Jay Leonard
Despite the wild claims of SEO experts for hire, you don’t need to rank higher in Google to increase blog traffic on your site. Ranking higher in Google is just one way to increase traffic—and there are many other ways.
Use Incoming Links To Increase Blog Traffic
Thanks to SEO, most people today think of links primarily as a way to rank higher on search engines. But links were originally designed so that people could click them—and many people still do. If someone links to your site using an appealing phrase, there’s a good chance you’ll get a steady stream of natural traffic.
The key to this strategy is to get people to link to your site on popular pages and to use appealing link phrases. Popular pages tend to link to other popular pages, so you’re going to need to build and market appealing high-quality content.
To get people to use link phrases which make people want to click them, you’re going to need to suggest those phrases yourself. For example, you can mention at the bottom of each post how you’d prefer people link to it, such as, “If you enjoyed this article, please consider telling other people How To Increase Blog Traffic.”
Use Alternative Search To Increase Blog Traffic
Google wasn’t the first search engine, and it’s far from the last search engine. Google dominates today, but its market share is steadily being eroded by other search engines, such as Bing and non-English search engines.
Most SEO experts focus on Google, so it’s relatively easy to rank well on the alternative search engines and attract to your site all the traffic they offer. Remember that the more you increase blog traffic, the easier it becomes to increase blog traffic further—if you rank well on a dozen small search engines, you’ll have the leverage you need to increase your rank on Google later on, should you choose to do so.
Get Your Content Syndicated
Warning: Google might possibly hate this traffic source, use at your own risk.
Having other sites re-publish your content is a risky business but it brings you a steady flow of targeted traffic, believe it or not? In fact if you got syndicated to the right sites you can almost never need Google traffic ever again. Huge websites publish a copy of your articles on their sites, in full, with an attribution link leading back. Not only that, they mostly publish all the links within the article as well.
I have heard people slamming this idea and I have thoroughly tested it. Although it may be true that Google hates this and you could possibly see a drop in search engine traffic, you would not notice as traffic would still be coming in. The tests I have done clearly swapped the search engine traffic for the content syndication traffic. The same products kept selling and the Alexa ranking continued to improve.
Use Fans To Increase Blog Traffic
Social media, RSS subscribers, and mailing list subscribers are all fans of your blog. They liked, followed, or subscribed to your site because they want to hear more from you, and they’re the perfect people to help you increase blog traffic.
All you need to do is to get them to mention your blog to other people. Even among the people who love your blog the most, few will actually mention your blog—and even fewer will have an audience large enough to matter—but if you keep pushing them to promote your blog, you’ll eventually see results.
One of the best ways to get people to promote your blog is to help other people promote their blog. This is the win/win situation. A few simple strategies come to mind:
• Tell your subscribers that if they promote your blog in a post, you’ll also mention their blog in a post. Oh no isn’t that reciprocal linking? Well yes but who cares really? A quality link is a quality link.
• Tell your subscribers you’ll write an entire post about the person whose promotion of your site gets the most likes or retweets.
• Start an art or writing contest, and publish to your site (with links back to the original artist or writer) the winning entries
Any way you can mobilize your fans into promoting your site will pay large dividends when it comes to Google-free ways to increase your blog traffic.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
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Nice article and great tips!
Informative article thanks for sharing it.
This is so true – so many people just focus on Google because clearly they are the dominant search engine, however it is all about picking the closest fruit and there are more than one way to skin a cat, as they say. I also think it is a wise move to consider looking at other search engines to drive traffic not only because sometimes they are less competitive, but also from the point of view that you do not have all your eggs in one basket as no-one really knows what the future will hold.
I guess my question is, how to you get the traffic to your blog and have people start engaging with comments. I have a business site and I am trying to get comments. No has stopped by. Now I am redesigning the whole site and hope that works. Any suggestions? I don’t have any fans so I don’t know to get this done.
You’re right, Google isn’t the only source of traffic for a website, but for sure it’s one of the biggest source of traffic, so why not having it?
About other search engines, I think that the only 2 of them worth talking about are Bing and Yahoo. In my opinion authority websites that rank well on Google, rank well on Bing and Yahoo too, so there’s a good competition on them too. Given that you have to spend time anyway, it’s better to work for SEO on Google, so you can get more traffic.
What do you think?