Are you trying the increase the popularity of your blog, but you have already tried all of the conventional methods? MyBlogLog is a great service that you can use to increase your traffic.
Here’s how in 3 simple steps:
- Create a profile that contains your information as well as your blog’s information. You want to be as detailed as possible and make sure you fill in your contact information because you want to welcome an open channel for communication.
- Next, you want to search MyBlogLog for competitor blogs or other blogs that may have your ideal reader base. Once you find a good amount of them create a list for your own record.
- Once you have a list of blogs that may contain your ideal readers then you want friend MyBlogLog users that are subscribed to those blogs and could also potentially benefit from your blog. The key to this is not the spam those users, but instead just friend them because a good portion of them will friend you back and visit your blog which should increase your traffic and readership.
Leveraging social communities can be an easy and effective way to increase your traffic and readership. Just be careful when leveraging them because the last thing you want is for people to accuse you of spamming.
Loren Baker from Search Engine Journal has been doing a SEO site clinic which has been helping website owners increase their traffic, rankings and links. Because of this I decided to do a short interview with him:
What is Search Engine Journal’s benefit from doing a SEO site clinic?
Search Engine Journal benefits by helping the SEO community and companies which are starting their initial SEO by total transparency. We are working together, with our co-authors and guest contributors as a team to offer SEO advice to not only the sites which we have accepted into the SEO Clinic project but also the readers of our column who are working on their SEO. For example, when doing an SEO Clinic for a WordPress powered blog, our goal is that numerous WordPress bloggers will benefit from our SEO recommendations.
Our Resident SEO Pimps benefit via expanded recognition of their expertise and services to the SEO community. I think that it would be easy to charge anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000 in consulting fees for such SEO oriented information and recommendation, but our ultimate mission is to help smaller sites and charities which cannot afford such SEO consultancy fees. In essence, such transparency should benefit the SEO and search marketing community as a whole.
How popular are your SEO clinics? Are they heavily linked to?
These posts have become quite popular throughout the SEO industry and the searchosphere. Many blogs and informational sites have linked to our SEO Clinic pieces, and our hope is that for each Clinic we provide, more sites which fall into the categories of our Clinic "patients" and link to the recommendations.
Do you have any recommendations for bloggers or website owners who looking to increase their links?
In each SEO Clinic, to date, we have discussed ideas for sites, such as TechSmith.com and BigOceans.com to attract links. In essence, the SEO Clinic will attract links to our patients from SEO blogs which cover the free SEO Clinic advice, but in each clinic we provide recommendations to improve links via building relationships with blogs in the niche categories our patients appeal to, and via social media marketing via Digg.com, StumbleUpon and other major traffic and inherent link building avenues.
I am currently attending the Elite Retreat San Fransisco conference where Shoemoney, Aaron Wall, Lee Dodd, Darren Rowse, Kris Jones and I spoke about online marketing. I know many of you wanted to attend and could not make it, so Kris Jones blogged about the whole event. Make sure you check it out!
There are many ways to increase a sites ranking such as purchasing text links, but it seems that people are forgetting the basics. Before you purchase text links I would make sure you have optimized your website for the search engines. Here are the most common mistakes that I see:
- Meta Description – Although meta tags don’t seem important you would be surprised at how much a unique meta description tag on each page of a website can do to your rankings. You can try stuffing them with keywords to see if it helps, but I recommend tailoring each description to accurately represent the content on each page.
- Sitemap – You want to make sure that your web pages are getting indexed by the search engines. If your content does not get indexed how do you expect the search engines to rank it? Using a simple sitemap structure can work well for you if you have a small to medium sized website.
- Robots.txt – Most people think that the more pages you have indexed, the more traffic you will receive. In many cases this is not true; by removing duplicate content from the search engines you can actually increase your traffic.
- URL strings – A lot of people use content management systems which make their URLs look all funny with extraneous characters. Clean up your URLs, the difference is like night and day.
- Code – By using clean and compliant code you can keep your website search engine friendly. You can use basic code elements such as headings or alt tags to help improve your rankings.
There is nothing wrong with purchasing text links, but before you do, I recommend you cover the basics. If you do not do the basics then you will not be getting the most from the text links you purchase.
Michael Gray from Wolf Howl had an interesting post about what time of day do you post to your blog. One thing that I like to keep in mind when posting is that readers probably have hundreds of options in their feed reader, but the amount of blog posts in their reader decreases over weekends drastically. So if you start posting on the weekends, there is a good chance that you will start gaining new readers because when they can’t find anything else that’s interesting to read they will at least be able to read your blog post.
Keep your posting schedule the same for a few weeks but also start posting on the weekends. Do this for a month and you should see good growth from it.
Are you doing poorly in the search engines? Loren Baker and his crew from Search Engine Journal are doing a weekly site clinic where they give one lucky winner free SEO advice.
A few days ago I wrote How to Build Trusted Links, which caused a few people to email me about purchasing .edu links. There are a lot of companies that sell .edu links, but most of the links will be on student blogs and not the actual university website. Although this can still build trust, search engines are quite complex and can probably tell the difference between .edu links from student blogs and links from the actual university website. So before you purchase links from .edu sites make sure you know what pages they are going to be placed on because ones from the actual university site will probably create more trust.
Links, links and links! That’s what everyone is looking for so that they can increase their search engine rankings and traffic. Some people increase their links by purchasing them or even linkbaiting, but why not through widgets?
Widgets have been a hot topic for the last few months because they are a great source of links. Just think about all the blogs that use a flickr widget to show off their pictures. With over 1 million backward links according to Google it shows that widgets have been really effective for flickr.
If you want to increase your backward links through widgets
you have a few options:
- You can create widgets for your website and distribute them. For example, Problogger lets readers put his content on their site through a simple widget.
- Create widgets for popular services such as YouTube, Digg and flickr and distribute them through your website. This can be very effective because these services have large user bases who would love to use your widget. All you have to do is embed a link to your site within every widget.
Do you know of any other unique ways to increase your link popularity?
Joe Whyte recently wrote a blog post about Google filters and how you can get around them as well as exploit them. It seems it has been creating a lot of controversy because of the point he discusses.
What do you think?
