Traffic Generation part 3

 

This is the final lesson in this part of the mini course where I will show you 9 amazing tips to help you get zero-cost traffic from search
engines.

It was going to be 11 tips, but I’ve combined some of them together to make the whole process a little more streamlined.

But before you sink your teeth into today’s lesson, let’s quickly recap what you learned inside the previous lesson…

First, I went over five quick and dirty tips for creating multiple streams of traffic to your blog which included things like:

- Writing comments on other people’s blogs…

- Getting active inside forums related to your niche and submitting useful posts there…

- Making use of EzineArticles.com and submitting regular articles there…

- Creating regular guest posts on other blogs…

- Making extensive use of offline media to help spread the word about your blog

These five strategies are the ones that will help you get quick trickles of traffic over the short term, and over the long term, will help you
generate a steady stream of no-cost traffic.

And then I went over four powerful tips for attracting floods of fresh new traffic to your blog, which included:

- Creating a complimentary resource and building your list…

- Making extensive use of online video…

- Getting into social media in a big way…

- And doing regular audio and video podcasts…

These four strategies normally take longer to get going, but once you implement them, they can provide you with a small explosion of traffic – which is always a nice thing.

So, now that you know all those strategies and you are starting to implement them, the next thing is to make sure that everything you do online is optimized for search engines like Google and Yahoo.

Remember, that over the long run, the search engines can provide you with a large percentage of your regular traffic.

And what’s great about traffic from the search engines, is that they won’t cost you a cent!

In other words, instead of paying for things like Google Adwords to get your site advertised on Google’s pages, if you follow the steps I teach you today and you implement all the other contentand traffic generation tips, you’ll be in a much better position to start ranking on Google’s website (and other search engines) for no cost at all.

Ok, let’s dig into it…

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Tip 1: Benchmark your blog with other popular sites
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Benchmarking your site with other popular sites is one of the easiest ways of optimizing your blog for search engines.

What is benchmarking?

Simple… all you do, is have a look at the keywords and content that other popular websites in your niche are using, and then you use those same ones and add your own keywords and content to the mix.

For example, say you have a new blog in the magic niche. You could quickly do a Google search of the keywords that you want to rank for – eg "magic tricks".

[The more specific you can make your keyword search terms, the easier it will be for you to compete for those same keywords. For example, competing for the keywords "fat loss" in the overweight niche would be very difficult. But if you use something like "fat loss for pregnant woman" as your keywords, your chance of doing well compared to the other sites will be greatly increased.]

Ok, back to the magic example…

By looking at the websites that come up on the first page of Google, you can get a pretty good idea about the keywords they are using on their site and also the kind of content that they are using.

You can then make a list of all those keywords and add them to your existing list of keywords that you want to use on your own blog.

There are a number of other things you can do as well to benchmark your site, but this will already help you for finding the right kind of keywords to use in your blog posts and pages.

Next up are what are called "internal" SEO strategies, and they involve smaller, but effective things you can do to help optimize your
blog content…

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Tip 2: Use Targeted Keywords In Your Titles And Headlines
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This one is pretty straight forward…

Whenever you create a new post or page, always make sure you add your targeted keywords inside the headlines/titles.

And for even better results you can add your keywords right at the front of the headlines/titles of your blog posts.

This will help because Google and other search engines give preference to keywords at the beginning of your headlines/titles.

This is easy and simple to do, and it will help you improve the chances of ranking for your selected keywords by leaps and bounds.

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Tip 3: Use H2 Tags
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The H2 Tag is really just a fancy name for a type of heading that you can use inside your blog postsand pages.

It’s like a sub-heading really, but Google and other search engines gives it a similar "priority" as your headlines/titles when looking at your blog content.

So, instead of just making sub headings bold in your blog posts, consider turning them into proper "H2" headings.

You can do this by selecting one of the paragraph options inside your WordPress Admin area when creating or editing a post.

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Tip 4: Use Related Keyword Tags
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Next up is using related keywords as the tags for your blog posts.

Tags are a mechanism that WordPress uses to help organize your content and to help people find your posts when searching for it on your blog.

But another benefit of using tags is that Google also apparently gives preference to tags when crawling your site. (I say "apparently" because no one outside of Google really knows the exact rules of their algorithms).

You can use the same keywords that you use inside your blog headlines/titles, but you will cover an even wider audience if you use other related keywords. In other words, keywords that you have not used inside your post or headline/title yet, but that still relate to your content.

For example, if you write a post about Michael Jackson, and you have not used the term "pop music" anywhere inside your post, that would be an excellent related keyword as a tag.

You can add tags inside your WordPress admin area when creating or editing posts or pages.

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Tip 5: Install SEO Plugins
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If you don’t have an optimized blog theme installed, like the Thesis Theme, it’s a good idea to install two more plugins that will help you
optimize your blog for search engines.

The first one is the SEO Title Tag Plugin, which essentially optimizes your blog title’s for search engines – instead of your blog name appearing first inside your blog titles, the SEO Title Tag plugin will modify the code of your theme so that your blog post titles appear first, with your blog name after it.

Remember, Google gives preference to whatever keywords you use at the front of your blog post titles. So by moving your blog name to the back of your blog titles automatically, this automatically optimizes your blog post titles.

You can get a copy of the SEO Title Tag Plugin here:

http://www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin/

The second plugin you can install is the XML Sitemap Generator plugin.

It basically creates an easily readable "XML sitemap" for your blog so that Google can easily crawl it and list you in their directory.

Don’t worry if this sounds too technical or complicated – just know that it’s great plugin to help make it easy for Google to find all the pagesand posts on your blog.

You can find the XML Sitemap Generator Plugin here:

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

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Tip 6: Link To Other Posts And Pages In Your Blog
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This is another sneaky little tip that makes sense once you understand how Google looks at your website.

Basically, Google views each of the posts and pages on your blog as a separate entity. And because of this, it creates a separate "page rank" for each of your posts and pages by treating them in isolation.

That’s why sometimes, when you look at some blogs, their home page could have a page rank of 6, but then their About page may only have a page rank of 2 or 3.

So, knowing this bit of information, you can use it to your advantage by creating links to and from your posts and pages.

When you do this, and Google crawls a specific post on your site, and you happen to link back to another post, Google will follow along that linkand pass on some "page rank juice".

I’m just using simple terms here to try and explain this in the most simple way. So, if you don’t quite fully understand all of this, don’t
worry about it too much.

But just make sure your regularly link back to other posts and pages when you create new content.

For example, say you create a new post, and while you’re creating it, you remember that you talked about a related topic on a previous post. You can then simply link back to that previous post and that will do the job.

And that’s all there really is to it.

If you do this, it will help the Google bot understand how content in your blog relate to each other, and as a result provide you with better
overall rankings.

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7: Just Write Naturally
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Google LOVES relevant content!

In other words, when you do a search for something like "beach gear", the last thing you want to find popping up as the #1 search result is a website about an unrelated topic such as "marine life".

What some people do, is to "stuff" their pages with a whole bunch of keywords "unnaturally" in the hope that Google and other search engines will pick up on it and start ranking their pages.

But the algorithms employed by these search engines are pretty clever, and nowadays can tell if you’re just stuffing your pages with a bunch of keywords.

Think about it…

It’s absolutely critical that Google always delivers RELEVANT content to their users.

And the best way that you can guarantee this relevant kind of content, is to simply engage in creating natural content.

In other words, don’t worry about stuffing your posts with a bunch of keywords to try and please the search engines.

Just write as you normally would, and then as a result, your content will contain all the related keywords you need for ranking with Google and other search engines.

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Tip 8: Get High Quality Incoming Links To Your Blog
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One of the best ways of creating a search engine optimized blog is to make sure you get as many as possible high quality websites linking back to your blog.

For example, say your blog is in the soft drinks niche. If you can somehow get Coca Cola (which would be a very popular website with high page rank) to link to your blog, that would give you instant "credibility" with Google.

Obviously though, it’s not always easy to get other popular websites and blogs to link back to your own, but over time, if you consistently
deliver value on your blog and become involved in your community, people will naturally start linking back to your blog.

Of course, if you really want to, you can take on a more active role, and actively seek other popular websites and blogs to link back to yours.

One great strategy for this is to create guest posts for other popular blogs and then to link back to your own blog at the end – you don’t want to make it too obvious

Over time, if other blogs keep on linking back to you, your own blog will appear more "relevant" to Google, and as a result, your rankings inside Google searches will start rising.

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Tip 9: Aim For The Long Tail
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In the ever increasing competitive online world, it has become very hard to rank for certain popular keywords in popular niches.

But that does not mean you cannot get ranked for other keywords, known as "long tail keywords" in those same niches.

What’s a "long tail keyword" you ask?

The concept of the long tail was first coined by Chris Anderson who wrote an article inside Wired Magazine, which eventually lead him to publish a book called "The Long Tail".

In the context of keywords on the internet, the long tail refers to those kind of keywords phrases that are not considered "main stream" keywords phrases.

For example, "fat loss" would not be considered a long tail keyword phrase. But "fat loss for pregnant mothers" is a long tail keyword phrase.

Do you see the difference? The long tail keyword phrases are A LOT more specific and targeted than the more popular phrases.

What this means is that you will rank much easier for these long tail keyword phrases. The only catch is that they wont get as much traffic as the more popular keyword phrases.

But over the long run, if you keep on creating new posts for your blog, targeting long tail keyword phrases, that would amount to a very nice and steady stream of traffic back to your blog.

For more information on the long tail, please visit the following page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail

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And that brings us to the end of today’s lessonand also the end of the lessons on traffic generation. You’ve now been given some of the most powerful techniques for driving traffic back to your blog.

All you have to do now, is start implementing what you’ve learned, to be persistent and also to be patient.

Any successful blog takes time and effort to develop, but what it allows you to do, is create the base for a very sustainable and long term successful business.

Inside the next part of this mini course, I will finally reveal what you’ve been waiting for all along – how to create multiple streams of income from your blog!

Until then…

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