How To Increase Blog Traffic

As a crew of basement brat, I have to contribute to this blog by writing a valuable post. But I was confuse, because no good ideas appeared in my head. I wanted to write about control engineering, my submajor in electrical engineering, but I didn’t have a good quality in it. I wanted to write about global financial crises, but it’s not my speciality, I am a electrical engineering student, not economics student. I wanted to write about policy, but I am not politician. So, as blogger I thougt it would be better if I write about blogging tips, how to increase our blog traffic. So more people will visit our blogs and what we written in the blogs will be read by more visitors. Like what I am doing for my “kampanye damai pemilu indonesia 2009 “blog. Before, forgive me if my english quality is not so good, not as good as older posts. But I hope you can understand reading this post, and this post doesn’t decrease basementbrat’s quality.

I am sure when someone creates a blog or site, he has purpose. Maybe with the blog he’ll appreciate his ideas. Or maybe he wants to monetizing the blog, get money from the site. Or maybe he uses his blog just for writing his activities or just for sharing what he feels. There are so many reasons and purposes in blogging or making sites, and everyone has different reasons. But whatever the purposes, I think people make a blog or site to be read by others. So, if we want our sites have many visitors and readers, we have to do some ways to increase visitors number, or increase the site traffic.

To check our site traffic, we can use site counter, so the visitors number can be known. We can also add live traffic widget like feedjit, so the visitors locations will be known.Or we can analyze in google analytics. If we want to check site traffic rank in the world, there are good site, alexa.com. This site gives ranks to all sites in the world by their traffic, or we can call it alexa rank. Please try to check your site in alexa.com, if your alexa rank still over one million, you have to do something to increase your rank.

There are many ways for increasing the site traffic. But I can’t mention them all, I just can write some ways, because I am newbie in this topic.

1. Tell people you have site

This is a manual way to promote your site. Just tell your friends if you have a blog or site, and tell them to open the blog and tell to other friends. You can do this by talk directly, sms, yahoo messenger, friendster, facebook, plurk, put the link in forum signature, join blog aggregators, and other medias. Don’t forget for always remembering them about your site. If your friends have blog too, tell them to add your site into their blogroll, or you can link exchange with them.

2. Optimizing your blog in search engine

This is an interesting way. You have to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Make your blog has good rank in search engine results page (SERP). I mean you should try optimizing your blog, so for some keywords, your blog can be in first page or second page in search engine. Why this so important? Because people will search anything in the internet by search engine like google. If your site has good rank in google results pages, people can easier find your blog. The detail about SEO will be written in later paragraphs.

3. Submit your blog in social bookmarking sites

Social bookmarking sites are contained list of sites have been submited there. They will appear your site too, so people who’re opening social bookmarking sites can find your blog. The famous social bookmarking sites are digg,delicious, technorati, furl, stumbleupon, google, yahoo, etc. please register your blog there and get the advantages. It’s free. If you have ever seen logos like these, these are social bookmarking sites logos.

4. Blogwalking and leave comment

Blogwalking means visiting other blogs from one blog to another blog. Blogwalking can helps you to increase traffic. But you have to leave your comment in post you have just read. To comment, fill the name, email and url form. From comments list, other bloggers can find your name then click your name that contained your blog url. If you often leave comments in many other blogs, you’ll be famous in blogging world.

5. Post Hot Topics

If there are events or news that are most being talked by people, try to write them in your blog. Or you can write a controversial topic, because this will invite the visitors. But I don’t suggest it. This has relation with SEO techniques. I prefer mention it, “keywords shooting” or in indonesian “nembak keyword”. The newest and hottest news will make people search them in search engine. If you can post the hot topic and google can indexes your post well, your blog has change to be found in google. And your traffic will increase. Example, today is american president voting, maybe people will search news about vote results in google. You can write something about that.

6. Promote in other ways

Five ways above are the main ways I can explain. If you have a lot of money, you can promote your blog by buying link in advertise sites, put your blog link there. You can also register in review sites as advertiser, and let other bloggers to review your sites in their blogs.

There are still many ways to increase traffic, but I can’t explain them all. Like what I’ve said above, I’ll write about search engine optimization or SEO. You have to make your blog easier to be found in search engine like google, yahoosearch, altavista, cuil, etc. Because google is the most used search engine, I’ll just talk about seo in google.

Google gives rank to the sites in it’s results pages with certain algorithm, and it has many factors. But there are some main factors used by google to shows the search results. The main factors are contents appropriate with keywords and pagerank.

These are some ways to optimizes your site in google:

1. Create Google Friendly Content

What google indexed in sites are contents. Content is relative, depend on every sites. Google will indexes your blog contents and show it in results page if the keyword appropriates with your content. The most important site content is site title. Use blog title do you like, but think, your title is friendly words or not. I suggest to use most typed keywords in google as blog title. Don’t use difficult title like “lsdifdfdijifsdsd” or “siwfdsiewasl” because none will search difficult words like that in google. But don’t use too many certain word repetations in a post if you don’t want google looks it as a word spam, your site can be threw in google sandbox. You must manage the words density in your post. If you want to do “nembak keyword”,trying to speculate what keywords people most typed in google, just use two or three in a post of keywords you want to be optimized, and hightlight them or use bold font in those key phrase. Someday I tried to shoot “film laskar pelangi” key phrase, and my blog www.gareng.net could be in first position in google.co.id for several days. This is the screenshot,

Ths time, I try to optimize “Kampanye Damai Pemilu Indonesia 2009” keyword. If you want to know what is the most typed keyword in google, you can use this tool. You can choose region and time range. And the long tail keyword also can be known. For last 30 days, the most typed keyword in indonesia is friendster. Maybe you can ‘nembak keyword’ with write about friendster.

2. Pagerank and backlink

Pagerank is important factor di google algorithm. Pagerank is rank from 0 to 10 given by google to every sites. My blog www.gareng.net was given pagerank 5 by google. It made me very happy, because not every bloggers are given PR5. The high pagerank and good content site must be has good result in google serp. For me, pagerank is still misterious thing. I don’t know certainly how google give pagerank to every sites. But I think my pagerank will increase if many incoming links come to my blog, many other sites link my blog. So, you have to search backlinks as many as possible. Google doesn’t see a blog by it’s traffic, but how many and who gives baclinks. So, don’t think if your blog has high traffic, it’s guaranted to be good result in google. There are many ways to get backlinks and increase pagerank.

• Tell your friends to put your link url into your friend’s blogroll.

• Make a dummy blog as many as possible, make your other blogs and put your link in your new blog. You should also make pingbacks among your dummy blogs, the most effective backlinks is three ways backlink. If you have blog A, B and C, let A to link B, B link C, and C link A.

• Submit your blog into blog directories like dmoz, dir.yahoo.com, topofblogs, topbloglist,etc.

• Submit your blog’s feed to feed directories. this blog feed is http://basementbrat.wordpress.com/feed

• Leave comments in dofollow blogs. Dofollow blog let you to get backlink if you leave comment and url. My blog www.gareng.net is dofollow. Deviantart blogs are dofollow too, they can be backlinks field. But default wordpress blog like my kampanye damai pemilu indonesia 2009 blog is not dofollow.

• Join web forums and put link in your signature

• Put link in the your facebook profile, friendster profile, twitter, plurk, and other social networking sites.

• Be member of blogger communities and submit your blog into their blog aggregators.

• Buy links if you have a lot of money

3. Submit your blog url in google

You can submit your url in google here. I don’t know this way effective or not, but I think nothing wrong with trying.

4. Submit your sitemap in google webmaster central

If you have self hosted wordpress blog like my blog www.gareng.net, or maybe you have your own blog, you should generate the sitemap and put the xml sitemap file into your blog root directory, then submit it in google webmaster central. This will very help google to crawl your blog. To generate the sitemap, for wordpress users can use google sitemap generator plugin. But for wordpress.com users, I am sorry you can’t use this fasility.

5. Optimize meta tag

You can add meta tag in your blog’s head, beetwen tag <head> and </head>. Use meta description to descript your blog. Write description in content.

<meta name=”description” content=”write your blog description here, about 25 words”>

And use meta keyword for keywords you want to be optimized. Separate keywords by comma. 10 words are enough.

<meta name=”keywords” content=”busby seo test, busby, seo, test, seo contest, busby seo challenge, worldcup, search engine optimization, google”>

But, this is also just for self hosted blog and blogspot.com, not for wordpress.com blog. If you use self hosted wordpress blog, you don’t need to do this, just try easy way with plugin all in one seo pack. If you want certain visitor location marketing target, you can use meta geo tag.

6. Permalink

Permalink is permanent link to our post pages. As example, this post has permalink http://basementbrat.wordpress.com/2008/11/06/how-to-increase-blog-traffic but if you want to your permalink more seo friendly, use the structure like this

http://basementbrat.wordpress.com/how-to-increase-blog-traffic.html

In self hosted wordpress blog, you can set the permalink like this /%postname%.html

But if your blog was hosted in wordpress.com, you can’t change it.

7. Internal link

Internal link is link in site itself. Try to make many links between your pages. This will help google easily find pages in your site. Minimize number of outbond links or minimize linking other blogs. The good blog is blog with number of inbound links (backlinks) more than outbond links.

8. Use SEO tools

There are so many tools for SEO and good seo website. You can find them in http://seo.alltop.com

9. Try jurus-jurus SEO

You can find post about seo tips and techniques here. These are tips from indonesian bloggers.

I think these are just some tips, there are still many other SEO techniques. I am just a newbie,I am trying to learn about seo by join a SEO contest named Busby SEO Test. In this SEO contest, participants should optimize their blog with key phrase Busby SEO Test to win $5000. Participants are given 4 months from 1 October 2008 until 31 January 2009. I have a website in http://umpcinfo.com/gladioolers, and now still in 4^th page in google. I need your support, I need many backlinks. I hope you would like to support me in this seo worldcup by put that link into your blogroll with anchor text Busby SEO Test. Thank you very much for your supports for indonesian team.

I think this is enough. I am sorry for wrong words and my bad english. Please leave your comments, suggestions or critics. I hope this post will give us advantages. Thanks….

-EEng-