INCREASE BLOG TRAFFIC FROM SEARCH ENGINES - HOW?

Traffic is the "LIFE LINE" for any blog - specially so if you are interested in monetizing your blog because the amount of revenue that you can earn from your blog is directly proportional to the amount of traffic your blog or website can generate or pull - More Traffic = More Money (Simple!). There are many ways to bring traffic to your blog like search engines, social sites, forums, commenting on other blogs, blog directories, guest blogging, advertising - just to name a few. But this post will fully concentrate on - Ways to increase Blog traffic from Search Engines?. I will discuss in detail - How to increase traffic to your blog from search engines?

To get traffic from search engines only one thing is needed that is - proper and efficient SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO). We know that SEO means to make your blog more search engine friendly and relevant for keywords that you want to optimize your blog for. Now this is a multi-step process that is optimization is to be done at every step from the beginning and is to be continued. I have discussed each of the steps in a concise manner to bring out the real goal of each step. If followed these steps will lead to a well optimized blog or site for the search engines and will definitely make your blog more search engine friendly which will give high position to your pages in SERPS and draw increasing amount of traffic to your blog or website. So let's begin :-

Keyword Research to Choose The Right Topic - Before you start a blog you must do a market research and find out which topics are searched most or at least a decent amount of times on the Internet. This is necessary because if you start a blog on a topic which is not of much interest to the Internet community then naturally there will be less searches on your topic. This obviously will cut down chances of the number of visits that you can get to your blog no matter even if your blog gets to the first page of SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages) for search terms related to your topic - I hope you got my point. So its very important to start a blog on topics that are of much general interest so that the search volume for the keywords related to the topic is large. This will increase the probability of your blog to get search engine traffic (provided you optimize your blog properly so that it ranks well in SERPS). 

But it is not feasible to find the search volume of keywords related to your topic if you do not have a tool that will tell you the amount of searches done on a particular topic. The best tool is Google AdWords Keywords Tool (free) which will give you the search volume on any particular niche and its synonyms. Just think of any topic and put the keywords related to the topic in the search box and press enter - you will be given the search volumes. Try this out for a number of topics until you choose a topic for your blog that has at least a decent search volume - this is important because more the number of searches more is the chance of getting traffic to your blog (provided you have optimized your blog - as mentioned above). You can read my post - How to choose a profitable topic (niche) for your blog? to get detailed information that will help you in choosing a topic with a large traffic volume. 

Choose A Optimized URL/Domain Name - As you have already chosen the topic for your blog in the previous step now its time to choose the URL or address for your blog. Try to include one or two of the main keywords related to your blog topic in your URL as this has much SEO value if you want to rank higher in SERPS. Though this depends on the availability but you can always apply some tricks like say you can add some numbers or hyphens in your URL and try out different combinations of the keywords you want to keep to get an optimized URL. Read my post - How to choose a domain name? to get more insight into the topic.

Optimize Your Blog Title - Blog title is the name of your blog - like the name of my blog is "Online Money Making". Try to include keywords related to the topic of your blog in the title. You can choose any keywords as there are no condition of availability in this case as was in the case of choosing the URL. This is of much SEO value and will help you in your rankings in SERPS so that you can gain traffic from search engines. Read- How to choose a Blog Title? to get many valuable tips that will guide you in choosing an optimized title.

Optimize Blog Post Titles - Google and all other search engines rank each page separately. So optimize each of the blog post titles with the keywords that you are trying to target with that particular blog post. You can again take help from Google adwords keyword tool to get search volume for the keywords you are targeting and also to get ideas for different combinations possible. Try to include keywords in the first few words itself as it will give better optimization to your post title. Also do not just include keywords but also make the title meaningful because ultimately your posts will be read by humans. So strike a balance between using keywords and giving meaning to your title so that you can get search engine traffic through SEO and also make the visitors read your post by making a meaningful post title.

Optimize The Post Body - Spread the keywords that you want to optimize your post for evenly in the post body. Mention the keywords specially in the first and last paragraph. Use Google Adwords Keywords tool to find the exact terms which are searched by selecting the "Exact" option from the drop-down menu on the right hand top of the tool. Mention these exact terms in the same sequence that they are searched a few times in the body. But never ever over-do this as search engines may penalise your post for keyword spamming - use keywords only when required and makes sense to avoid this. 

Make your keywords bold once or twice(max) for proper search engine optimization to increase traffic. Also use two or three images in your posts with different combinations of keywords in the alt tags - this will help in search engines ranking your post higher in SERPS for those keywords. 

Also remember to post as frequently as possible with well optimised content as the more diverse your posts are the more are your chances of appearing for different searches. Remember people also search with words that are impossible to predict - the keyword tools just gives you an idea of the search terms but there are many other search terms that are overlooked by the tools. Increasing your posts and optimizing each with diverse keywords (of course related to your niche) will just increase the probability of your blog to appear high in SERPS not only for regular search terms but also for the few hundred or thousand weird search terms.

Links - This is the one most important and most potent factor in making your blog and your posts search engine friendly. Links are mainly of two types :-

1. Outgoing Links - These are links that go out from a page of your blog. These links can be 'Internal' that is pointing to other pages in your blog OR 'External' that is pointing to other sites or blogs. Whatever be the case use keywords that are relevant to that particular post page as anchor text . So only link to relevant pages that will help you in using keywords that matches the topic of the post on that page. This will increase the keyword relevance of that post page and also tell the search engines that this page links to many other sources of relevant information thus giving your post maximum SEO value and help in increasing your rankings in SERPS - this in turn will increase traffic to your blog/website.

2. Inbound Links - These are links pointing towards a post page or home page of your blog. These links can be 'Internal' that is coming from other pages within your blog or website OR 'External' that is coming from other blogs or websites. These links have the maximum SEO value and can literally outweigh every other factor in terms of ranking in SERPS. Each link is like a vote of trust and use of proper anchor text tells the search engine about the topic of your post or blog. 

So try to use keywords that are relevant to the topic of the page for anchor text of links coming from other pages within your blog.  As anchor text of links coming from other blogs or sites are out of your control so you would have to depend on the wisdom of the blog or site owners of what anchor text they use for the links. But there is one way to get favourable anchor text - when you analyse your external links with the help of webmaster tools find out a way to contact the owner of the blog or site (email or contact form) from where links are coming and then approach him politely if he would consider changing the anchor text to your chosen one - in most cases this works. 

There are also inbound external links that you must have planted yourself in social sites, forums, blog comments in other blogs, blog directories, article directories, your other blogs etc - here you can obviously have anchor texts of your choice so utilise them wisely - I hope you have understood.

One more important point to remember is that the number of inbound links must be more than the number of outbound links (more the difference the better) for optimum SEO.

Labels/Tags Widget - Tag or label your posts with keywords and also let the keywords appear in the sidebar by installing the Labels or Tags or Categories widget/gadget. This will give greater keyword relevance to your posts and better SEO.

Related Posts Widget - Install the related posts widget or gadget as this will also help in increasing the keyword relevance of your posts and thus help in SEO. This will help in placing your posts higher in SERPS thus increasing traffic to your blog from search engines.

There are many other SEO techniques that can be adopted in your blog to make it more search engine friendly. But I have discussed the most important and potent ones in this post. Adopting these techniques will definitely make your blog posts and also your blog as whole search engine friendly which in turn will increase traffic to your blog from search engines.