Increase Traffic to Your Blog from Search Engines
- The Top 5 Tips
Copyright 2005 Tinu AbayomiPaul
Your favorite thing about having a blog may
soon be this - they naturally attract search engine traffic.
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.
But before you head over there and start submitting,
you should know a little about how to optimize your blog. Then
your new listings can help your site get the best keyword placement
in the major search engines.
These are my top five tips for lucrative blog
search engine optimization.
Lucrative Blog SEO Tip #1: Lucrative Keyword Choices
You have a choice. You can target a general
high traffic 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 this a "lucrative keyword".
Whatever you call them, here's the most important
thing: They may not get you the most traffic, but they often
bring the most profit.
You may be surprised to learn that there isn't
always a correlation between high traffic and high sales. Many
of the most profitable sites in the world get moderate traffic
because their lucrative keywords result in 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 - there are two and three word phrases that
can bring you traffic and sales.
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 surprisingly high percentages of search
engine queries debuted as late as 2004.
As long as there are new developments, new products,
services and trends, you'll never have a shortage of these terms
if you learn 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 pages URL names, or even
a combination of Technorati tags and the text of 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 or ping
just once 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 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 at my site.)
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, my main site gets 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.
About the Author: Tinu is a web site promotion
specialist and the author of several books on search engines,
blogging, and RSS. You can read more tips in her blog at http://www.FreeTrafficTip.com
