Blogs are a new and powerful content-delivery platform. A blog’s biggest concern to keeping traffic is content. By keeping fresh and relative content that is most suited to your general audience you will find your blog gaining success. A way to know if your content is of interest to your users there are many traffic analysis tools available. Blogs are great for creating discussion, such as debates or comments. By following the simple practices below you can ensure your blog receives as much traffic possible.
1. Write Regularly on a Focused Topic
Define your topic, stick with it and its ok to have sub-topics but don’t get too side-tracked.
2. Link Often, and Link to Other Blog Posts to Generate Trackbacks
Fairly self-explainatory, the more you link the more people trust you as a good source of information, you may loose your user for a bit to explore other sites, however they will most likely come back to you.
3. Create Your Own Blog Template
Want to be taken seriously? Forget default templates for the look and feel of your blog, create your own. This gives you the opportunity to build an identity and to make your blog more search engine friendly.
4. Put Keywords in Your Post Titles
Make sure all your titles have prominent and relative keywords placed in them.
This will help search engines find your blog and communicate better with your users.
5. Archive by Topics
Most blogging systems will keep an archive for you. Do not organize your archive by date, users do not care when the post was made but what the content was, archive your posts with a search using keywords.
6. Summarize Posts to Direct Traffic Better
Direct your traffic better by supplying short summaries along with a prominent headline so that users can decide if its worth their time to continue reading.
7. Add a Popular Posts Section
Don’t let your best posts get buried in the archives, keep them available to users, if they were popular they were obviously good and useful to the viewers.
8. Add a Recent Posts Section
This is mostly specific to repeat visitors, make it obvious so that they can see what you have that’s new.
9. Tell People Who You Are and What your Blog is About
Adding a short introduction is a great way to let your user know who you are and what type of information they may get from you. It also allows the user to trust the blog owner more creating a deeper connection.
10. Promote Your RSS Feed
Feed your users information using an RSS Feed, turn visitors into subscribers. Place your RSS Feed icons on an obvious part of the page.
11. Cross Link to Circulate Traffic
Instead of linking just to other external websites link within you blog to old posts, or other content areas of your site.
12. Encourage Users to Share Your Content with Others
Many bloggers end their post with links to social networking sites such as Delicious, Digg, or Magnolia. Some blogging systems will install this for you. The places your site is shared the more users will view it.
13. Direct Users to Related Posts
This is a great method to keep users on your blog longer. When a user is done reading part of a post you can suggest related reading, it may make a user realize that there was more to your blog than they first thought, causing a possible revisit in the future.
14 About Duplicate Content Indexing
A common misconception is that search engines penalize the page rankings of sites that publish duplicate content. However it is almost impossible to not duplicate some information on your blog and unless done dishonestly is of no major concern.
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