Generating traffic is every website owner and blogger's wish and wanted to increase revenue by increasing traffic.
To start immediate traffic to your site or blog you can start with simple ways but for long-term organic traffic, you have to work hard.
Many sites are providing exchange offers such as:-
10khits
SOTAM
One of the websites Worldprofit provides 50000 free visitors along with leads generators, Vault with free valuable e-books, solo ad email blaster, top 20traffic sources, 500000 free credits just for viewing a video for 10 minutes & log in daily & much more on upgrade
There is nothing wrong with trying this, in my initial phase of blogging I too tried & got some results too but later I understand these are all temporary ways to generate traffic.
If I have to seriously make blogging a profession, I have to work hard on the following.
SOTAM
One of the websites Worldprofit provides 50000 free visitors along with leads generators, Vault with free valuable e-books, solo ad email blaster, top 20traffic sources, 500000 free credits just for viewing a video for 10 minutes & log in daily & much more on upgrade
There is nothing wrong with trying this, in my initial phase of blogging I too tried & got some results too but later I understand these are all temporary ways to generate traffic.
If I have to seriously make blogging a profession, I have to work hard on the following.
1 CONTENT
Search Google for the word "content" you will find the first meaning of content is "in the state of peaceful happiness", "satisfy(someone)" & "a state of satisfaction".
After reading this my brain started to achieve the state of peaceful happiness-- hahaha, this is not with me only, everyone wants peaceful happiness in doing anything may be reading my blog or yours.
Content is the real Hero of the blog.
Did you want to see a movie without a perfect story? would you like to read a novel that is not interesting? definitely not.
Then how can you expect others to read your blog with no creativity, uniqueness, information & solution to their questions?
Actually, the readers are not looking for your blog, they are looking for the answer or something new to read(if you're a lifestyle or storytelling blogger)
If you see Google's content policy it's clearly mentioned that it should be the original content.
Hence do write original, unique, informative, content to get more traffic.
CONTENT LENGTH
The length of the blog plays an important role in deciding the readers to stay on the blog. Successful bloggers normally write more than 2000 words per article.
LEDE
The leading paragraph of an article or the starting paragraph is sometimes spelt shortened to lead or lede creating curiosity to know more.
As per research, 55% of readers stay for 15 seconds on the blog & which makes them decide to read more or not.
Try short, sweet & unusual leading paragraphs followed by effective paragraphs with topics.
READABILITY
The readability of a blog helps to sustain more time on your blog and decrease the bounce rate. It also helps to increase ranking on search engines.
You can increase readability by using a more active voice as compared to a passive voice in your sentences.
Sentences of less than 20 words and paragraphs of less than 75 words are considered to be good to increase readability.
More use of transition words in sentences increases readability.
Try to write consecutive sentences that will provide enough variety in your sentences thus increasing readability.
Subheadings should be equally distributed throughout your blog to increase readability.
FREQUENCY
It is been found & in my personal experience that the frequency of publishing content at regular interval drive traffic to the website. Especially by the repeated visitors.
TIME INVESTED
While going through my research I found that bloggers reported doing good and normally devote more or around 6 hours to an article.
While normally bloggers said that they write and publish in 2-3 hours.
It clearly indicates that successful bloggers invest more time in research for the post, checking/editing multiple times or by more than one editor, check always their analytics data regarding the behaviour of readers.
PRESENTATION
When I was in the marketing field one of my bosses said that "it's not the gift you deliver, it's the way you deliver matters".
Similarly, in a blog, the presentation is equally important, If a blog contains beautiful pics(as I have seen in top travel blogs), informative videos or audio it catches more attention & the reader is bound to stay longer & will love to come back.
2 S E O
As I said content is the hero,
SEO is the director of your movie(blog).
Every new blogger comes to know about SEO (search engine optimization) but it takes years to master it.
SEO is the director of your movie(blog).
Every new blogger comes to know about SEO (search engine optimization) but it takes years to master it.
In simple words, it's the process of making it easy for search engines like Google to understand your site and rank high.
Google find (crawl by spiders), file up (index as per keyword) & label (rank high) your website, blog or pages on their searches.
Search engines have set norms for ranking, some are known while many are secrets of search engines and they keep on changing from time to time.
For learning, you required creativity, technical knowledge & analytics nature but the goal is to rank high in organic searches.
Let's first understand how Google or any search engine works.
1 They store millions of websites in their library according to the keywords.
2 Whenever someone searches for example "Watches", Google extracts and shows the most related website about watches like where he can purchase watches, a Watch shop near him...
The following are the two steps of SEO.
On-page SEO and Of-page SEO.
a) On-page SEO
As the name, it's the activities that are done on the page or the sites for ranking high on search engines.
This includes the following activities.
Meta Tag
The meta tag is the text in HTML code to provide information to search engines regarding the content on the page.
Open the theme, and edit HTML, below <head> you can edit the title tag, and meta description, which are the part of meta tag
The title tag attracts the viewers & a small meta description tell viewers what they will gain from reading the article.
A title tag & meta description should contain a Keyword with a small description.
When I started blogging I was not aware of SEO or keyword hence no keyword in "Fun Funds-- enjoy earning" plus it doesn't describe the site.
A lot of hard work I have done to make this brand "Fun Funds" somewhat known online I don't want to change but you can change & gain the ranking.
A title tag should not be 70 characters & a meta description, not be more than 155 characters otherwise, it will be chopped by the search engine like "homemade recipes of --- ", the purpose of catching eyes is not solved.
Don't add more keywords in the title & the same title for more than one page.
The entire above page is the result of a search "mastpaisa" my domain which is why it's said to be a search engine result page(SERP). You can preview by SERP Preview Tools
Before you start writing find what people are searching for suppose you search "price of Apple iPhone 6" here "iPhone 6" is the keyword, and the related search shown by google is also the keyword.
Google Keyword Planner is one of the free tools to search for keywords, many other free keyword generator tools are online.
You can find it on KWFinder for 10 days of the free trial.
Due to a lot of competition for a particular keyword, it's better to make a long-tail keyword like "Apple iPhone 6 -full phone specification" although long-tail searches might be below the viewer who searched you will be more engaged & your blog will be higher rank in a specific search.
Sometimes a specific search volume may be less than hundreds in a month in that case you have to understand
Keyword Difficulty is an important metric to analyse.
Keyword difficulty is measured on a scale of 0-100 lowest the keyword difficulty chances of ranking 1st SERP.
Criteria for calculating keyword difficulty are Domain authority, Page authority, citation flow & trust flow depending upon how influential the URL is, how many sites link to it & does it's linked to the trusted sites.
You can also find out the keyword difficulty with KWFinder.
You should also do an analysis of the Trend by Google Trends & average monthly search volume(Google keyword planner).
Remember search engines are smarter,
you can't optimize the wrong keyword.
SEARCH INTENT
The intention by which the viewer search are classified as
Informational(like searching where is a place located),
Navigational( like searching for a particular website like mine "Fun Funds" although it's a dream--hahaha)
Transactional(searching to buy for example what is the price of the iPhone 6)
Keeping in mind the above user's behaviour & goal of your website make a strategic SEO plan.
SEO FRIENDLY URL
Avoid auto-generated URL
If you are on WordPress go to setting --common setting -- page name-- you can customize in custom structure.
Remember to add your targeted keyword to the URL of the blog page.
If you are on Blogger don't start writing a new post/page without adding a post/page title.
As soon as you start writing a new post/page without a title Blogspot automatically develops a URL that is very difficult to change.
I'm trying to do it, as soon as I will come to know the method I will let you know, if you know please do share it with us in the comment box.
Although in some themes like simple you can customize the URL.
INTERNAL & EXTERNAL LINKS
Internal links not only promote your other articles but also help search engine robots understand website structure.
External trusted links help to low down keyword difficulties & improve rank.
IMAGE OPTIMIZATION
As I said images contribute to the designing of your blog & develop an attraction not only that Google is shifting to a more visual way of finding a search, nowadays.
I'm noticing changes if you click an image a sidebar opens up with the description of the image & similar topic images.
Choose the right image related to the topic & it's always better to use personally clicked photographs rather than a royalty-free stock photo.
Resize the image if you want to add a big pic of 2500x1500 pixels to 250x150 pixels or another suitable size in the same proportion which makes it easy to download in less time. It will also not affect the loading time of the page.
Select the JPEG or PNG format of your pic, you may use GIF as it's popular nowadays but it may slow down the loading speed of your page.
After downloading an image on your blog select the size by clicking on it, smaller or medium size for fast loading speed.
Choose the right image related to the topic & it's always better to use personally clicked photographs rather than a royalty-free stock photo.
Resize the image if you want to add a big pic of 2500x1500 pixels to 250x150 pixels or another suitable size in the same proportion which makes it easy to download in less time. It will also not affect the loading time of the page.
Select the JPEG or PNG format of your pic, you may use GIF as it's popular nowadays but it may slow down the loading speed of your page.
After downloading an image on your blog select the size by clicking on it, smaller or medium size for fast loading speed.
Add properties, title text & alt-text are equally important as the title tag & meta description, in alt-text clearly mention what information the searcher will get with a keyword or key phrase to make him land on your page. Google Images are also one of the best sources of traffic.
Remember people love to watch unique images.
Remember people love to watch unique images.
SHARING OPTION
Although people are lazy in sharing your post they too add a social media sharing button.
If possible add an attractive award on sharing --hahaha(bribe), peace, I will give my good blessings to you on sharing or even for not sharing.
USER-FRIENDLY
Until & unless viewers are not satisfied you will get more bounce rate, putting shoes on the viewer's foot you will analyse the problem
1 Site speed
2 Site structure
3 Site on a mobile
SITE SPEED
If a user experience a slower loading definitely he/she will switch immediately. you can check speed & problems on Google page speed insight, Pingdom tools & a few others.
SITE STRUCTURE
The template or design of the site must be attractive with the use of proper use of heading, subheading, a minor heading or in other words H1, H2--H6. it makes accessibility & increases ranking too.
SITE ON MOBILE
A large number of users are mobile/tablet users hence mobile accessibility is a must.
To make your site user-friendly don't hesitate to hire technical experts to handle this technical aspect.
A technical expert will check the crawling ability by checking domain configuration, internal links & redirects, broken external links, sitemap, robot txt file, URL structure, and old technology used that may lead to the indexing problem.
Submit site
There are more than 140 search engines, and mostly 70% share of the search market is Google. Submit your blog to search engines, like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex. You can also submit to all search engines from Entireweb.
How to submit to Google Search Console?
(a) Signup on the Google search console
(a) Signup on the Google search console
(b) Add Site by adding the domain
(c) Submit sitemap:
A sitemap is the entire description of the site including the content, headline, images, video & pages.
To submit the sitemap click the sitemap option in the left menu of the dashboard. A simple way to submit a sitemap is to type the URL "www.yourdomain/sitemap.xml" & enter. See the result as a "success" if not try again after rectifying any mistake.
(d) Check your all pages' URLs by the URL inspection option.
It will show the crawling status if your page is found on Google if not found check the live test by clicking the live test button on the right site.
It will show the crawling status if your page is found on Google if not found check the live test by clicking the live test button on the right site.
(e) After crawling is done by the bots check if the page is indexed, if not request for the index, normally it takes 4-5 days maybe a few weeks to get index your site.
(f) To check the indexing status of the website search on Google "site:yourdomain" & you will find the pages/post which is been indexed. If not, request again for indexing.
I have written in length regarding tools required for blogging, how to prepare for blogging & much more, to enhance your knowledge in
The first (crawling) & second(indexing) parts is been finished for the search engine submission, for the third(ranking) factor we have to put more efforts, which I will explore on this page, before that
How to submit the website on Bing?
(a) Signup to Bing webmaster from your google account.
(b) On the dashboard, you will find two options one is directly submitting the site & another is through the Google search console, opt for the second which is an easy option, import & done.
(c) Submit sitemap, if not found, in the "configure my site" option
(d) Submit the URL
TIP: Add your website(property) to the Google Analytics site & link to the Google search console.
I will advise hiring SEO professionals or website developers to at least take care of the technical part if you are not competent enough to do.
It's the process of building quality links from other websites which develops your authority.
Backlinks from reputed sites indicate that your site is been recommended hence increasing your domain authority and thus your site getting a high ranking.
A high ranking on search engines generate organic traffic to your blog increasing revenue from the blog.
SHARE-- SHARE-- SHARE
Despite all the above efforts still, the glamour of the film is missing & without glamour or heroine film is dull, outbound marketing is the heroine of your project.
Share on social media, share through Gmail & whatsoever platform you find to share like forums, comment on another blog, free classified ads...
It's also been a part of "Off-Page SEO"
It's also been a part of "Off-Page SEO"
GUEST BLOGGING
It's an easy way to reach new readers & make them follow you on your blog. 60% of the bloggers do guest blogging having a relationship with other bloggers.
Many successful bloggers also invite guest bloggers to write on their terms. It is beneficial for both.
If you have a travel blog you can submit a guest post on Lili's travel plan for her term obviously.
You may also be invited to do a guest blog on
A billion things to do
During my search, I found a blog that has done a great job of providing a list of
250 sites to submit a guest post for free.
During my search, I found a blog that has done a great job of providing a list of
250 sites to submit a guest post for free.
Make a relationship with other bloggers so that they may invite you for guest blogging or you can also ask them.
Guest blogging is one of the best ways to increase backlinks to your blog and off-page SEO.
Read more about
FINAL THOUGHT
I have tried to cover almost every aspect to generate traffic to the blog & increase revenue. There is always a possibility to improve more, no website is perfect.
Share to help others to increase their online presence.
This is a wonderful post check out this website www.winnershub.com.ng
ReplyDeleteIncredibly thorough. Time to get started working my way down this last!
ReplyDeleteThese are great tips. Content and SEO are the big picture way to succeed - sure, they take a little longer than some other approaches, however, they are solid and reliable opportunities to continue driving traffic for months and years to come. They should be the focus point for any blogger looking to be successful.
ReplyDelete