You want your blog to be noticed. Whether you’re producing a blog for business purposes, to showcase your literary or artistic talents, talk about your hobbies and interests, or just to share the ups and downs of your daily life, it’s a safe bet that you’d like more people to read it. Few active bloggers are putting in the hard work required just for the sheer joy of writing, indifferent to whether anyone sees it, although some make that claim. No, the name of the game is to increase the traffic to your blog and website. Trouble is that millions of other businesses and individuals are trying to do the same thing. As always, much of the competition to climb to the top of the SERPS involves appeasing that Leviathan known as Google. As of 2019 the beast controls 90% of the search engine market. Their nearest competitors are annoying bugs on their back. If Alphabet ain’t happy, nobody’s happy. And just because they can, they’re always changing the rules.
A lot of the game still comes down to good old-fashioned blog promotion fundamentals. Too many businesses and bloggers make simple mistakes that torpedo their search rankings. They also fail to make use of effective tactics and strategies. Here are some tried and true methods to optimize your blog and gain more traffic.
1. Find The Best Writers
If you’re the owner of an SMB wanting to increase visitors to your site through your blog, you’ll probably want to turn over the writing duties to someone else. Maybe you don’t feel that writing is one of your strengths, and you almost certainly don’t have the time to churn out the regular content that Google likes. Good content marketing requires good writers, and it’s worth it to hire one when you consider the ROI. It’s a good idea to have a team of writers at your service to give your blog the benefit of a variety of voices. Creating a great team of experienced bloggers isn’t difficult and the results are well worth it.
2. Spice Up Your Posts With Awesome Images
Great pictures and graphics can do a lot to increase your blog’s exposure and appeal. With the notoriously short attention span of readers these days, they help to give a sense of what the post is about right from the get-go to encourage them to keep reading, and it makes the page look more authoritative. They are also another place to insert your keywords, which can be added to the caption and the image file name. And since the image will show up on social media when a reader shares the post, an eye-catching picture will attract attention and make it more likely that people will click through. There are several free stock image sites out there, but the quality is usually poor. Consider using a paid site with better images.
3. Make Use Of Multimedia
Your blog doesn’t have to be all written content. It will be more interesting and appeal to a wider audience if you throw in some videos, infographics, and podcasts. You don’t have to produce these yourself, they just have to be relevant to your business and useful for your audience, which means you can feature the work of others. Just make sure it’s ok for you to use them on your blog. Most video producers and podcasters will be happy to have you sharing their work.
4. Enable Comments And Encourage Them
People enjoy reading other readers’ comments and appreciate the option to leave their own. Often as much can be learned in the comments section as in the post itself, so it makes your content more useful to your readers, and that encourages them to keep coming back, maybe just to see if someone has replied to their comment. It also provides you with a free and effortless SEO boost because your readers will be putting keywords on your page. And it has long been rumored that our reptilian alien overlords, aka Google, look kindly on blogs that generate a lot of discussion. Make sure you end your posts by asking readers to leave their comments below.
5. Make Social Media Sharing Easy
You should have the familiar icon social media links above or beside each post above the fold of the page so that users can find and use them easily. This is a simple way to see a significant increase in traffic. Of course, you should have a presence on all the major social platforms yourself and be sharing each article you post to your feed.
Follow these fundamental optimization tactics and, to paraphrase the old adage, build a better blog and the world will beat a path to your website.
Bob P. is a former Web Search and Website Assessor for Lionbridge Technologies, contracting for Google, and was also a Social Media Networker for Slingshot SEO writing backlinks and web content for a wide variety of clients, and has experience with keyword oriented content writing for several other companies. He’s a former radio talk host/news anchor/producer, creating and hosting two original radio programs in the Indianapolis market, Radio for You and The Central Indiana Outdoorsman Show, and also served as co-host on one of the longest running jazz shows in the Midwest, Jazz Lives. He has held membership in the Indianapolis Press Club and Hoosier Outdoor Writers, the International Association of Professional Writers & Editors, and also Mensa and Intertel.
