When you create a web page one of the things you need to get is traffic to the site. What traffic will depend on the type of site that you are creating. If you are creating a Hollywood gossip blog then you are likely to get a lot more traffic than a site advising physicians about heart medicine. The point is to be seen by the right audience and maximising the scope of that audience.
The Hollywood gossip blog should easily achieve thousands of hits per day, but it is more complex making a specialist site reach its target audience. I do not this eZine to achieve a readership of hundreds of thousands, yet I am seeking to focus in on those people who are looking to receive advice about technology leadership and social media strategy.
When I started this site it was with the intention of reaching a specific audience. Realising that I sought advice about improving my following and increasing traffic, so that my target audience were aware of my site, and feel that I have been moderately successful in this goal. The key method to build readership was through the search engines. This should be obvious really, because for all of their shortcomings search engines like Google and Bing are out indexing the web day-in day-out, ans they can drive traffic to your site. Search engines today are responsible for over 60% of all traffic coming to my site, and they bring in punters even when we are tucked up in our beds.
Yet I still find myself asking the question of whether I have done enough. In fact I can be sure that I have not! According to some “guru’s” there are many tactics we can use to build traffic. The truth is that some work and some do not. The problem is that the landscape is also continually changing and advice written a year ago may not apply today. You have to study and change your site’s visibility.
When building a blog in WordPress is is essential to include addins like SimpleTags and the All-in-One SEO Pack. I do have to apologise to those who use other blog tools as I don’t know what tools, if any exist for them and spent many years wrestling with Google’s Blogger and could NEVER be found. According to many experts (See for example Jack Humphrey of The Friday Traffic Report) blogs are the darlings of the search engines. Yet they do have to be setup correctly in order for each post to be found and do remember you are driving traffic to a specific page on your site, not the overall site. It is the ‘findability’ of an individual article that drives your page rank.
Gaining success is usually achieved over time and is unlikely to be an overnight sensation. That said I did a search for the topics surrounding one of my articles and found that it was number 1 on Google’s search the very next morning, even eclipsing some sites I had used for reference material. Generally each article has to have SEO Tags added to it. This is one fact I wish I knew before writing my very first article. I have since added tags and trackbacks to those early articles.
Post titles are important and need to satisfy both the search engine and the human audience. A post’s permalink structure should also be set to include words rather than simply the post number. The search engine will find an article more easily because it has a keyword in it, however the human won’t read the post unless it looks relevant to them. They will make their decision based on the title and the one sentence displayed on the search results. This is sad, but true. Tags are vital for the search engines to operate, and I have found that my list of keywords for any article has been increasing over time. Again I have paid some attention to old articles and gone back to improve them.
One of the strongest ways to get exposure is to build cross links with other like minded people. Commenting on posts is important, and I often look for material to comment on. I would love it if you were to post a comment on my site. The best thing about comments is to include links to things you have written on other people’s sites. This is powerful from the viewpoint of SEO as it brings another link to your site. I also believe that providing outbound links is as important as inbound links – I am not sure whether this is good for SEO, but I do know it is important to credit others for the things they have said, even when you are providing a counter argument. The technical term is a Trackback. Also remember that there is no limit to the number of links to can add into a post. YOU must spend a time adding these to the ‘Send Trackbacks’ field underneath the body of your article. As far as I can tell the link is less active than if set in ‘Trackbacks’.
In building blogs we have the potential for the largest discussion in the history of mankind on any topic you care to choose, sadly the majority of articles are badly structured and poorly written and do not assist in building knowledge. A large chunk of the remaining ones cannot be found easily because the SEO has been poorly managed.
So you have written your article, done the SEO and set all the Tags. Now you have published it. Surely this is the end of it, there is no more work that needs to be done we can sit back and reap the rewards. Well sadly no. This is where you have to continue by publicising the article. Sites like Stumbleupon.com, Socialmarker.com and digg.com are an essential part of getting your article known about. The purpose of Stumble Upon is to comment on specific web sites. Most people are happy recommending and bookmarking other people’s sites but think it is not right to do your own. Get over it! Write a little review of your article and why you think it is worth reading – you are best placed to do this as you should believe in what you say. Keep it at between 50 and 150 words, as you don’t want the review to be longer than the main article.
The other thing I do is have the articles automatically posted on Twitter once I publish. There are a number of services that will assist here, including Social Oomph.
