So You Want More Traffic to Your Blog?

Blogging is not quite as easy as it seems. Getting traffic to you blog is critical and it involves a fair amount of work. There are a few key components that any blogger who is in it for the long run needs to consider aside of content and design both of which are critical to the success of your blog. Your personality as in you the author must be first and it must shine. Let your readers see both the good and the bad but especially with a personal blog if you are talking about the bad take the humorous approach. All the content and personality will not do you a lot of good if you don't get your blog indexed in the search engines!

Wednesday afternoon I got close and personal with search engine optimization (SEO) for my blogs. I found out a lot about SEO! First you need to add meta tags to your blogs. You can have excellent content but the search engines don't see your blog the way bloggers or your readers do. What the meta tags do is say hey here I am much like a beacon in the dark guiding the way. They guide search engines to your blog. Meta tags must be formatted properly and there are guidelines as far as properly formatting (here). I used a couple of online tools to help me with the SEO:

• Wordtracker - will help you find good key words for your meta tags
• Scrub the Web - a free meta tag analyzer and you can submit to 10 search engines
  

A few notes on using key words. Do not spam! No keyword should be used more than 3 times. If you do some search engines will ban blog. Don't use keywords that pertain to your blog! Sure you can add a lot of key words and I don't need to explain this but trust me the search engines don't like the bait and switch technique. They will ban your blog meaning you get no traffic from them. Don't use trademark protected words! That is a sure fire way to get banned from the largest search engine and you really don't want that. Constantly monitor your keywords! From time to time you will need to update your meta tags.

Be warned after you have added your meta tags and submitted to search engines it can take up to 10 weeks for your blog to be indexed. Do a search of free search engine submissions and continue submitting your blog. Do the same thing with directories but remember it will take time for your blog to be indexed. Just keep adding your blog every chance you get!

Ok, now with my meta tags in place and submitted to search engines there are a couple of ways to go. I chose to ping my blogs first. Pinging is another beacon that says here I am! If you don't regularly ping you are losing the prospect of gaining new traffic. I used Ping My Blog but there are other ping services out there. Essentially you should ping your blog after each update or at least once weekly. What a ping does is sends a message to critical blogging sources like directories and search engines to say I'm alive, well and still blogging. Regular pinging means more traffic to your blog!

Garden Gnome
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