Need More Visitors For Your Blog?

Need More Visitors For Your Blog?

Lots of people use blogs to make business connections, get work, or make extra money. A recent CNN article even encourages client-seeking freelancers and other professionals to blog. As many seasoned bloggers already know, getting the blog set up is only half the battle. You have to have interesting topics, maintaining a blog takes up a certain amount of time, and you have to get visitors.

This is where the field of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques can help you. Most SEO customers are B2B or B2C companies that make money selling products or services online. Based on the competitive nature of e-commerce and lead generation efforts, SEO for these companies can be expensive and time consuming. For the solitary business professional, however, several small scale SEO practices can be undertaken which may get you enough traffic to your site (or blog) to keep the money coming in.

Here are some hints for getting more visitors to your blog with SEO techniques.

  1. Think Local. Most business professionals and freelancers will be working out of a certain geographical area. If you’re using your local city name in your blog posts, you are going to get classified in search engines for those phrases. If you leave out regional terms, you are effectively competing with everyone in the world who does what you do.

  2. Become a subject matter expert. If you practice a specific field of copyright law, or do marketing consulting for beverage companies, you definitely want to talk about those topics in your blog. If there are aspects of your work that are common to many customers, blogging about it will get you visitors who have the same issues.

  3. Find out what people are looking for. The Google Keyword tool can help you find blog topics related to your profession. Even if there are only a few hundred searches a month for your trade, one click can create thousands of dollars in new business, depending on your field.

  4. Build keywords into your titles. Most blog platforms like Blogger and Wordpress will show your blog title as the title of your posting page. Titles are very important in the world of SEO, and can be the difference between getting found on the first page of Google. Over 80% of searchers don’t even bother to get to the next page of results, so good titles are important.

  5. Get other people to link to your site. Search engines like Google value links from other sites as endorsements. You can start by getting links from fellow bloggers, but if you can get links from news sources you will be considered more credible.

  6. Use social media. For every new blog post, you can submit yourself to social media outlets like Digg. Sometimes the summary of your post on Digg will hit the search engines in a few hours, even if your own site doesn’t get ranked. You can use Twitter to let your followers know that you’ve done another post, and Facebook to link to it as well.

  7. If all else fails, buy paid traffic. Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN Adcenter (for Bing) all sell sponsored search packages, and there is no minimum spend per day. If you’re a freelancer with a niche service, your ad may show up among a small group of other ads, which is cheaper than being found for high demand terms.

There are also plenty of SEO tools you can use to find out where you rank in the search engines. As a word of warning, it can take several months to get your blog into competitive positions in the search engines, so getting started right away is generally the best course of action. As you develop you blog, you will be able to master techniques that can “ping” other networks every time you post, but the real key to getting found involves having plenty of fresh material. As you build an audience for your subject matter, you may find that word-of-mouth referrals take over for your SEO, but having a good groundwork will get you out in front of the free traffic that is looking for your unique abilities.

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