So you’re looking to increase the profitability of your blog for the Christmas period (and beyond). You’ve optimized your AdSense, Chitika and Affiliate programs, you’ve even written a little seasonal content…. but there’s one missing element…. Traffic.
Unless you actually have people viewing your blog it is very difficult to actually earn anything from it.
So how do you drive traffic to your blog?
I’ve written quite a bit of this previously in a number of posts (for example here) but want to spend a little time talking today about Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Why SEO?
When you are looking online for information on a topic where do you go first?
While I’m sure there will be a variety of answers given to that question - the majority of average web users would answer with one word - ‘Google’.
Every day Search Engines like Google send many millions of web users to websites in their index. While there are plenty of Web 2.0 web indexing services around that are increasing in popularity - the fact is that search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN are still the biggest source of traffic to websites on the web.
As a result - learning how to be indexed and ranked well by them seems like a no brainer.
Writing for Search Engines and Humans
Some bloggers have a problem with the idea of optimizing a blog for search engines. They argue that rather than writing for search engines a blogger’s sole focus should be that they write quality content for humans.
I personally don’t see that writing for humans and search engines have to be mutually exclusive things - in my opinion both can be achieved without compromising either.
Some bloggers argue that if you write for humans that SEO looks after itself. To some extent I agree with that - if you do write quality content that others like you will find that they link up to your site (a key in SEO) - however I would argue that incoming links from other sites is just one part of climbing the rankings in Search Engines (an important part but not the only one).
There are other factors that come into play also and I believe that by knowing them and naturally incorporating them into your blogging you can increase your chances of being found by readers in Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Of course - some people become a little obsessed with SEO and forget the human reader, don’t fall for this trap and keep a balanced approach and you’ll benefit both from traffic from the search engines as well as a loyal readership who keeps coming back for more quality content.
Basic SEO tips for Bloggers
I’ve written previously on this topic so rather than writing the same thing again in a slightly different way will republish some of my previous tips below. I hope you find them useful.
Before I start - I’ll say that while I do get a lot of SE traffic that I’m not really an SEO expert (it isn’t what I devote most of my time to). If you want to read something by someone who has spent a lot more time and effort on the topic I recommend looking at an e-book by Aaron Wall - SEO Book (aff). I’ve actually been reading through it in the last few weeks (it’s been on my to do list for a long time) and have found it really helpful.
SEO experts tend to divide search engine optimization techniques into off site and on site techniques.
It's interesting to see that your recommended methods seem to have no positive effect on even the smallest SEO tactic: Pagerank.
Perhaps I would weigh in your opinions more if you had a page rank of even 2. (As far as I can see, you have a 0).
Yeah you are right. This is because its hardly a month since i created this blog so the google pagerank takes time to buildup info about you, nearly 3 months. Thank you for the comments.