that people can use without copyright restrictions)! Believe it or not Google scours the web for content that might be the same and doesn't index (include in search results) most of the stuff that has a copy out there. This is not always true, but for a new website, you don't want to be doing that.
How to Blog: Target Your Content
3.) Target your content to what people are searching for. One of the best ways to establish a begining website is by specifically writing articles about the specific word phrase people frequently search for, but there isn't a lot content on.
How to Blog: Free Search Engine Keyword Tool
Go to this address: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/keyword-suggestion-tool.html?seed=christian&adult_filter=remove_offensive&suggest=Hit+Me
Bookmark that page. If a keyword is not already in the keyword box, type in "christian." The top 100 (daily) searches relating to this keyword will show up. It will look something like this (only small section of it included):
60,003 searches (top 100 only)
Searches Keyword
60,003 total searches
3066 christian bible group icebreakers
2938 free christian powerpoint backgrounds
2361 christian song lyrics
2107 christian newswire
1709 christian lyrics
1653 christian
1565 christian music lyrics
1533 christian music
1325 christian backgrounds
1241 christian easter crafts
1190 christian e cards for free
1166 christian interpretation of dreams
How to Blog: How to Target Traffic and Keywords and Phrases
Go through through the list and search for each phrase in the google search engine. I always target Google because it get's 70 percent of search traffic. A lot of the other search engines are stupid and take a long time, but they will eventually start indexing stuff. Don't worry about trying to optimize for them though. When you search for the word phrase put quotes around it, like this "christian interpretation of dreams." When the results show up, check how many results there are. If the number is pretty low (preferably below 50, but a lot of times below a couple hundred works too), that is a good phrase to target. It is even better when the keyword phrase doesn't appear or appears only a few times in the title of each of the search results. Write a post about that topic, and very important, use that keyword phrase as the title of your blog entry (blogger makes the title of your entry the title tag for the page. The title tag is what shows up as the title in the search results and if you look in the bar at the top of your browser, it will be up there to).
How to Blog on Blogger: Keep Your Blog Title SHort
4.) Keep the title of you blog short. Blogger makes this title part of the title tag too. The titles in search results are about this long:
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If your blog title is about this long*,
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the title of your blog entry wont have much space to show the keyword phrases you should be using in your title. For example, the name of my blog is Joe's AdBlog. It's a pretty short blog name and the blog entry title still has enough space to show up in the searches.
*These sizes may look different depending on your browser and if your computer has the fonts that I'm using.
How to Blog: How to Add a Blogger/Blogspot Sitemap to Google and other Search Engines
5.) Add a sitemap of your website to Google. Do this by going to www.google.com/webmasters/tools. Type in the address of your website in the add site box, and hit the add site button. Somewhere on the next page, it will say verify site. Click that. Once on the page, select the option for embedding code. COpy the code and paste it into the html code right after the "head" tag (it shouldn't be to far down). You can access the html code by hitting the "Layout" button on your dashboard and then hitting the "Edit HTML" button. Once this is done, go back to the Webmasters Tools window. Click the "Sitemaps" button. Click "Add Sitemap." Click the down arrow. Select "General Web Sitemap." Enter rss.xml and add. When that is done, add another one. The name of the next one is atom.xml.
How to Blog: Using Google Webmasters Tools
6.) Come back frequently and check the stats that google provides in the webmasters tools area. I don't have time to explain them.
How to Blog: Add Site to Google Analytics and Verify
7.) Add your site and verify in a similar manner in Google Analytics (search for it). Play around with different stuff and there and learn what it's for.
How to Blog: Adding Inlinks, Increasing PageRank, Using Digg and Blog Directories
8.) This is important. Add inlinks to your site. Inlinks are links from other sites that are pointing to yours. Google has a very complex system that uses these inlinks and other things to determine what your sites PageRank will be. Inlinks have a huge factor in increasing your site's PageRank. Comment on forums, do link exchanges, yahoo answers, and more. Add your content to Digg.com, del.icio.us and others. Go to my site, www.advertisingadvice.blogspot.com. Scroll down until you see the Top Blog buttons and all those other ones. Click through them and add your site to those directories. I don't have time to explain more, but remember this, add links, add links, and add links. Try to add them from sites that have a high page rank. DONT add them to spam sites and stuff like that, you'll get google wanting to block your site as being spam.
How to Blog: Remarkable Content, Articles, Photos, Videos, and More
9.) If you want a lot of readers, you want to get people to talk about your stuff. So make your articles REMARKABLE. Remarkable stuff gets remarked about (or talked about). Average isn't good enough. Everybody does average. Make your information and content OUTSTANDING!
How to Blog: These 9 tips Should give you a good start. Read my SEO pages for more info on getting traffic from search engines
Just some quick tips to get your blogger site started. There's a lot of other things, but if you can learn how to do the above well, you'll have a good start.