Web Traffic Generation
You've labored over your web page SEO best practices and followed expert guidelines for traffic generation techniques and you're still not seeing much improvement in your site visitor numbers. Attracting more visitors to your websites and blogs involves more than just great content and attractive webpage design. Here, I will explore how to generate traffic to your websites with methods that have proven effective for entertaining and informing your audience in ways that will help to capture interest with increasing numbers and keep your audience coming back for more.
Not only do we need quality, informative and engaging content for our business or personal blog sites but we also need to extend our blog site content effectiveness and reader reach through search engine optimization techniques that will help to ensure that our blogs are highly visible with best possible search results page positioning.
Here, I will explore various elements essential to any blog (or website) that must become a living, breathing entity as part of your site optimization focus in order to boost web traffic generation for your blog or website. Following are essential optimization tips for your blog that will help generate consistent traffic flow and reader engagement as well as stimulating interactive reader connection through comments and critical blog site sharing which is imperative to blog site growth and unique visitor traffic generation.
Infographics
One of the most engaging methods of capturing reader interest and engagement is through the use of blog infographics; informative graphic information that helps to support and enhance blog or article presentation and again, will increase reader sharing of the post to their own online presence i.e. social media and professional networking pages, link backs to their own blog or website and beyond.
Critical here is that you make sure your infographic is highly relevant to your article or blog post. Search online to find free and premium infographic creator tools to suit your needs and budget.
Keywords
Effective use of keywords includes advance research to develop a set of keywords that are proven through actual analytics data to be the most used keywords in searches for the category or seed keywords you are utilizing in your content. One of the most prevalent keyword planner tools is Google Adwords Keyword Planner Tool which provides a host of search parameters to help you narrow your search for best keywords relevant to your blog topics.
A search of keyword planner tools will bring up numerous tools to choose from. Ensure that the application of your keywords/keyword phrases for headlines and body content are organic or read back as though naturally placed as part of a headline or sentence wording. Never just plug in keywords randomly where they don't fit naturally as the search engines view such practices as spamming or keyword stuffing.
Newsletters
Subscribers to email newsletters has become a powerful marketing tool for capturing visitor email addresses, in a consentual way, and used for regular newsletter emailing purposes to engage your readers/clients in current topics of relevance/interest, special offer notifications and much more.
Newsletters are a convenient opt-in way for blog or website visitors to engage in your content through the convenience of automatic delivery of the newsletter directly to their chosen email address. Newsletters are also an effective way to develop a relationship with your subscribers for increased sharing of your content and potential sales conversion. The newsletter is a direct connection to your blog for leveraged/increased web traffic and back linking to your blog.
Content Curation
Content curation has become an effective way to add highly relevant, engaging content to your blog site in support of your business product or services offered while at the same time helping to establish you as an authority on the subject matter. I use this method often for external linking to the most relevant authority sites to my blog post topics.
This linking approach to external authority sites helps to aggregate back linking from those sites where hosted by industry leaders. The increased exposure to your own blog or website is a tremendous value to yourself as a blog or website owner/administrator. Here again, that mutual linking process helps to build relationships with those authorities in your industry. Mutual linking should only occur organically and never arranged simultaneously.
Be sure to connect with those industry leaders directly through highly relevant commenting on their site, messaging and sharing their site with others. This activity is an essential best practice for building your brand which in turn increases your blog or website traffic.
Blogging Strategy
Simply put, do what works! Monitor your blog site analytics information to find out which blog posts have had the best subscriber/visitor engagement and from that success you can develop new blog post ideas to build on that engagement even further. Another good blog post strategy is to periodically enhance an existing successful blog post with additional information.
Determining which blog posts work best for your own reading audience takes some time. Watch statistics for each post in the hours, days and weeks that follow and where a particular post falls short of typical experience, go back to find ways to enhance those weaker performers as well. Add highly relevant, immediately usable information to your blogs and people will want to share that blog post with others.
Engagement Through Hot Topic Response
Another great way to connect with other industry authorities is to run relevant searches with effective keywords in your search terms and on the search engine results page to your search query; look for the area which offers related/trending search terms. This is an excellent way to curate for future blog post topics, connect and engage with industry authorities and boost the overall effectiveness of your blog posts by providing the best possible resources to your readers through that highly relevant external linking.
Link Building
Natural link building is an important method of alerting search engines not only about the subject matter of your blog or website but also an indication of the level of your blog site authority and relevance through effective linking practices. HubSpot has excellent newsletters and on-page resources and information on this subject. Writing 'organic' website content that reads back naturally is essential to attracting external back links and for web traffic generation.
By definition, 'link building' is the creation of a hyperlink (link to an external site URL) between one blog or website and another which creates the potential for directing traffic between the two so-linked sites. When back linking by an authority site to your own blog or website you will also benefit from increased search visibility...Google, among other search engines, love to see quality, organic linking of this nature. The benefits of other sites linking back to your own cannot be understated nor the critical importance and emphasis placed on this practice by leading search engines.
Link Building & Search Engine Optimization: Linking has become the backbone of Google Search. Site and page ranking will only be enhanced through effective implementation of link building. Be sure to develop link building practices that are highly relevant to users in relation to your own blog/article posts and as such your readers are far more likely to want to share that link with their own clients, colleagues, friends and family.
Good Links: Links back to your blog site from another authority site which has highly relevant linking of its own is very important. Linking to sites which do not contain quality linking of their own will serve no meaningful purpose and could be perceived as a poor linking practice on your part. The days of requesting mutual back linking are over. Avoid that kind of manipulative link building strategy completely. It is essentially an artificially forced linking practice that is meaningless to search engines and you can be severely penalized for doing so today.
Free Downloads
The offer of free downloads such as informative eBooks, guidelines and more that educate your audience in a practical way with immediate application, only serves to build your brand awareness. By embedding your blog/website URL links in the download content you will help increase traffic back to your blog or website.
Blog Post Frequency
Here is a critical aspect of blog traffic generation; statistics indicate that the more consistent you are about the timing/frequency of blog posting, the greater your reader engagement will be. People are creatures of habit by nature and your readers will watch for your posts when they expect to see them. Do whatever possible to be consistent with the number of times per week you post your blogs and even the days that you post on. Erratic posting habits will frustrate your subscribers to the point of becoming disengaged/opting out.
I am among those guilty of intermittent blog posting...guilty as charged! I need to schedule my blog posts and commit to staying on track with that schedule.
Create Quality Resources:
As a product or service provider, offering your site visitors relevant resources through the provision of links to other industry sites is of tremendous value to your customers/clients. Invite guest writers/speakers to your site for added value to your subscribers. Share valuable and informative content mutually and connections on the internet are forged through that relevance between content and linking.
Authority blog and website owners/administrators should not shy away from providing their visitors and subscribers with highly relevant industry links. You may not have exactly what a visitor is seeking today but you have become a resource authority for that visitor and they will likely return to your own site and/or refer it to others as a valuable resource to their own advantage.
photo c/o Bing Search