Help Guide for gaining more traffic to your blog

A series of Guides I originally posted on Google Blogger Groups My Groups ID end of articles
Getting visitors to your blog and getting the Links needed for people
to find your blog are getting harder and harder to find,

But here are A few tips

The most important quickest and cheapest way to gain traffic to your blog is to take the time to go out to other blogs and take the time and effort to make a sensible comment after someone has taken the time to write a post, if your comment is interesting and you visit often most bloggers will take the time to visit your blog or offer to exchange links if your writing is interesting.
One of the reasons I created The Power Guides was to provide each blogger an equal chance of gaining visitors if they took the time to post because then they would be included in the latest 10 blog posts so anyone who took the time and effort to keep an eye on latest posts and commented would become known by that community.

1 Find blogs that are somehow related to yours and ask if they will
link to you and you can put a link back to them
Use http://blogsearch.google.com/ and trim down to last day


2 Check if any blogs allow guest writers and offer to write a blog
posting providing you can have a link at the bottom of your blog post


3 Submit to Blog Directories and Use some of the counters provided by
blog directories that do provide traffic back and stats couple of
examples below


http://www.blogtopsites.com
http://www.bloghub.com/
http://www.blogarama.com/
and others like Technocrati


4 If you have good content join some of the social networking sites
like stumbleupon and ask a few people to check your site and if they
think it's worthy to give thumbs up


5 Make sure your blog profile includes a link to your blog and when
you find a blog that interests you leave a comment ( not spam ) just
genuine comment , they may then check your profile and check your
blog out


6 make sure to submit your blog feed to feed agregators


But possibly the most important thing you can do is to make your blog
interesting and not just put adds above the fold ( however tempting it is
to try and make money ) what you must think about is if you go to a
blog where you can not tell what the blog is about apart from adds in
your face WHAT WOULD YOU DO most often you would just hit the back
button


Just a few ideas



SEO == Search Engine Optimisation

Few Basics


The Title needs to be based on page content


Any pictures should have a description using alt or at least text


Try to bold important parts of the text to help Search Engines
understand what the page is about


If possible use Headings on page


Be careful of Accidentally trip the over optimization filter


This is another filter employed by the search engines to stop SEO's
getting the top spot in search results, and I am afraid it is often
the innocent that get caught in it.


Lets try to explain


The search engine algorithms looks at the words on a page and tries to
work out what the page is about using the title, Keywords, Headers and
Bolded words, It is also very reliant on the words other sites link to
you with .


So lets say your page is all about frogs how they live, where they
live, their life cycle etc. that is fine the search engines will work
out that your page is all about frogs even better if another site
links to your page with a link saying all about frogs , so far so good
and you are on the first page of the results.


Now you happen to know a lot more about frogs so you decide to create
separate pages about green frogs, red frogs, yellow frogs and so on
and so on,


Now this could be where you get into trouble because you create links
to 20 more pages with each link saying green frogs, red frogs etc and
the obvious place to put those links is from your existing page about
frogs.


Now I can not give you a formula for how many times the word frog
should appear on your page as each page has more or less other words
but lets guess and say you have the word frog on your page 23 times
( the search engines have looked at the page and the algo has said
that is exactly how many times the word frog would be expected and
puts you at NUMBER 1 in the search results YIPPEE ,


Now when you add all your other pages to different color frogs ( 20 in
total ) you create each link with as green frog, blue frog, red frog
etc a total of 20 times on this great page that the search engine
loves.


Hear comes the problem and you could innocently be caught in an Over
Optimization PENALTY Trap that was set for those who try to game the
SEARCH ENGINES because the algo now sees the word frog 23 + 20 = 43
times on your page and decides this is not what It would have expected
and gives your page some type of penalty.


This is just an idea of one of the things to look for if all was well
and now has gone pear shaped.


I posted a while ago about getting traffic to your blog , so I thought
I would do an additional post on

Links In --- Links Out


I did cover in an earlier post about how to get links and traffic to
your blog and there are a number of bloggers who who have sites
dedicated to helping you get links / traffic ( I do not run any of
those sites )


But this is just about getting your blog indexed and getting Search
Engine traffic


I am afraid just because you have put up a great article about a
subject you know a lot about does not mean you will get thousands of
visitors sent by the search engines and sometimes your great post may
not even get indexed so here are a few tips.


When I made the first statement Links In --- Links Out not only does
it cover links to other sites but also links to your own site, I will
try to explain the best I can.


Search Engines use a series of mathematical calculations ( called an
Algo ) to decide if a site / page is worthy to be listed for a
specific search term,


These range from


The content on the page
The Title and Headings
and
Other Links pointing to that page ( your own and from other web
sites )


Now your own is fully under your control so if you have a page about
green frogs and your link says green frogs that counts as a link
( sounds Great ) but here is the problem


Most search engines expect your blog to have links coming from other
sites the more the merrier and each blog / page has a sort of power
rating ( often called Page Rank or Trust Rank not just what you see
on the little green bar much much more that you do not see behind the
bar) the better power rating the blog or site that links to you has
the more power / trust / page rank they share with you.


Now this is where the problems start to pass power / trust / Page Rank
to another page ( even a page on your own site ) you need to have some
power on the page you are linking from and if you have no links to
your page / site you will have no power to pass.


So here are a few tips to do the best with the power you have


Do not have to many links out to other sites or even your own site
from any page so you can do the best you can with what you have .


I will try to provide a real example using this my own personal blog
( it is a PR2 which is very low but it is a personal blog ) so I do
not expect any more than that ( this is my personal blog for The
People History ) not the main site


This month I did quite a few posts 40+ and my blog WAS SET UP TO
DISPLAY ALL POSTS FOR THIS MONTH in my side bar so combined with these
40 links to older posts and any labels , archives, links to The People
History and Other Family and friends sites I worked out I had over 100
links out from my main page .


What this meant was no page got any power worth having so the only
pages indexed and recieving traffic were just an odd few not the 90
pages I have in total.


You can also think of it like a water pipe .


We have only 1 pipe with poor water pressure coming in and we are
trying to supply 50 pipes out . It is easy to imagine just a dribble
out if you are lucky


Now lets imagine we have 5 water pipes with good pressure coming in
and only 10 going out , this would mean although we have less pressure
for each pipe going out at least it's enough to be worth while


Sorry if I didn't explain it that well but the point is you must find
the balance of power gained through links coming into your blog /
page / website to power leaving that page / blog / website.


So if you are running a fairly new site with little inherent power
from links from other sites try to keep the outgoing links including
those to your own pages to a minimum and get other sites to link to
you


Sorry if this is confusing to new bloggers as it can seem very
complicated


There are a number of great bloggers on this group and others who will
give much better more detailed descriptions





Gaining Traffic To Your Blog
The Internet and websites and blogs is still growing exponentially so
being realistic on how many visitors your blog or site will attract is
a fact of life below are some of the factors that come into play.

Age of website, blog or page
The search engines are inundated with websites and blogs trying to
make a fast buck and one of the many ways they deal with it is by
looking how long the page has been online ( some webmasters will
create a new site each week with 100,000 pages in the hope they will
make loads of money they are not trying to provide anything useful or
informative just to make money . This is one of the main reasons that
search engines use age as one of the main defining factors , If the
content is good and over 12 months gains a number of natural links
from other websites the search engines will give more credibility to
that site / page / blog
This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the sandbox effect and the
more competitive the words you are hoping for traffic from the deeper
the sandbox


Other links to website, blog or page
As you can see from the item above the SE's expect your new site to
gain a number of natural links over time ( sometimes they even help by
putting your page high in the results for a day or a week to see if
natural links occur ) so you might see loads of traffic for couple of
days maybe in the beginning or could even be suddenly for no reason
( this is where social networking sites tags can be useful as it can
be a link but also can help to create other links


How well the page is Search Engine Optimized
SEO is a difficult question to answer so my honest advice is write for
your visitors


How many other sites pages are targeting the same words
This is where the going gets tough the more sites targeting the words
the harder to compete lets take as an example CAR INSURANCE . as
anybody knows this is a cut throat industry and as such website pages
number many many millions so don't expect to compete very well on
that type of keyword


How interesting and well written the content on the page is
This is at the core of success or failure if you provide something
interesting and informative from your perspective the chances that
people will read or link or bookmark or email to a friend is much
better and although you may not get as many visitors as your page
deserves it will provide a platform for long term growth


How much you have spent on promotion
I am afraid the Internet is now such big business that the amount of
money / time spent on promotion is a big factor on if you will be
successful .
Below are some of the ways to spend money and help your website be
found / linked to


1 Directory Submissions
2 Paying for a review of your website
3 Paying for Visitors from somewhere like StumbleUpon
4 Adwords / Yahoo Search Marketing / Microsoft ADDS
5 Paying for banners
6 Affiliate traffic
7 pay for links on other sites which might send you traffic ( be
careful with this as SE's are cracking down on some areas of paying
for links )


Free Website Promotion
I have covered this on earlier post including some basic ideas for
link building and social network tagging so I will not go into it here
again


The Most Important Website Promotion Tool


By far in my opinion the most important fact in building long term
traffic is visitors who decide the information, content and style of
writing is so great that they add your page to their favourites or
tell others or send emails or even just tell friends in the pub as
this is how the Internet started and can still today provide as much
traffic as search engine queries


The main object of this post is to help you realise there are some
things you can do to help get more visitors but some you can't and
that patience is a virtue for visitors the same as most other things
in life , so don't give up just carry on writing how you want to write
on a subject you enjoy and if your writing is enjoyed by others
visitors will grow over time.


Steve
My Google Groups Profile