BlogHer: Building Your Blog Traffic
Charlene Prince Birkeland of Yahoo spoke during lunch at BlogHer. She mentioned some great tips for increasing your blog's traffic, which I've summarized here.
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Your readers are going to find your blog in a lot of ways - search engines, social media, statistics reports, and so on. You need to actively make certain that readers are engaged, and not turned off, by your site. You can do this in several ways.
- Make your site usable. You'll be better off with a simple and clean design. Everything should be no more than one click away.
- Target the right audience with fresh and interesting content. Be genuine. They'll know if you are posting just to be posting. If you see a spike in visits, pull those readers in by posting lots of new content.
- Build community. You need to be a part of the conversation. Make connections and remember to comment on other people's blogs. And respond to the comments that are posted on yours.
- Use social media to distribute your content. But select the avenues that will really help you. This area can take up a lot of time.
- Embrace search engine optimization best practices. You'll want to use keywords in your title and text (within reason) and to tag your posts and photos. For keyword research, try WordTracker Keywords suggestion tool.
While each of these areas can take a lot of thought, planning, and time, you can make the process as simple as you want to or have time for. And don't obsess. Search engine optimization isn't the end goal. It's just one way to make your goal happen. - K
