How to Drive More Traffic to Your Blog

Every blogger wants to know the secret to increasing traffic to their blog. The simple ways to do this include setting up an RSS feed and ensuring that this can be seen clearly on your site or creating a community across various blogging sites and directories. But if we want to look at creating a complete and seamless strategy, we need to look at all areas of traffic. But first, we need to break down the different types of traffic you may be getting.

If you log into your Google Analytics account, you will see that your website traffic is broken down into the following: organic traffic (search engine traffic generated by keyword queries on sites like Google), paid traffic (this is through PPC campaigns etc), referral traffic (any traffic coming directly from another website) and direct traffic (anyone who enters your domain directly into the URL bar of their browser).

It’s not a very common thing, especially for beginner/ middleweight bloggers, to ever require the use of PPC so let’s ignore paid traffic for now. Here we take a look at the other 3 types of traffic and how to increase them.

Organic (Search) Traffic

This is the traffic generated by search engines, which means that any traffic from here will have been keyword driven. In order to improve your organic traffic, it’s important that you think about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) when you’re creating your blog or writing blog posts. Some things you need to be doing include:-

• Optimising each blog post with the right keywords – make your keywords relevant so that when people search for something, they find useful and interesting information.

• Optimise title tags and meta descriptions – not only is it important to use keywords and phrases in your body content but you should optimise your site wherever possible.

• Build links – link building should be approached carefully and buying links or getting low quality links is not recommended. The best ways of building a natural link profile is to link to others you trust, get involved in group blogging projects or guest write for online magazines and other blogs.

Referral Traffic (Traffic from Other Sites)

Referral sites which drive traffic to your blog will usually be social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Having a social media presence is very important to help Google know that your website is out there, making its mark in the online social world. But more importantly, social sites help you share your blog posts and your content with people who share the same interests. When you create a new social media page, whether it be Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest or YouTube, always add a link to your blog so people can go directly to your website.

Referral traffic can also be from other blog websites – this could be anyone who links to you. So link building is a very important part of the bigger picture.

Direct Traffic

If you’re new to blogging, the likelihood is that 99.9% of your direct traffic is yourself when you are logging onto your website or someone you know. It’s not until you’ve established a name for yourself that readers will type in your URL into their browser, hungry for the latest content.

To improve direct traffic to your blog, it’s important to build the brand of your blog site. This means networking with other people at events, handing out business cards or blog URL cards or trying to get features in print magazines.

We hope you have found this information on blog traffic useful. For more tips and hint on driving traffic to your blog, visit our specialist SEO blog over at The WebMarketing Group. 

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