[andyparks16]

Hey guys,

So I have been working hard on the content of my blog and have been getting a small amount of traffic without any work on driving it to it. Now it is time to start driving traffic.

In experienced eyes, what is the most effective way of actually getting traffic to you blog? Is it based pretty much based on getting a high ranking in the search engines?

Advice is much much appreciated

Andy

[lintlin]

Here's what I have been doing, and it seems to be helping:

1. MOST IMPORTANT do keyword research. Both through a KW research tool (I use Market Samurai and love it) AND look at your stats what keywords your visitors are finding your site through.

Make a list with your top 5 keywords, and a second list with secondary keywords. Mine is about 20 keywords long.

2. Go over your content. Bold or italicize some of your keywords. Link some of your keywords to other relevant content on your site. Say you were writing about apples, and your article says something like "apples are not oranges", make sure you link the word oranges (or the whole sentence) to your article about oranges. Look how your taxonomy is set up and maybe make nice taxonomy landing pages. Make sure that your content urls have keywords in them, and not example.com/?=321 or your article about apples is not example.com/shiny-red-fruity-things. It should be called example.com/apples. Your taxonomy should be example.com/apples/granny-smith. DO NOT DELETE YOUR EXISTING CONTENT URLS. Use a module like URL aliases to rewrite your content paths VERY carefully.

Check if your primary link navigation structure uses your keywords, and if not, think about how you can change the titles of your menus to reflect this, using url alias to do so. DO NOT DELETE THE OLD PATHS!

3. Go over your meta tags. Use your keyword list and change the meta tags for EVERY page of content, making sure they are relevant to the content. Make sure every piece of content has a description tag. Depending on your blogging software, there is surely a module that can help you with this.

4. Different page title names for each piece of content. Not the article title, but the page title (upper left hand corner of your browser). Get those keywords in there and make each one unique.

6. Make sure your sites are listed with Google, Yahoo and Bing. If they aren't, submit them. If they are, regenerate and resubmit your site map after doing the above 4 steps.

7. Bookmark your content. If you use Firefox, there is an add-on called shareaholic that makes bookmarking content easy. Just right-click on your article and you get a list of places like reddit, delicious, digg etc that you can post your article to. Do this for each piece of content.

8. Taking your list of keywords, get yourself a hubpages and squidoo account and make a few relevant pages on each site. Make sure on hubpages that you have at least 6 modules on your page and that you only link back to your site once (either the RSS feed or the link box). Same with squidoo. If your hubs/lenses are good, you will see yourself getting some traffic from there, and google likes these backlinks.

9. Other off-page SEO practices, like commenting on other relevant blogs (only well-thought out comments, no spam!), getting .edu or .gov backlinks (google inurl:.edu + keyword) and see if you can find anywhere relevant to link back to your site. Use your signature in relevant forums but DO NOT spam the forums. I actually get a LOT of traffic from forums that I use privately i.e. don't talk anything about my sites but people are nosey and will click on your sig links.

10. Read "Article Marketing the right way" by Lanadili http://forum.abestweb.com/showthrea...ghlight=article and do it.

Don't forget to add your site to your email signature!

And then, if you so desire, learn about Pay Per Click and how to do it properly. I burned a bit of money on it earlier this year, so I try to stick to onpage and offpage SEO right now.

There is also a great web marketing checklist that I wrote about last week. You might want to download it, print it (or use Adobe for an interactive checklist, thanks Daniel!) and go over your website with it.

polepositionmarketing.com/library/ebooks/web-marketing-checklist.pdf

Hope this helps!
Stephenie

[andyparks16]

This is excellent lintlin, i look forward to putting these measures into place

[andyparks16]

just a quick query about taxonomy, i guess in this case you are referring to classifying and sub-classifying things??

[RemodelingGuy]

Just to expand on lintlin's post a tad....

Someone shared the checklist below the other day.... Very Cool!

http://www.polepositionmarketing.com...-checklist.pdf

[lintlin]

Haha Jimmy, that was me, and the link is in the post above.

[lintlin]

Taxonomy is basically "tagging" your posts, so I guess you could call it categorization. I really only use drupal, so I'm not sure how it works with Wordpress, but I'm positive that there is an integrated taxonomy/category system. On the apple example, it would be example.com/fruit/apples and example.com/fruit/oranges. That would mean both your posts apples and oranges would be tagged fruit, and any sub-sub-categories like /fruit/citrus/oranges and fruit/seeded/apples.

The problem is that this content is then findable under example.com/apples, example.com/fruit/apples, and example.com/fruit/seeded/apples and gives your site a LOT of duplicate content. Which is why it is very important to have an internal URL-redirect module installed. So the last two pages point at example.com/apples and google knows this is the canonical URI. You can also use the canonical meta tag, but this is not the same as a url redirect.

Hope this helps, I am shocked at how much I have learned since March!!

Stephenie

[RemodelingGuy]

Originally Posted by lintlin

Haha Jimmy, that was me, and the link is in the post above.

Well, that's what I get for posting with one eye closed.

I have that link in my favorites bar and check it out daily.

Just when you think you know it all, someone else proves you ( me ) wrong...

If everyone getting started in this biz would follow those steps, it would save them a ton of trial and error.....

[ladidah]

Very nice comprehensive list lintlin!

A very important point to add to the above list is to make sure you do have unique and valuable content on your blog. If you have articles on there that is simply cut and pasted from an article directory, chances are there are hundreds of other sites out there with the same article. Not much value. Write something that would be helpful, unique, written with a different point of view, etc.

One more thing once you do all of the above and get millions of traffic to your site, it is very important to have your site set up so it can be easy navigated.

Too many blogs have their navigation be organized by months only instead of adding links for posts using e.g. keyword categories. Having even a section of "Most popular posts" or "Most viewed post" is also a place to start.

It's no use if you get all this traffic to your site and visitors have to click through each month to find their topic of interest. You will then find visitors clicking away very quickly and you loose that opportunity.

[andyparks16]

Thanks ladidah, I am feeling good about this:

A very important point to add to the above list is to make sure you do have unique and valuable content on your blog.

Because I strongly feel that my content is unique and written the same way

[RemodelingGuy]

Originally Posted by ladidah

Very nice comprehensive list lintlin!

A very important point to add to the above list is to make sure you do have unique and valuable content on your blog. If you have articles on there that is simply cut and pasted from an article directory, chances are there are hundreds of other sites out there with the same article. Not much value. Write something that would be helpful, unique, written with a different point of view, etc.

One more thing once you do all of the above and get millions of traffic to your site, it is very important to have your site set up so it can be easy navigated.

Too many blogs have their navigation be organized by months only instead of adding links for posts using e.g. keyword categories. Having even a section of "Most popular posts" or "Most viewed post" is also a place to start.

It's no use if you get all this traffic to your site and visitors have to click through each month to find their topic of interest. You will then find visitors clicking away very quickly and you loose that opportunity.

Between the two of you gals, us GUYS don't have a prayer....

[Pootur]

Writing articles is a great way to drive traffic to your blog. You can write 4-5 articles a day and submit them to 10 or more article directories. I submit to EzineArticles at first and when an article gets approved then to others. It is free and simple.

[RemodelingGuy]

Originally Posted by Pootur

Writing articles is a great way to drive traffic to your blog. You can write 4-5 articles a day and submit them to 10 or more article directories. I submit to EzineArticles at first and when an article gets approved then to others. It is free and simple.

What kind of crappy advice is that to give???

Write 4 - 5 articles a day?

Who can write 4 - 5 well thought out and informative articles every day?

Try slowing down and coming up with some helpful articles that mean something to someone.

This isn't a race to the finish line.

[andyparks16]

Who can write 4 - 5 well thought out and informative articles every day?

Try slowing down and coming up with some helpful articles that mean something to someone.

This isn't a race to the finish line.

What about submitting your blog posts to article directories with a link to your blog included...i believe this to be possible??

[MichaelColey]

Originally Posted by Pootur

Writing articles is a great way to drive traffic to your blog. You can write 4-5 articles a day and submit them to 10 or more article directories. I submit to EzineArticles at first and when an article gets approved then to others. It is free and simple.

That may work for you, but please realize that ABW isn't an "article directory". We don't want generic articles that you've posted 9 (or 199) other places. We want real affiliate marketers here, participating in the community, sharing their experiences, and no just reposting stuff to get backlinks.

Moderator Note: As a result of the above, some of your other posts will be removed and your homepage is being removed from your profile.

[andyparks16]

Thanks jusvie I am on Digg atm doing some promotional stuff...cheers

[hauensteindish]

Propeller and other websites like that will help and even look into traffic exhchanges

[hauensteindish]

thanks for the tips. right now that what affiliate marketing, often having to do with information products).">im trying to do is to get more traffic