Driving massive amounts of search engine traffic to your blog can be a lot easier than you think, it really depends on some key factors like the niche you've chosen, your marketing and SEO techniques and even how dedicated a blogger you are, to name a few. There are billions of search queries per day across major search engines and you need to be taking advantage of this consistent and predictable source of traffic if you truly want to dominate your niche.
So here are 17 techniques to put in action and practice to help you rank higher in search engines and attract tons of relevant visitors to your blog.
1. Optimize Your Blog's Loading Speed
Google has since started using loading time as a factor to rank a site's authority in search engines. Google gives sites that perform better higher authority and ranking because these sites will provide a better experience for their searchers. Simple techniques such as reducing the sizes of your images, using a reliable web host and caching plugins such as W3 Total Cache can help to reduce your blog's load time.
2. Article Marketing To Increase Backlinks
Not many bloggers consider using article directories like Ezinearticles.com or Hubspot.com but article marketing can be an excellent way to gain quality backlinks to your blog, gain popularity and increase search engine traffic since they are so frequently and readily indexed by search engines. This works excellently for getting new blogs indexed quickly.
3. Ensure Your Blog's Code is W3C Compliant
This is extremely important and a poorly coded site can prevent search engine crawlers from effectively indexing your site. Use the W3C Markup Validation Service to check for any errors on your site. Having a few minor errors will not be detrimental for your blog. However, if there are many, you may want to go through those errors and make corrections or employ a developer to do so.
4. Avoid Black Hat SEO Techniques
Black hat SEO techniques are practices that mislead and degrade the relevance of search engine results like keyword stuffing, spamming, using link farms, text hiding and article spinning. These techniques will get your blog banned from google and other search engines. Which means zero search engine traffic for your site.
5. Web Directory Submissions
This is another under-rated technique and yet it can be very effective for increasing the trust level of your site, provided that you submit to trusted high quality directories. Submit your blog to directories like DMOZ, Yahoo Directory and Best Of The Web Directory to name a few. Ensure that you submit your blog within relevant categories. These will help to increase pagerank and authority.
6. Choosing The Right Domain Name & Niche
Once you have decided upon the niche for your blog, try to ensure that your domain name has a couple related keywords in it while keeping the name short, sweet and easy to remember. Launching a website with iPad in the domain name while providing spectacular iPad related content will drive thousands of visitors to your blog who are searching for iPad info, especially if you register and market the domain in anticipation of the product launch. So choose a specific niche and take advantage.
7. Use Google & Bing Webmaster Tools
Google and Bing Webmaster tools pages allow you to submit your blog's sitemap to the search crawler queue which will help your site get indexed faster and in a more in-depth and complete manner. These webmaster tools pages provide feedback on your site's performance and offers advice on how to improve.
8. Consistently Create Original Useful Content
Ensure that your blog is a source of original link-worthy content that people will enjoy and share and is not just a copy of posts on other sites. Google does in fact pay attention to how far reaching and how much your content is being shared and this is an indicator of the authority of your blog. Never copy content from other sites, this may not get you banned immediately but will destroy your site's authority.
9. Take Advantage of Trending Topics
Its an awesome technique if you can build a blog around popular events like World Cup, the launching of the iPad or any other trending topics. Millions of people are searching based on these hot topics and if you can get the stories, news and reviews out quickly, google will rank you highly for these topics and bring traffic your way. These are awesome opportunities for selling related merchandise and monetizing targeted traffic through advertising.
Use the Google Trends tool to find out what people are searching for and a history of trending search topics.
10. Frequently Update Your Blog
Google especially places high priority on fresh new content. As a blogger, you will notice that on the first two days that you publish new articles, you should see a rise in search engine traffic for those particular post keywords, then it will eventually get lower and taper off. This is because google picks up your content as being new and sends some traffic your way. Continuous and frequent blog posting will give your site the upper advantage in search results and google will index your site more frequently than the average.
11. Guest Posting To Increase Backlinks & Trust
Guest posting on quality, trustworthy blogs will get your site indexed quickly, increase backlinks and improve the authority of your blog. This is very effective for new blogs.
12. Write New Product Reviews
Writing timely product and book reviews can send tons of traffic your way from searchers who want to find more information on products before making their purchase. Also, if you can gain the attention of the product owners or authors they will readily share your reviews if they are in-depth and useful for the buyer which means more traffic for you.
13. Twitter As A Search Engine
Twitter is fast becoming a search engine on its own and using appropriate hash tags can gain you extra traffic when sharing your articles this way. For example, when I post new jobs to my job board, I commonly use the hash tags #jobs and #jobsearch with the tweets since many users search for jobs on twitter using these keywords. So start taking advantage of that and use tags that match your site and content when sharing.
14. Effective SEO Techniques
Ensure that you know a little SEO so that you can easily and consistently optimize your blog for search engine traffic. Techniques such as using Alt tags for images, using appropriate link text, good keyword density within posts, usage of heading tags, internal link building and having simple navigation structures can allow searchers to easily find your blog's content and attract more relevant quality visitors.
15. Social Bookmarking is a Must!
Social bookmarking sites are among the most frequently indexed sites on the web and creating links in sites like Delicious.com, Digg.com, Reddit.com, StumbleUpon.com and so on can get your articles out on the wide web quickly and higher in search results.
16. Maintain A You Tube Channel
Google owns YouTube and displays search results that match videos in the YouTube database. Create channels for your blogs and have supporting videos for the content that you produce on your site. If you publish technical tutorials on your blog upload supporting videos to YouTube. When uploading your videos, ensure that the titles and descriptions contain the most relevant keywords that will attract the best targeted traffic.
17. Use Paid Press Releases
Publishing a paid press release through a site like PRWeb.com can significantly get your articles out on the web and go viral. You'll even get Google advertising credit, get inclusion in Yahoo, Google and Associated Press releases that are viewed by millions of people. Its very important that your content is unique and captures the attention of readers.
Conclusion & Discussion
Following the tips above will get you started on an excellent path to start dominating your niche and attract relevant interested visitors to your blog through search engines.
Are there any techniques not mentioned above that have helped you to gain massive amounts of traffic? Please share in the comments below, we would love to hear from you.
