Generate Traffic, Leads and Sales With Video
After you’ver installed your WordPress Blog you will notice all URLS contain “id” in them. This means they are not search engine friendly…search engines have a difficult time spidering this type of URL therefore you will lose traffic.
You need to optimize your blog by converting your long URLS to ones that include the title of your post.
If you want to attract visitors to your blog you need to market it on a continous basis. You won’t see any increase in web traffic if you just throw up a blog on the Web and expect it to get traffic immediately. Create a simple marketing plan first using the methods below, then stick to it.
Here are the top 12 ways to market your blog:
1. Add fresh content
You’ve probably heard the phrase “content is king.” This is because content is what the web consists of. Search engines
primarily spider content on web pages and information is what people search for. I try to add content to my blog at least 3 times a week to keep visitors and search engines happy.
2. Research keywords
If you have a business blog that has AdSense Ads or Affiliate Programs on it be sure to research your best keywords first
then integrate them into your content. You won’t attract search engines or visitors if you write on topics people are not
interested in (ie you only receive a small number of searches for that term). I use SEARCH IT for all my keyword research. It’s a free SEO tool that not only provides you with targeted keywords, but also shows what competing sites are doing to get good rankings.
3. Placement of keywords
Include your keywords in the meta tags (title and description tags) and within your content. Your title is the most important tag because visitors will read this first before your main content. The title also appears at the top of your visitors’ browsers.
4. Create an attractive headline
Write a catchy headline for each post. For example the headline of this post explains what you are writing about (Top 12 ways to
market your blog) and what benefit you receive (Increase web traffic). The headline needs to pull the reader into the content.
The other points are discussed in my next post……
Blogs are meant to make it easy to find information however I find them still somewhat awkward to navigate sometimes. I will search through the recent posts, categories, archives and finally enter my keyword in the search box (maybe I should have
done this first) before I find the specific topic. Some blogs have posts that are not even related to the blog’s title.
Adding a Site Map to your blog makes it incredibly easy for any visitor to quickly scan all the categories and posts of your blog. All the information from your blog can be neatly arranged in a vertical order down your site map page. Your posts are automatically placed under their appropriate categories.
You can see it in action by visiting my site map page
Many site owners make the mistake of duplicating their site’s home page. They will have the same content for http://www.url.com, http://url.com, and http://www.url.com/index.html. This will result in lost link value and therefore damage the rankings of the site’s homepage. For example you may have your internal links pointing to http://www.url.com but outside sites may be linking to http://url.com. Therefore you will be diluting the effectiveness of your site.
If you find many links outside the site pointing to both the non-www and the www version, it may be wise to use a 301 re-write rule so all pages will be redirected to the same url.
How to include the 301 re-write rule in your web site
WordPress has a built-in feature which allows you to automatically ping all the RSS and blog feed directories every time you make a post. This is a very powerful feature if you want your blog to get a lot of web traffic immediately. You automatically gain backlinks to your blog.
What are pingbacks?
If you have started a new blog or had one running for some
time, you may have noticed you’re receiving comment spam.
Before I put a stop to it, I was getting medical product
and gambling offers which have absolutely no relevance to
my web design blog.
Spammers notice new blogs via back links to wordpress.org
and once you’re noticed they will always be able to spam
you. You may soon end up with 100s of spam comments. This
not only clutters up your blog but will also eat up your
hosting space and bandwidth and therefore cost you more
money to run your blog.
How to prevent blog comment spam
If you ever had to add AdSense Ads to a static (not
database driven) web site, you know it requires a number of
steps ie
-Download the web page from the server to your computer.
-Copy and paste the AdSense code into your page.
-Save the the page and upload it to your server. Word Press
makes it very easy because you can use the
Features and Benefits
7. How To Create a Google Site Map
Adding a Google Site Map to your blog helps the Google Search Engine to spider all your pages on a regular basis.
Your Word Press Template does not generate a Google Site Map automatically, therefore you need the Google Site Map Plug-in.
This plug-in generates a sitemap for the homepage, posts, static pages, categories and archive pages. It provides a static XML file in your Blog directory. This XML file gets automatically rebuilt every time you change, edit, create, or publish a post.
Installation
Simply download the Zip-Archive and extract all files into your wp-content/plugins/ directory. Then go into your WordPress administration page, click on Plugins and activate it. After that you will have a new menu point called “Sitemap” under the “Options” menu. You can alter the default change frequencies, filename and other options there. Click once on “Rebuild Sitemap” to create your sitemap the first time.
TIP
Create a normal Site Map Page as well and organize your posts into their appropriate categories. Thiis will help visitors to quickly find topics of interest. More navigation tools on your site helps the visitor to find information quickly. Now they have at their disposal: Site Map, Search Bar, Category Lists, and RSS Feeds.
Resource
Read more about Google Site Map
6. How To Customize Your Permalinks
Permalinks are permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink should be a link that does not change in its appearance because other bloggers may link to your post or your article.
The default links that come with your Word Press theme will end in something like this:
/index.php?p=423
This kind of link is not easily spidered by the search engines therefore you will lose precious search engine traffic. You therefore need to customize your permalinks. Here is one of my articles which shows the keyword-rich title I used:
http://www.drostdesigns.com/blog-seo-how-to-optimize-your-blog-for-the-search-engines/
How to create a customized permalink
Creating and customizing your blog does not guarantee you will get web traffic. You need to optimize your blog for the search engines to maximize the potential it has to make sales, boost AdSense earnings or gain subscribers to your newsletter.
Methods to Optimize Your Blog.
I use Word Press as my blogging software so not all these methods may not apply if you use other software.
1. Keyword Research.
Before you start writing you should choose keywords that people are actively searching on. You can do this by inserting words into the keyword selector tool
If the words that you enter don’t display any results this means that no one uses those words when searching for that topic
and therefore it would be useless to have them on your blog. A high number of searches indicates that word or phrase is very popular.
2. Insert researched keywords.
