How to give your site a SEO Boost to increase your Traffic

Optimizing your posts for the search engines can help you to boost your traffic. Sure you don’t write for the search engines but for your readers but your readers come from the search engines. Even if you don’t write for the search engines but for your readers you still want to optimize your posts so that your readers can actually find your content. After all, your blog is not an island but you want people to come and join your community.

So here are seven ways to give your blog a SEO boost:

1. Target an easy search phrase – one that has lots of demand and little supply. These phrases are often the phrases that are three or four keywords long. Often they begin with “How to” or “Tips for”. I usually use Market Samurai to find the keyword phrases people are looking for. Beside that, it gives me some ideas about what to write. Sometimes it is much different what I think people look for than what they actually do. If you look for keywords with three or more words (long-tail keywords) you get highly targeted traffic, means you get people who are exactly looking for what you have to offer. The reason for targeting these long search phrases is that you can quickly achieve a top page rank because there is much less competition than for the short keywords. You can then use these content pages to link to other pages within your website – the pages where you ideally want your traffic to go and of course which fit to the content.
2. Do some social bookmarking to bookmark your key pages. Choose a few key pages and list them with social bookmarking sites. Sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious but there are tons of others you can use to drive traffic to your site. Social bookmarking sites create both traffic and incoming links.
3. Link to your key pages from social networking sites and blogs will boost your traffic as well. I couldn’t believe it myself until I did it. I thought that when I comment on a blog nobody will ever read the other people’s comments and come to their blogs. It simply is not true. I often get visitors from blogs I have commented on long ago. Of course, when you comment on a new post you get more traffic and later it gets less but it is a steady flow of traffic. So true is that commenting on blogs and participating on social networking sites drives traffic to your site. It can also give you a SEO boost. People may share to your website or specific pages on your website once they learn about your valuable content. So after all it is well worth to get in contact with people.
4. When you write a new post always try to link to old posts. This has a few advantages. Of course, first of all it is for your link profile to these pages. You diversify by adding also internal links from one page of your blog to another. The second though is that you also make people dig deeper into your site. If they want some further information they will click on the provided link and check out more about the topic. You do your audience a favor. Provide as much information as you can.
5. The currency of the Internet is content. The more you write, the more keywords you target the more visitors you get. The more relevant content you have, the more value the search engines place on your site. Creating keyword-focused content will give you the SEO boost – it’s just a question of time because once the search engines know that you regularly provide fresh content they stop by often and send you more visitors.
6. Don’t forget to optimize your existing content, don’t over use this of course but some optimization is really a good idea to let search engines know what your site is about.

• Add your targeted keyword to your headline
• If you have subheadings, place your keyword there once
• Add your keyword to your first paragraph
• Don’t use the same keyword all over the place. The search engines are smart. If you write about traveling to China write naturally. Even if you use words like “I have traveled to China” search engines will still know what your page is about.
• Motivate your readers to leave a comment on your site. Ask them to participate, join, etc. User-generated content is another good factor for the search engines that your content is relevant what they look for. Look for opportunities to ask for contributions. For example, ask advice and then let people post their responses to your site. Just make sure it does not look spammy. Sometimes it is hard to figure if a comment is actually spam from someone who is just looking for a back link or if it is a comment. Especially when they are too general I just delete it – it doesn’t add any value to the discussion and is, most probably, just spam. Readers read the comments and I want them to get value for the time they spend on my site.

Boosting your search engine optimization takes a goal and a plan. And actually you need to stick to it. It is not a one time thing you can do and then forget about it. Choose the keywords or keyword phrases you want to focus on.

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Filed in: Blog • SEO
Tagged with: seo • traffic • traffic generation tips