21 Ways to Improve Traffic to Your Blog

1. Using social networking website

Create accounts with digg (popular content that surfers share with each other), Reddit, Stumble Upon (ditto) and del.icio.us (a bookmarks manager), and promote your best posts. Don’t overdo it and push each pearl of wisdom you produce or you’ll just arouse antagonism.

2. Rework HTML title tags of trafficked posts

By watching your stats, you can often identify posts that get search traffic from a keyword, even though the keyword isn’t listed in the HTML title of the post. By editing your posts’ HTML titles to add the keywords they cover, you can strengthen the rankings and therefore the traffic that the post generates.

3. Save your best posts for the best times of the week

Writing a home-run post on a Saturday afternoon will probably happen from time to time. However, does your blog have good traffic on Saturdays? Analyzing your blog’s stats to determine when it naturally has the most traffic can get more eyes on a great post, which will translate to more social votes and more links.

4. Tell your friends

Don’t just assume that they’ll find their way to your blog. Ask them to disseminate the link among their friends.

5. Be active in an online community

If you have something interesting to say about somebody else’s blog, just do it, adding a link to your blog. But don’t post comments just to post your link. That’s obnoxious and doesn’t do great things for your image.

6. Exchange links with other bloggers

Link to them and have them link to you. If another blogger in your sphere of interest posts something interesting, link to it and add your comments. Track-backs can bring traffic. (A track-back is a way for Web writers to obtain notification when somebody links to one of their documents.)

7. Make sure your blog is visible and attractive with the major browsers

If it looks weird or doesn’t work in Firefox, for example, you lose potential traffic.

8. Good spelling

Use spell-check, for heaven’s sake. Never mind the aesthetics: if you spell a key word wrong, you can’t be found on Google. And avoid excessive grammatical mistakes as well.

9. Stop writing about yourself, start solving problems

Surfers become readers when a blog provides something that is wanted. A casual visitor may read your blog because they find training, answers to problems, entertainment, or something else they want. This more than likely will mean that they won’t want to read about you, your girlfriend, your cats, your kids, or your catastrophes (unless you have a personal blog that your friends read). Discontinuing the off-topic posts will help you to develop more repeat traffic .

10. Create profiles in online social networks

Link all your profiles to your blog. Facebook for instance has several applications that allow you to publish posts on profiles.

11. Create a widget from your blog

Meaning, a graphical user interface component with which the user interacts. Try to disseminate it.

12. Don’t overdo with ads

Google’s Adsense is nice, in that it brings each surfer “contextual” ads, but if 80 percent of the text in your blog is promotional material, you are bringing no value to readers and they won’t come.

13. Use a traffic analyzer

Install a traffic analyzer on your site to learn the trends and patterns of your surfers, you will learn a lot that way.

14. Write concisely, but not too briefly

A reasonable post is generally no more than 300 to 400 words. Once you’ve reached 800, you’ve reached the limit of the average surfer’s tolerance and any more than that reaches the point of nuisance.

15. Write continuously

Try to write every day, but don’t carpet-bomb with posts.

16. Write lists

It may be getting old, however the fact is, it works. People click on titles such as “21 ways to improve traffic to your blog”.

17. Make it pretty

If your blog is pale and dull, if it doesn’t have attractive media effects, people won’t have a good time reading it. Also, make sure that the fonts you choose are readable, not too small, not too light, and not challenging. Yet don’t overdo things. A blog sporting 200 flashing banners, dozens of popups and giant bright pink text will just annoy readers and send them surfing elsewhere.

18. Subscribe to the feeds of your industry’s major players

In this way, you won’t miss important news releases. When news breaks in your industry, there will be a lot of extra traffic searching for information on the event. Adding your thoughts will almost always generate extra traffic.

19. Answer your email and comment questions

Be diligent about responding to comments that other readers post on your blog. Answer e-mails. Contact with readers is important. Why do people read your blog? Because you solve their problems. Why will they come back again and again to your blog? Because you solve their problems.

20. Pay more attention to the style of writing from magazines

Look at the magazines and pay special attention to the types of titles that are used on the covers. Write down the most interesting titles and think about what makes them interesting. In order to generate buzz around a post, a great title is an absolute necessity.

21. Edit your post one more time

How can you improve your title? How can you improve your first paragraph? Small details in your post, especially in the beginning of your post, can make an enormous difference in its ability to draw social traffic and links. You can definitely improve your title, first paragraph and formatting.

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Tags: google analytics, Internet Marketing & SEO, pagerank, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, traffic