Increase Traffic to Your Blog from Search Engines
Your favorite thing about having a blog may soon be this – they naturally attract search engine traffic.
Some people are reluctant to optimize their blogs, in the desire to please visitors over search engines, and rightly so. You don’t want to have a blog purely for the purpose of attracting more search engine traffic. This doesn’t change the fact that you can do both, with a few simple changes to your blog.
I don’t know about you, but one thing I’m occasionally guilty of forgetting is that the queries we find in our web stats don’t represent faceless, mindless data – they represent people who have found what they were looking for, in the form of your site.
So one could argue that you are serving your audience better when you take the time to research what they want to read about and deliver it. After all, if they searched, and found you, the best way to keep them there is to give them more information on what they searched about, right?
Blogs already have optimized site architecture. Most are set up with a clear navigation, where every page is set up to link back to the other main pages.
They also have the inherent potential to be well-linked. If you haven’t already submitted to blog directories, you are missing out on some great one-way links. Many of the top directories can be found on Robin Good’s Top 55 list at MasterNewMedia.org – now up to 90 blog search engines and directories.
But before you head over there and start submitting, you should know how to optimize your blog. Then those listings can help your site get the best keyword placement in the major search engines.
Here are five tips to help you get your blog to show up at the top of more lucrative searches, more often.
Lucrative Blog SEO Tip #1: Lucrative Keyword Choices
You have a choice. You can target a general keyword you have little chance of ranking well for and get barely any traffic.
Or you can shoot for a keyword that gets a moderate level of targeted traffic resulting in more subscribers and sales. I like to call them a name I heard recently in passing – “lucrative keywordsâ€, though they are more often called “profitable keywordsâ€.
Whatever you call them, here’s the most important thing: They may not get you the most traffic, but they do bring the most profit.
You may be surprised to know that most of the time there isn’t a direct correlation between high traffic and high sales. Many of the most profitable sites in the world only get a moderate amount of traffic – and due to their choices of lucrative keywords, they have a much higher ratio of visitors to buyers.
A recent article in Information Week stated that the highest conversion rates from search engine traffic comes from people who do four word queries.
The great thing about your blog is that it can get so well-indexed that you have the potential to show up for any number of four word phrases that are relevant to your industry.
It isn’t just the four word phrases that get converting traffic, though I’d agree that they result in the highest conversion of buyers.
Targeting your blog discussion to a two or three word phrase that has a high yield of traffic, and yet has little competition is not a dream of past Internet days. Another recent study revealed that a surprisingly high percentages of queries made in search engines have never been performed before this past year.
As long as there are new developments, new products, services and trends, there will never be a shortage of these types of terms, if you know how to discover them.
Lucrative Blog SEO Tip #2: Keyword Placement
Your blog can be set up to repeat the keywords that you want to target just enough times to establish a theme. You can take full advantage of this in your post titles, your category names, the way you pages are named, and even with Technorati tags and your permanent links that appear after each post.
Lucrative Blog SEO Tip #3: Timely Posting
Instead of pinging at 15 minute intervals when your site hasn’t been updated, or even pinging after every single post, you can actually get better results if you update during one of three sweet spots in the day. Here’s one that you can use today.
Check your web site statistics. If you’re getting spidered every two weeks or even monthly, you can increase your number of spider visits by blogging on the anniversary of the period that the spider comes to your site. It takes a bit of monitoring, but you can often predict when the anniversary date of your last spider visit was.
An even faster way is to ping at a time when the spider is reading a page that carries your update. (This is a little harder to explain, as I’ve mentioned, but I have a resource that explains this process in-depth.)
Lucrative Blog SEO Tip #4: Get Linked
Turn on your site feed(s) and use them to promote your blog. Robin Good’s guide can get you some great one way links. If you sparingly include the lucrative keyword you selected in tip two in your title and description, all those link backs will contain the keyword term you most want attention for, which is often noted by the spiders as they follow the link through to your site.
Once there, if you use these and other tips to skew your blog a little more to the search-engine-friendly side, the synergistic effect is better, more profitable traffic.
Lucrative Blog SEO Tip #4: Frequent Updates
The more you post, the more food for the spider, which can cause the spider to react by splitting up its job into several visits, whereupon you have even more content, and so on, until the spider just adds you to a more frequent schedule of returns.
For example, I get spidered several times daily by Google, and yet I can go a week without an update with no change in spider visits. This means my pages get indexed more often and my new pages show up faster. Think of what that could do for the launch of your next product.
You’ll be happy to know that you don’t have to slave over long blog posts several times a day, all day long to get similar results from your blog. In fact, some blog software will let you set up your posts in advance, so that you can have posts show up daily even though you technically only blog once a month.
Bottom line: A few small changes to your blog can draw more search engine traffic without turning off your blog visitors. Done properly, this gives your audience more of what they were searching for in the first place.
Confused about which keywords to choose? Try the 100% free Lucrative keyword research Tutorial. See also my free reference guide to blog Related Posts at this site.
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