How to Get Search Engine Traffic to
Your Blog
1. Search Traffic has been an important
part of my blogging
The amount of traffic that the blogs I’ve worked on get from
Search Engines varies considerably from blog to blog but on
my two current blogs I get 25-35% of my traffic from Search
Engines (largely Google).
You can see that Search Engine Traffic is not the biggest source
of traffic (social media takes that award) but it is significant
considering the site gets over a million visits a month.
2. Search Traffic isn’t Everything
Looking at the above chart you see that if I was to only ever focus
upon Search Engine Traffic that I could potentially be loosing up
to 67% of my blog’s traffic.
One of the main points I made yesterday is that people shouldn’t
become obsessed by Search. While it has amazing potential – I
find that sites grow best when they have a variety of sources of
traffic (including from Search Engines).
Here is another chart from the presentation which shows the four
main areas that I put effort into when thinking about driving traffic –
Search, Social Media, Community and Content.
Search Engine Optimization, participating in social media, building
community and producing content are four important elements of
building a site that gets (and keeps) high levels of traffic. When a
blogger becomes obsessed by any one of them
(to the detriment of others) the site can suffer
(or at least not realize its potential).
When the four elements come together a blog can
grow quite rapidly.
3. SEO is Important
Learning the basics of Search Engine Optimization is important
as a blogger. While most blog platforms these days come fairly
well optimized for Google there are always tweaks that can be made.
For example on
WordPress the title tags that are served up by default can be tweaked
to not show your blog’s name on each post on your blog
(or at least to put it after the post name).
There are also a lot of easy ways to optimize a post for search
engine traffic while writing posts. For example
formatting images well with SEO in mind and
using good keywords in titles.
SEO really does make a difference and bloggers who
learn the basics can see significant increases in traffic.
It is well worth investing time into learning it.
Learn more SEO techniques in previous posts on ProBlogger:
- Search Engine Optimization for Blogs
- How to Herd Organic Search Traffic to Your Blog
- Do a Search Engine Optimization Audit on Your Blog
Highly Recommended – Also check out Aaron Wall’s SEObook
for some excellent training on SEO. Consider it an investment
in learning how to drive traffic to your blog.
4. Great Content is More Important than SEO
I felt strange saying this at a conference where SEO companies
were pitching for clients and talking about the importance of
building links to a site – but in my experience the most important
thing you can do to build your blog’s search engine traffic is to
write the most amazing, useful, authoritative and inspiring
content possible.
Here’s the question you need to be asking while writing
each post:
How can I make this the type of post that people
will want to share with others?
Search Engine authority has a habit of coming to those blogs
who consistently produce content that enhances peoples lives,
meets needs and solves problems. If you create something that
does some of these things it is quite likely that the all important
links that your blog needs to build search engine authority will
come as people link up on their blogs, share the link on social
messaging and bookmarking sites, email their friends etc
While great content doesn’t automatically equal lots of traffic –
if you produce it consistently over time and actively participate in
social media and within your blog’s niche it has a habit of building
your traffic and search engine authority.
I’m not anti using link building strategies
(ie asking people for links) but I’ve never really done it
(I may have once or twice in the early days of my blogging).
I know some bloggers who spend many hours each month
‘building links’ but wonder what would happen if instead they
concentrated on using that time to build linkable content?
Perhaps I’m a little naive – but Google is in the business of
ranking the best sites highest. They want to rank great content
in the #1 position – so, my aim as a blogger is to write that kind
of content.
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