People really make this issue complicated. I mean, really complicated! This simple 3 step guide will simplify your life greatly. Especially if you’ve been drinking the kool aid on a whole bunch of blogs and SEO sites that help make the issue of getting traffic and links to your blog harder than it really is!
In the Beginning…
There was no SEO. There was no term “link building.” It was just a boy and his blog. The boy learned that, in order to get traffic, he had to share with other boys and girls who were bloggers too.
That, in doing so, those other boys and girls linked to him and kept up on his writing (if they liked it). They became ongoing link partners, but had never heard that term before. To them, it was just a matter of sharing traffic. And those boys and girls became the wildly successful bloggers of today.
And today we have our own dictionaries full of terminology for link building and SEO. Yet, boiled down to its core, getting traffic and search engine rankings is still a very, very simple matter.
Prep work: Watch this presentation I did on the 5 Tenets Of Professional Blogging for a primer on what makes pro bloggers tick. It’s worth your time if you’re new to this blogging thing!
Step 1: Your Content And You
As a growing blogger you will notice certain “changes” happening to you. At first you think you’re dying or something is really wrong. Then you learn it is just nature doing its thing. You seek out relationships and you want to be noticed more by other bloggers. You start to have “crushes” on other bloggers because they are so popular, have great content, and are so cool.
This is when you realize you want more of what they have. Step one in your guide to blog traffic is your content.
Read these posts and go to step 2…
- 8 Ingredients for Intoxicating Blog Posts -Jason Baer
- 7 Types of Blog Posts Which Always Seem to Get Links and Traffic -ProBlogger
- 5 Simple Ways to Open Your Blog Post with a Bang – from Copyblogger
- How to Write Great Blog Content – from ProBlogger
Step 2: Making Friends With The Search Engines
All the engines want is for you to make them look good. Google wants visitors because it makes money from advertisers the more that people use it to find stuff. The stuff they find for searchers determines whether that user is going to come back and use Google regularly or not.
Making the search engines look good makes them want to rank you higher in their results. Giving them what they want is the key to your success in befriending the engines who are like the most popular kids in school who like to gossip about everyone else.
- Search Engine Optimization for Blogs – SEO – Problogger
- How to Deal with Pagination & Duplicate Content – SEOmoz
- The Blogger’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization – Aaron Wall
- Wordpress SEO: The Definitive Guide to High Rankings for Your Blog – Joost De Valk
Step 3: The Popularity Contest
No one can afford to be unpopular on the web. Unless you’re writing for yourself, and throwing up advertising and product links for the heck of it, you want as many people checking you out as possible. Today, you have to do as much work off-site as you do on-site. This is called “social marketing” or “social networking” and it means getting out and about and guiding people to your site through social networking tools.
- Google Friend Connect – Jack Humphrey and Chris Lang
- Twitter – Jack Humphrey and Chris Lang
- Social Marketing with Maria Reyes McDavis – Jack Humphrey, Webside Chat
- Working with FriendFeed – Webinar by Jack Humphrey
Questions
Q) Does this guide cover everything you could do to become popular in the engines and on other sites?
A) No. But follow these core tactics and the rest will follow when you want to go deeper!
Q) Will following the resources here make me a pro blogger?
A) Maybe. Probably not. But they’ll give you ideas on what you are doing right and wrong and set you on the path to immediately more traffic and links by putting them in action.
Tips
- Keep it simple! Most bloggers burn out and quit because they try to do everything and spend more time learning than doing.
- Pick something and do it! Don’t be a hero. You have to pick something and implement it and go to the next thing. This is a process and it cannot be condensed into a weekend or a month.
- Chill out! Don’t focus on what you don’t know. Begin learning and take your time to thoroughly understand the tactics you are working on implementing. Only then should you move to something new. Otherwise you leave in your wake a bunch of half-assed attempts that get you nowhere.
Speak Up!
- What are some of the things you’ve learned about blogging and getting traffic since you’ve started?
- What has helped you become more successful with popularity, link building, or search engine marketing?
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Great article sharing lots of great posts , but I think the tip no 2 is the most important one , only reading about all those techniques want do you any good , You have to pick one work on it , learn from the mistakes done in that method and implement the other one
Speaking of SEO – most of my own posts that have ended up getting a lot of search engine traffic have done so almost accidentally. (Meaning I didn’t really expect it) I didn’t set out to create a page that would get massive traffic, it just happened. To be honest, I struggle in trying to duplicate the process. (Create another page like it)
So I end up with a blog with hundreds of posts that get so so traffic and three or four posts that go hog wild. I would sure like to make that 30 or 40 posts!
@Kelly – I know what you mean. it does become a hit or miss kind of thing. I never intended my top 50 video sites post to get so high in the rankings (for awhile it was #1 and the traffic to that post alone for “video sites” was amazing). But here’s the way to look at it – You have to post fregularly for your readers anyway. Keeping an eye on good, basic SEO while doing it will produce those winners as you fulfill your “contract” with your readership to produce what they like.
This way you don’t feel bad about posts that don’t make it in the engines because they have at lease that one other purpose.
Great list.
I know SEO is the hype, but it’s last on my list. I do the basics: meta keywords, internal links, seo-friendly images and so on. I figure Google with it’s $$$ has the smartest engineers whose primary job is to match search terms to relevant content. A great SEO strategy may get you traffic; it’s no good if they only stay for a few seconds.
Content is King, Queen and the joker. I go for viral each time, or keep quiet.
Social media is great; Stumbleupon has been kind to me, and off-line avenues work well: flyers, meetings, and handing out business cards at the local pub.
Jack – This post offers some golden nuggets. I encourage your readers to follow the links and really study this subject – it has a high ROI on your time. Also, the inclusion of Joost De Valk’s Word Press SEO – this is a must read for anyone serious about SEO for Word Press.
Great post – fantastic content links.
James
It seems that the “Share This” feature is a MUST on any site looking to get more traffic. It’s amazing and almost hard to believe how much influence those “social networking” sites can have, and how much draw one person’s positive comment about a site can produce. Thanks for the info!