In a previous publication, I discussed 7 ways you can increase your blog traffic growth without technical SEO activities involved. That post addresses a section of my audience who are either not skilled in technical SEO tasks or those frustrated with the low volume of search engine traffic to their blog.
In today’s post, and for those ready to take on the challenge, let’s look at how you can increase organic SEO traffic to a new blog with proven SEO tactics that will greatly influence your search engine ranking.
If you’re still in doubt whether your business needs to care about organic search engines traffic, here are some stats that might come shocking to you and make you rethink about your decision.
With 93% of online experiences begin with a search query, and 70% of links users clicks on the search result pages are from the organic result, you should definitely consider your traffic growth marketing strategies to involved tactics that will influence Google organic SEO traffic.
According to another study, search engine is the #1 source of traffic to content websites, 300% more than social media sites. And that SEO leads have 14.6% close rate than other display advertising channels with 1.7% close rate.
That make sense to you? Let’s move on!
In order to attract targeted audience using SEO to drive traffic to your blog, there are certain things you might want to look into first. These small things will serve as the foundation that your subsequent SEO techniques will leverage to maximize your search engine ranking opportunity.
#1. Build a Focus Blog.
On WordPress alone, there are about 76.5 million blogs already in existent with about 50,000 more being created daily as you’re reading this line. How many blogs do you think are live on the internet already?
Maybe some 300,000,000? or even more…….
If you want to give your blog a chance to get noticed, stand out and build a tribe of audience – build a blog focus on a specific topic.
In the past, when there were about 12 million blogs on the internet, is easy to start a blog that talks about many topics under the sun and builds large followings around the blog.
Fast forward to today, the better and easier approach is to start a blog that is specific and address just one issue. Narrow down on your audience selection and create contents that are super targeted to that audience.
Here is an example of what am trying to pass across.
Instead of starting a blog on health related diseases that publish content on various kinds of health issues, you can narrow down on your audience selection by targeting type 1 diabetics patients only or let say HIV-infected patient only.
This will help you in attracting the right audience to your contents quickly, easier and makes the process of content creation easier to come by.
Getting the right links to your content won’t be a difficult task too, and it helps tell Google clearly what your blog topic is strictly all about which help your search index greatly. Besides, if you get things right, this approach can elevate a blog to an authority status in that topic quickly.
#2. Setup an SEO Friendly Blog.
Now that you’ve narrowed down on your audience, is time to ensure your blog is search engine friendly.
Bias not intended, if you’re going to maximize your chances of driving organic search traffic to your website, then build your blog with the world most popular content management system – WordPress.
WordPress now powers over 25% of total blogs online, 30.3% of world most popular 1000 sites. According to Matts Cutts, former Google’s head of spam team, 80 – 90% of Google crawling issues is already been taking care of by your WordPress installation software.
That’s a huge advantage!
Considering the fact that using content management system is not common with top industry blogs/websites, WordPress really has something to brag about.
The chart below considers both self-hosted and wordpress.com market share.
Source.
So if you’re like me, I just head straight to move my blog to WordPress.
#3. Configure Your Meta Tags.
WordPress blogs have some specific tags you’ll need to get right so your human visitors and search engine spiders can at a glance understand what your content topic is all about.
To make things easier, webmasters across the breadth and length of the internet recommend Yoast SEO plugin to increase your WordPress blog search visibility.
The two most important Meta tags you need to pay attention to are Title and description Meta tags.
The title tag come in between the header section of your webpage HTML source code while the content of your description Meta tags comes as a snippet in search query when user type in a related search phrase and your webpage pop up among the search organic result.
Read this comprehensive post put together by WordPress codex on Meta tags to learn more about tags and why they’re important.
#Set up Your Permalink Structure.
To cut long story short, there is basically two ideal WordPress permalink structure that you should consider:
Either you go with:
/%postname%/
/%category%/%postname%/
Every other option out there really don’t make too much of sense or pass any SEO link juice like many people believe them to be. Adding post dates in the URL could possibly lead over time to lower click-through rate and affect search ranking if possible.
And adding .html nor .php affect ranking positively in anyway. If you want to learn more about permalink structure, here is a YouTube video from Matts Cutts speaking on the issue.
#4. Other Techincal Things.
There are lots of things you can do on your WordPress blog from the word go to make sure is set up correctly to give it the best of search engine optimization visibility that can influence organic search traffic:
Only install needed plugins – Wp Smush.it, W3 Total Cache, Yoast SEO, just to mention a few.
Make sure your web pages are loading insanely fast.
Keep it clutter-free.
Design it for users.
Use Breadcrumb.
These small things can just be the difference between a blog that struggles to attract and retain readers and the one that commands authority and is supported by a loyal community of readers.
Now that your blog has been giving fair chances to attract organic SEO traffic from it’s set up, let get into the real tactics you can start implementing on the blog that will ensure you generate quality organic search engine traffic to your blog.
10 Steps to Increase Organic SEO Traffic to a New Blog.
Note – The tactics mentioned in this guide are not in anyway magic bullet, each of them require that you devote considerable amount of time and consistently working on their execution before measuring your outcome
A good rule is that you just pick one or two and work on them long enough before you start measuring your progress.
#1. Answer Question Not Keyword.
Keywords are definitely the starting point to an effective search engine optimization strategies, and without them, content creation is a guess work.
But if your content publication routine is researching for high volume search query and writing your content around such keyword, then you’re definitely not serving your audience right.
Keywords are generated by a real human in the form of a question asking in different communities online. These people want comprehensive answers to their questions and not just showing them that your content contains exact words or phrases contain in their question.
There is a BIG difference between answering a user question in your content, and writing your content around that user’s search phrases.
The benefits users get from the two content strategies will vary significantly.
The best content development strategy is to discover what your audience are seeking to know more about, the question they’re asking and how often they’re asking such question.
Then produce the right content that massively supply answers to such question without leaving anything out of it while you align the question to a topical keyword phrase in order to maximize your potential to improve organic SEO traffic.
The most popular and talked about sources on the Internet for discovering the questions your audience are asking at the moment is “Quora” and “Yahoo Answer“.
No need to reinvent the wheel, Quora is no doubt a reliable place to gathered hundreds of questions your audience are asking that you can writes contents that supply answers to such questions.
Plus you can uncover dozens of a keyword variations ideas from reading your audience questions that even the most sophisticated keyword tool in the word can’t show you.
Enter Quora on your browser and type in your content main keyword. You already have more content ideas and even experts opinions, facts and data to make up in your content.
Another reliable tool I just discover recently for uncovering question users are asking is Answer The Public. Though from what I see with the tool, it just can’t replace real human touch that questions and sites like Quora, Yahoo Answer, Answer.com, Forums etc brings.
Answer The Public is an automated tool that search by country focus, but still a good fit to try if you can’t find your match on Quora.
But I doubt if that could ever happen.
#2. Create Eye-Catching Infographics.
One blogger who has been so successful in using infographics to build and increase organic SEO traffic to his blogs is Neil Patel. In one of his publication, he writes:
Lots of potentials await when you create high-value infographics that pass across useful information to the end users.
And when you consider the 60% of world population who are the visual learner and the rise for the search query “infographics” – 800% in the last two years you might want to include infographics in your content marketing tactics.
But there is only one problem with using infographics to increase your organic search engine traffic – all infographics are not created equal – therefore, results are not typical.
Before you begin to create infographics, think about what purpose will it serve your business? Who are your target audience that will possibly link to your infographics and how do you intend on reaching out to these audiences?
In most cases, people who link the most to infographics are not your typical blog readers. This is especially true if you want to attract quality authoritative links to your infographics.
You’ll want the bulk of your infographics links to come from authoritative blogs in the relevant industry, mainstream media houses and other credible places on the internet.
These are powerful link sources that can possibly increase your search engine ranking visibility.
But as a starter in this type of link acquisition strategy, don’t set the barrier too high for yourself, target low and medium size blogs that have the possibility of exposing your infographics to other big outlets.
In other to maximize your chances of getting the best out of your infographics, here are a few key steps worth following when creating and marketing your infographics.
#Step 1. Find Popular Topic in Your Industry.
Creating an infographic isn’t like generating ideas for your blog topic, your infographics idea should be based on a proven content topic already out there loved by thousands of targeted fans and blog readers.
This proven topic not necessarily from your own content archives, it could be from someone else blogs, trending topic, special event etc.
One thing you’ll need to understand here is that unlike text; infographics, SlideShare presentations, Youtube videos, podcast etc…are alternatives formats you can develop your content ideas into to reach a wider audience who are more familiar and accept those content format over text.
So your BIG task is to find already proven topic in your industry to convert into infographic format.
To do this, head over to Buzzsumo.
If you have been reading this blog or CyberNaira regularly, you should know I reference Buzzsumo a lot.
There is one reason for this, despite my controversial post against the true credibility of BuzzSumo total share count, BuzzSumo is still a viable and reliable tool for the purpose it was created.
So I head over and enter my search query “dog training”.
Whoa! Can you see that?
The top page from the BuzzSumo result has been shared more than 1.3m times already. This is a golden opportunity waiting to be tap into if this is your industry.
Now that we’ve found a proven story, is time to see what we can make out of the event and turn it into an appealing visual content story-telling infographics.
#Step 2. Find the Designer.
Before you start elaborating on how to get your infographics created, take a moment to gather your infographics content. Highlight the main points, facts, data, lessons and the takeaways from your content and group them in their order of relevancy.
Now, is time to find an experienced graphics designer who knows what it takes to create a winning infographic. Unless you’re a very good graphics designer yourself, I wouldn’t recommend you try to do things yourself here.
There are few good places you can find professional graphics designer that won’t cut your throat or break your bank account and still have an infographic really good done for you at an affordable price (besides, some of these places are free to use).
Dribble.
Visual.ly.
PiktoChart.
Easel.ly.
Infogr.am.
ICharts.
#Step 3. Accompany Your Infographics with content.
Maybe tomorrow, but as of today, no search engine spider has the ability to read the text on image files. Even Google search engine spider can only index your image file as it is, but can read what text you had on it.
Only the description ATL tag get crawled and use to determine what the image file is all about.
Write an in-depth article like you normally would for your content topic and publish it along with your great looking infographic on your blog. The next BIG thing you wouldn’t want to miss is promoting it to the right audience I talked about in step #1 of this section.
There are lots of infographics submission sites today you can submit to, but you should also start by reaching out to other content marketers in your niche and see how your infographics can be of great value to their blog and audience.
If you get everything right, getting a dozen, or even hundreds of high-quality SEO links from these process alone is very visible.
#3. Use Latent Sematic Indexing.
First, for the beginner – what is Latent Sematic Indexing? According to Google result extracted from the pages of Wikipedia:
In other words, Latent Sematic Indexing is the use of synonyms of your primary keyword to avoid keyword stuffing and more importantly, to tell Google better about the theme of your content.
For instance, when you target “affiliate marketing programs” as your primary keyword in your content, Google expect that a mention of affiliate marketing companies in your content like ShareaSale, Cj, LinkShare, BuleSnap, Amazon etc.
These words prove to Google that you’re really talking about affiliate marketing network programs in your content.
Another example is when you mention someone in your content, to help Google understand better who you’re really talking about in your content and for proper indexing of your web page in the search algorithm, is best to reference what works or filed that person is into.
For example:
Let’s look at how Google is using this information to affect search result for certain queries. Here is a search query I did for “increase website traffic“.
Look at the top result in the image, it contain just a word “website” from my exact search phrase but still rank top for that particular query.
Why?
Google understand better the search intent behind that keyword phrase, therefore, and despite not having the exact search phrase in its content headline, that page is still the best possible answer to my question.
This is made possible because the content of the page contains words, synonyms or co-occurrence to my primary search phrase. Other pages too might incorporate Latent Sematic Indexing into their content keywords, but Google chooses to rank that page top for that search phrase.
Lots of factors are responsible for search ranking. LSI – Latent Sematic Indexing is just one of it.
#4. Use a Website Auditor SEO tool.
One of the best investment you can do for your online business is to invest in a website auditor SEO tool such one as “Website Auditor” from Link-Assistant.
Your site architecture is important for crawling and indexing of your webpages if spiders can’t navigate their way through your entire site, the effect on your search ranking will be negative.
Here is how Website Auditor works.
Download the SEO tool from this link (the free version. You can upgrade later if you find it useful), enter your website URL and check the appropriate field, then wait for some minutes for website auditor SEO tool to crawl your sites and gather all the information.
When the SEO tool is done crawling your site, you’ll get a detail report presentation about your site SEO status in a page like this:
This is what most SEO agency will charge you $5,000 to do and with no practical advice on what to do to patch things up. With website Auditor SEO tool, you can run a professional SEO audit of your website even if you don’t have any SEO technical skill.
The next thing is to pay attention to the report and look into areas need for improvement, corrections, and modifications.
#5. Inbound And Outbound Linking Regularly.
Something you might want to be doing regularly within your content is linking out to other credible sources relevant to your current topic.
And constantly interlinking your content together.
In the real sense, these two activities don’t directly affect your search ranking positively but they sure will influence other direct factors that possess the potential to move your search ranking up.
Show me your friends, and I’ll tell you who you are.
This is also true in online marketing if you’re linking out to bad or phishing websites regularly within your content, the logical thinking is that your website credibility is questionable too.
And if you’re not interlinking your content together regularly, you’re not helping search engine crawler get around your webpages easily.
Interlinking is what make navigating through the site structure by both human and search engine spider easier, and for spreading SEO link juice around individual pages possible.
If search engine spidered are not able to crawl your webpages correctly, your indexing will be greatly affected which will definitely have a negative effect on your search ranking.
Proper indexing of your content in search algorithm is one of the most important factors that preside great search visibility. Therefore, you should ensure that search engine crawlers have the require freedom to index your webpage in their search algorithm.
When you link out to other bloggers in your content, is best that you let them know you find relevant resources on their website and have linked to it in your published article.
This tactic can earn you additional shares, traffic, and audience. But do not expect to hear back from many of the people you reach out to, lots of bloggers don’t consider linking to them a big deal.
They get hundreds of mentions everyday, so it doesn’t matter to them anymore.
#6. Reach out, Start Building Relationship.
The more you engage blogging in isolation, the harder it is to get your blog out there in front of a target audience and influencers.
If you want to start attracting targeted audience to your content, either direct, social or organic search engine traffic you’ll need the help of other blogs that already have the kind of audience you want for your blog.
And to think of it, one of the most important factors that directly increase search engine ranking is backlinks, and a good part of link building strategies is relationship building.
The more you get yourself in front of relevant bloggers who can possibly share and link to your content, the better and easier is to build or earn quality authoritative links that can increase your search engine ranking.
So, to influence a big part of your Google SEO traffic using outreach and link building tactics, here are some of the good strategies you’ll need to focus on.
# Start With Blog Commenting.
Blog commenting as a relationship building tool if done right is one task every content marketer should leverage upon to establish a meaningful relationship with targeted marketers and influencer.
Plus it helps in the learning process of understanding your industry better. The more you blog hop around reading and commenting on other people’s content, the better you’re improving your knowledge in your niche.
Establishing a real meaningful relationship with targeted marketers should be on your priority list when leaving comments on their blogs and not SEO link juice. Though getting SEO benefits is part of the equation but that should be secondary.
I must remind you that writing such comments as “Thank you, I love the post”, “Nice tips”, “Great post” etc. won’t cut it in today’s marketing space. You’ll need to show some level of commitment and expertise if you really want to get noticed with your comments.
And again, don’t just leave comments on every known blog you see out there, relevancy is everything in internet marketing. Part of the reasons you’re leaving comments on other people’s blog is to drive traffic back to your blog, right?
Then you’ll need to be selective and only comments on blogs that are relevant to your industry and have the kind of audience you want to attract to your content.
One thing you may not be aware of is this, even the top authority bloggers in your industry are using blog commenting as a content marketing and link building strategies.
But you really don’t see them doing it, this leaves you with a big question mark on your face. The truth is, they’re are hiring freelancers to do it for them.
I have scrapped many comment section of industry top blogs only to find some top influencers blog URL among the website input field. Some hired freelancers have done this on their behalf in exchange for money.
The below comment author contact details was found on a post on Brian Dean’s blog. After going through every comment authors detail, this particular one appears to have every link to Neil Patel.
So don’t neglect blog commenting, if your favorite blogger can pay someone to do it consistently, there are great benefits in doing it.
# Reach out to Build Links.
I don’t know how to say it better, but a BIG part of your marketing success will lie in the quality of your blog link profile because there is a direct correlation with quality of links pointing a page and search ranking.
And since search engine traffic has been proven to be the most profitable of all Internet website traffic, you have few options left besides link building.
So how do you build good quality backlinks?
I have already talked about blog commenting up there but one thing I didn’t specifically mentioned about it is using it for link building purpose.
To save time and find blogs where you can leave your content links through blog commenting, visit drop my link.
Drop my link is a tool design to help link builders find thousands of relevant sites where you can drop your links and drive more traffic back to your site.
Another tactic is by emailing relevant bloggers directly for link opportunity. I have received tons of cold email from people asking for a link to their quality content.
Is up to me to honor the request or not.
The first thing I usually do when I receive such email is to check the content out if it’s appealing and worthy of my association. I then run a brief search on the marketers to see what Google index about him.
If nothing crazy comes up among the search result, I decide whether to give the link or not. Depending on how I perceive the situation.
Reach out to other content marketers, email them with your awesome content link request. It takes nothing out of you if you meet with no response or a no reply.
If you get a 1% response rate from emailing 20 people, that’s 2 links assuming they’re from quality authoritative sites – that’s better and over time could make the difference.
There are other advanced link building tactics you can start executing to increase organic SEO traffic you can find here.
Conclusion….
Here is what you need to know if you want to consistently increase organic SEO traffic to your blog – focus most of your content marketing strategies towards getting more inbound links from credible authoritative websites.
A big part of the search algorithm ranking heavily depends on the quality of links signal to the individual web pages.
I have given you some easy and advanced marketing tactics that will definitely if done right will result into generating at least one quality link back to your website.
What other SEO tactics are you using to drive consistent organic traffic?
The post 6 Fastest Track To Increase Organic SEO Traffic to a New Blog appeared first on Just Website Traffic.