Blog Traffic Tips
There are so many ways to increase blog traffic out there, but today I wanted to cover 6 simple steps you can do to optimize your blog, and up your ranking.
My last post How To Get An A+ On Your SEO Blog Page Report Card talked about optimizing your posts. Today I will go over steps to optimizing your whole blog.
Create Pretty Permalink Structure
The permalinks Wordpress uses by default are not search engine friendly. You can make this simple change by inserting %postname% instead of the default that is already there.
This will successfully create URL’s that include your post name which should include your targeted keywords.
So instead of having a page URL look like this..
http://www.johnpaulaguiar.com/page=2 “Not Pretty” Right?
Your URL will now look like this..
http://www.johnpaulaguiar.com/how-to-get-an-a-on-your-seo-blog-page-report-card/
Ahhh So Pretty.. Now this look’s a lot better.
Install All in One SEO Plugin
This plugin allows you to specify a title, description, and the keywords for the search engines. This will make your life a lot easier..lol and trust me any tool that can help my blogging, is a great tool for me.
Once you have it set up, it pretty much works automatically for you, the only thing I do once I make a post, is change the title if needed.
Install Related Posts Plugin
Search engines love it when you interlink your pages and posts. The plugin will automatically add your previous posts at the bottom of your new post that are relevant to that post.
This is important because for one, you are interlinking your content, SE’s love this and will increase blog traffic and second, you are giving your readers more related info and a place to go at the end of the post.
Now I personally stopped using a related post plugin, since I have to many plugins installed as it is, I use Zamanta.com to add my related posts.
Research Your Keywords
When people search, they search by keyword or keyword phrases. It is important that you know what these keywords are if you want to rank at the top of the search engines. Your posts should be written around these keywords.
Make Your Blog User Friendly
Make your blog clean and easy for your readers and search engines to find information. That means including your blog’s archives, categories, recent posts and pages.
This also means having a nice clean design, now this is where I can see both sides of clean user friendly, and attention getting design, I have tried to do both..lol “I hope”
Expand the Ping List
When you make a new blog post Wordpress will “ping” the blog search engines. This alerts them that content on your site has changed and ready for readers to view. This can help you get indexed fast and increase blog traffic.
Do a Google search to find an expanded ping list you can include in your wp-admin so you make sure you get as many of these sites to update you as possible.
Increasing blog traffic can be the most challenging part to to a new blogger.
These 6 simple steps will help you on your way to optimizing your blog, increasing your blog traffic, and making your blogging tasks a little easier.
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December 4th, 2009 at 8:40 am
John, Thanks for the useful post.
I already have done the first 3 steps but will have to do the remaining in my new blog
December 4th, 2009 at 8:42 am
Your welcome, 3 down, now do the other 3 and you will be set.
December 4th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Thanks for your tips. I implemented your suggestions and had my site indexed by google. when i type in the exact name of my website name, it finds it. but when i search my site name and one the post's title name, it doesn't find it. do i have to wait a few days after the post has been pinged to search engines?
December 4th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Your welcome, I'm glad the tips helped.
Your post pages will need to be keyword optimized, if they are not, it will be hard to find your posts.
But good thing is your site is now indexed and showing on google. Now you can write posts with some keywords you want to rank high for on Google.
December 4th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Nice post John.
I'm working on most of your suggestions (four out of six ain't bad, right?), so this was a timely find for me. I do have a question, though. Can you recommend a good, All-in-One SEO Plugin? I'm already using Zamanta for the related posts, but I'm afflicted with indecision trying to pick yet another program to implement.
December 4th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Thanks Jon, glad you liked the post. Yea 4 out of 6 not bad
You can get this wordpress plugin here It's called the “ALL IN ONE SEO PLUGIN”
http://semperfiwebdesign.com/portfolio/wordpres...
You def don't want more then 10 – 15 plugins, but this one is a MUST have.
December 5th, 2009 at 11:09 am
great post… i think its very useful for my first blog here… i appreciate your experience
December 5th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
TY Glad you liked it. Glad I could help
December 6th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
I had pretty much everything you covered, except the expanded ping list. Thanks for the tip! Going to make some changes.
December 6th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
That's great, Glad the post helped.
December 9th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
I have recently realized the importance of keyword. It took me time to find the best tool for keyword research. I hope it will do good on my traffic.
December 9th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Yes Keyword research is one of the most important things you can do to attract traffic to your site.
December 11th, 2009 at 11:25 pm
Great list… just like to add one more thing…. what about WP-Greetbox?
December 12th, 2009 at 6:17 am
TY Glad you liked the post. Yes WP Greetbox is awesome, I use it. But that doesn't bring in traffic, they have to be on your site allready to see it.
But it is a great plugin to greet people the way you want and get info to them up front.
December 30th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
Is pinging really that important? I figure if I write good content and people link to me, google will find my content. If they don't then they're in trouble because my content is awesome
December 30th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
Yea if your starting out then yes Pinging is important. Getting links to good content enough for google to find you doesn't happen over nite, that's where pinging comes in, just to help the process.
Awesome content huh? lol As long as you think so, I'm sure Google will come around too..
December 30th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
John,
Thank you for sharing this.
I think I'm on the way to completing all six. I've installed All-in One SEO plugin, however I'm not too sure whether I'm using it correctly. I've not really done anything with it. Any help would be appreciated!
I've just, (today) added to my ping list. I got the info from another site.
Regards
Paul
December 30th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
The All In One SEO is allready working on your site. Since your perma links lookgood.
Most of what the Plugin does is automatic.. but there are a few tweaks you can do. Page Titles. post titles, keywords…
December 30th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
John Paul,
Thank you for the response.
What are the tweeks I can do to the titles, post titles and keyword.
Regards
Paul
December 30th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
You want your page titles to have the keywords your working with. Take look my blog and clik thru the pages at top, and see what I mean.
Here is a ALL IN ONE SEO vid tutorial on how you can use it for your posts. http://bit.ly/4mkFTy
December 31st, 2009 at 8:20 am
Nice easy to follow list. Also commenting on other blogs should help too that's exactly why we set up our website. Experimenting with comments to increase traffic. Hopefully by the end of 2010 we'll have some positive results. Keep up the good work!
December 31st, 2009 at 8:25 am
TY glad you liked the list. Yes I agree, I talked about commenting in another post. We all know how important commenting “Quality Relevant” comments can be to increasing traffic, so I'm sure your results with be positive. Good Luck in 2010
January 5th, 2010 at 1:44 pm
Great list. Just why didn't you put together a list of ping services? I had done all but the last before starting. I had heard that you do not want to have your blog constantly ping other services, ie, when you update a blog post, etc. So, I installed a plugin, not sure if that is required or not.
January 5th, 2010 at 1:57 pm
There are many ping lists out there, so I didn't add one. I installed a plugin too that only pings a post when it goes active, no matter how many edits you do, it also work with scheduled posts, only pings when post goes active.
If you can control those 2 things then you will not have any issues with pinging to much.
February 10th, 2010 at 4:46 am
Thanks for these good tips. I would add : commenting on other blogs and building a community around your blog of course as traffic boosters.
Regarding Zamanta – I tried it for a while but didn't really like its recommendations.
Have you tried different plugins for that purpose as well?
February 10th, 2010 at 7:41 am
Omer, Thanks for taking the time to comment.
I still use Zemanta, But I mainly use it to add related posts and for the link rec.. the rest really doesn't work that well.
April 2nd, 2010 at 6:09 am
< strong>6 Simple Steps To Increase Blog Traffic…
There are so many ways to increase blog traffic out there, but today I wanted to cover 6 simple steps you can do to optimize your blog, and up your ranking….
April 2nd, 2010 at 11:00 am
John great tips.
I employ all of these tips and advise this to all my WordPress clients. These are some of the easiest steps for better traffic results.
April 2nd, 2010 at 11:04 am
Hey James.. Thanks for the comment. Yes this is all the basics to getting more traffic. You need to start here before you try the more advanced tips.
April 2nd, 2010 at 7:04 pm
Installed Wordpress and shifted my blog from blogger platform. The rest of the tips you have pointed out, I found I'm using them. Its OK. But I'm bit unaware with ping services yet. I found one of the ping url set default on wordpress installation. Could you please share your recommeded ping services?
April 2nd, 2010 at 7:13 pm
Hey Suresh.. TY for the comment.
The Ping list I use is pretty much all the Ping sites you need.
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2/
http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://www.bloglines.com/ping
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping
http://rpc.blogcatalog.com
Hope that helps.
April 4th, 2010 at 4:05 am
Thank you for some nice tips, We should always try to put keyword in the parmalink, this is one great help for SEO.
April 4th, 2010 at 7:43 am
Glad the post helped you.
April 7th, 2010 at 8:42 am
[...] 6 Simple Steps To Increase Blog Traffic [...]
May 27th, 2010 at 11:54 pm
Hey John, this is a fantastic site and I look forward to learning from you. In regards to this topic, I am curious if there is such a thing as pinging “too much”. In other words, would sites that you ping to ban your site if you ping too much? And what is too much if so?
May 28th, 2010 at 4:54 am
Jaren..TY for the comment.. and the support
Yes you DO NOT want to over ping.. sites will block you. Now how much is to much, I don't think anyone one knows.
I installed Ping Optimizer on my blog, that only pings your post when you submit it live. Wordpress by default pings when you save as a draft, if you fuure schedule and every time you edit the post.. so this is wayyy to much..
Let me know,, I can get you the link… it's Free so no brainer
May 28th, 2010 at 11:54 am
Jaren..TY for the comment.. and the support
Yes you DO NOT want to over ping.. sites will block you. Now how much is to much, I don’t think anyone one knows.
I installed Ping Optimizer on my blog, that only pings your post when you submit it live. Wordpress by default pings when you save as a draft, if you fuure schedule and every time you edit the post.. so this is wayyy to much..
Let me know,, I can get you the link… it’s Free so no brainer