Building a Blog has never been as easy as it is today.
With applications like Wordpress you can have your Blog online in no time.
You don't have to hire a coder like in the old days.
Now your hardest decision is what template to choose.
Even though is has become a lot easier many people find that once they build a Blog no one ever comes to it.
I mean, they set up a ping list, added it to a few social bookmarking sites, got some backlinks and put links on Digg but they find that through all of their efforts, they still have very few visitors.
So, what is the trick? Building backlinks, social bookmarking and the other most common ways to drive traffic to your Blog require work.
Just registering accounts on all of the most popular social bookmarking sites will take up a full day.
Now, I'm not saying this isn't needed.
In fact, it is something I do with every Blog post I make.
You don't need to get too caught up in this.
Organic traffic is great, if you can get it.
Just think how many people go to Google to search for what your Blog is about versus how many people go to a social bookmarking site to do their search.
If you can get their attention in Google then you can tap in to a pipeline of visitors.
Okay, so how do you do this? Is it Adwords? No, it's not using Adwords.
In fact I have tried using PPC and have failed miserably.
Honestly I just don't get the PPC world.
But, I do get the organic traffic world.
Here are the tips you need to get a flood of organic traffic: 1.
) Make sure you permalinks are setup as /%postname/.
Why? The reason is if for instance you write a post titled "Buy Blue Candles" your URL will be something like "yoursite/Buy-Blue-Candles".
Now when a user types in the keyword "Where to Buy Blue Candles" then in the users search results the keywords they are looking for are highlighted which draws their eyes to it and gives you a better chance that they will click on your link.
We all know that more highlighted words equals more prominent in the results which means you will stand out more and get more clicks then if you did not stand out.
Remember, before modifying anything in your Wordpress Blog be sure to make a backup of any file and the database you are working on.
It would be a shame to see all that hard work lost.
2.
) Before posting, do keyword research and then change the "slug" for your post to include a combination of the keywords you have found.
For instance, if you write a post for a Canon A570IS camera, simply perform keyword research on the term "A570IS" you will probably find variations like "Canon Powershot A570IS".
This is great, but don't stop there.
Try to find common misspellings.
For instance Canon is commonly misspelled as Cannon.
If you are posting something as specific as a model number like above "A570IS" then try to search on variations of that model number.
For instance, try searching for "A570","570IS", or "570" and include all variations in the slug.
I know having your keywords in the URL doesn't make a difference in rankings right? I have heard this also.
Truthfully I have not found that to be the case.
I have ranked just by having the keywords in the URL and not found in the title, the body or even in the tags for the site.
In any case, having them there doesn't hurt and like before those keywords will be highlighted in the search results.
3.
) If you are using Wordpress don't forget to install the Simple-Tags plugin.
It's incredible.
Use the keywords you find in your keyword research and create tags with each of them.
The Simple-Tags plugin works great for this.
Also, each keyword will be its own URL and hyperlinked on your page.
This not only give you more indexed pages but gives you a better chance that if your main post doesn't rank well for your keywords then maybe your tag page will.
4.
) Use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin for Wordpress.
All you have to do is manually build your sitemap first and then it updates it automatically when something changes.
It's one of the best.
No, this won't have the visitors knocking down your door but it lets Google and Yahoo know where to look to index your pages.
And if the bots don't have to go searching then it will make your life much easier and you will get indexed faster.
Putting these four things into action has resulted in more traffic per month than all of my Web 2.
0, article marketing, and link sharing strategies combined.
I get 300 times more traffic from Google than any other strategy I have in place.
But, don't take my word for it.
Give it a try yourself.
You will be glad you did.