Top Strategies To Make Your Blog Successful
This post is the third and last part in a series and continuation of my last post. A new blog or website or even an old website without traffic is completely lost. Traffic is life stream of any website and a reason of its survival . But biggest question is, from where we can get traffic for our blog? In our daily life we do our best to avoid traffics in roads. But as a webmaster we just want to hit by traffics, get tangled, scrambled and surrounded by it. But it is not easy. It takes times and dedication and a great deal of efforts. Its a step by step and a long process.
There was a time in my internet marketing career, when I used to believe that visitors will come to my website immediately, after I publish my website. I created my website and left it alone to get traffic by itself. But luckily that thinking was long way back in 2003.
Here is the techniques I have used to promote all my websites and have given me a good result. Use this technique on your risk, because after using all this methods your website is going to be hit and bombarded by traffic from all directions 
11) Optimizing Your Blog For Search Engines
If you want to improve the search rankings of keywords of your blog, you must know how to optimize contents of your blog. Optimizing techniques are simple, can be done by anyone and it wont cost you anything. You have to just spend few minutes to optimize your blog, but its benefits will be long lasting. Here is what I would recommend highly:
i) PermaLinks or URL structure - Default permalink structure in wordpress is “http//www.yourdomainname.com/?=x“, which is not SEO friendly and will mess entire link structure. To change this structure you must go to setting area of wordpress and select permalink settings and choose custom structure and fill it with “/%postname%“. After changes, your blog permalink structure will generate a URL similar to “http//www.yourdomainname.com/posttitle”
Many bloggers include category also in their permalink (%category%/%postname%), so they might benefit from keywords in category as it is part of their URL structure. But I prefer keeping my URL short which is better looking, easy to remember and also easily crawled by search engines robots.
ii) All in One SEO Plugin - One of best plugin in wordpress which help you to tweak and optimize your blog. You can easily tweak title, keywords and description for every posts and pages manually. If you don’t want to do it manually you can let plugin to do it and it will automatically optimize your title, meta keywords and descriptions for you.
iii) Use Keywords Rich Title and Post - You can benefit and boost your organic search result traffic by writing posts on keywords which is performing well in various search engines. I am using HitTail service. They observe my search hits in real time and provide me with writing suggestion for useful keywords which I can include in next post title to rank high in search engines.
iv) Headings, Alt tags and text links - You must try to use HI and H2 headings and may include few keywords in it. Also, for graphics use “alt” tags and “title” tag on text links. Use most important keywords in these tags, for better optimization for search engines.
v) Sitemaps- Majority of bloggers make a big mistake of not having a sitemap in their blog. For wordpress there are many plugins available to create sitemap without any know-how. XML Sitemap Generator plugin has worked well for me and it automatically notifies Google, Yahoo and MSN, for any updates in my blog. Other blogging platforms like bloggers can use xml-sitemaps.com to create their sitemap for free and then manually submit it to Google by joining Google Webmasters tools.
12) Marketing and Promoting Your Blog:
i) Search Engines: In my last post, I have already mentioned how to get your site indexed in Google under 24 hours. Actually to get indexed in Google in 24 hours, you need a website with very high page rank linking to your blog or website. I have already mentioned these sites with high PR, so make sure you check my last post.
Submit to search engine directories
Here is guidelines, you must follow when you are submitting to search engine directories:
* Directory should have high Page Rank.
* Use your main keywords on the backlinks, that will point to your website.
* Many directories have “no follow” tag, which means your submission on such directories will not result in any backlinks. So be sure that directories you are submitting allows follow tag.
* Before submitting to any human edited search directories, make sure that all links in your blog are working, otherwise it will result in rejection of your application.
Here is list of free directories where you can submit your blog (PR= Page Rank):
Addsitelink.com (PR 2)
Arakne-links.com (PR 4)
Blog-search.com (PR 3)
Bloglisting.net (PR 3)
Blogrankings.com (PR 4)
Dirgenius.com (PR 4)
Quickblogdirectory.com (PR 4)
Webdirectory-submit.com (PR 3)
Worldsiteindex.com (PR 4)
ii) Submit to Article Submission Directories
Guidelines: Please specify link of your website in the author bio box, so you can a quality backlinks from these high page rank Article Directories. Also, don’t forget you will also be getting instant traffic from readers who will visit this site to read articles and will visit your website by clicking links in your author bio box. Best way to make readers come to your website, is by mentioning in your bio box that you have special offers and free gifts in your website for all your visitors.
Here is list of free Article directories where you can submit your articles to get quality backlinks:
webarticles.com (PR 3)
goarticles.com (PR 6)
ezinearticles.com (PR 6)
content-articles.com (PR 3)
buzzle.com (PR 6)
articledashboard.com (PR 5)
free-articles-zone.com (PR 4)
articlecity.com (PR 5)
a1articles.com (PR 5)
ideamarketers.com (PR 5)
iii) Commenting on other blogs
No doubt this is one of the best strategy to get quality backlinks and traffic to your blog. But many bloggers are unaware with a fact, that they are not getting any backlinks from most of blogs they are commenting because of “no-follow” tag in comments. If you are just commenting to get backlinks for your blog, then you should need to select only blogs who allows “follow tag” in their comments. Best way to find this, is to install “NoDoFollow” plugin in firefox, which will highlight all links with “no-follow” tag as red and all links with “follow” tag as blue, which would be a extremely helpful to distinguishing a blog with such tags.
iv) Forums
Find forums in same niche as yours, read the posts, respond and participate actively and also make new threads about special offers and services provided by you. Again don’t forget to put your blog URL in your bio as a signature. Also, many forums now allows blogs to put XML feed as signature, so it would be a great help in bringing lots of traffic. You can check big-boards.com, they have lots of forums listed in their directory.
v) RSS feed directories:
You can get tons of traffic by submitting your feed to various RSS directories. But for best result you need to submit your feed to maximum of RSS feed directories. There are hundreds of them. Here is few where you can submit your feed right now:
http://rss-feeds-submission.com
http://yourfeeds.com/Submit-RSS.aspx
vi) Link Exchange:
You can see how many website links, I have already listed here in this page. It means when any of my readers click on any of these links and go to the website listed above, these websites are getting traffic. They are getting this privilege because they have good page rank and great contents and useful services. So if your website has good contents people will give links to your website automatically, without you asking them to do so. With useful stuffs and resources in your site, you will soon find that your visitors will promote and link to your website without you even asking them or even lifting your fingers.
But initially when you start your website, you need to build backlinks. All the above techniques that I have mentioned will give quality backlinks to your websites. Apart from this you can use Gotlinks.com and freerelevantlinks.com to build your backlinks manually with other blogs or websites in similar niche as yours .
vii) Video Submission:
This is one of the best way to get fast traffic to your blog or website. Even simple videos created with help of camtasia or Windows movie maker, can get you hundreds of visitors per day from youtube and other related sites. You can use tubemogul.com, to get your video submitted in 12 sites at once.
viii) Social Bookmarking Sites:
For me bookmarking my blog post after publishing is like a ritual habit, which should be followed without a miss to please myself and which helps me to get peaceful night sleep. So why it so important for me to bookmark it to such sites. Well it certainly brings good traffic, help me to get indexed in various search engines and certainly I want to impress Google so they can bestow their grace of giving me good page rank to my new blog in their next PR update. Here is some bookmarking sites which will work wonders for you. So have a nice happy time bookmarking your blog.
digg.com (my personal favourite)
But a word of caution, all these techniques will work only if you have a great quality contents for your visitors. If you don’t have value contents for your visitors, you are wasting your time. Visitors will never be loyal and will leave your blog as quickly as they came.
Content is truly a king, but still King needs a support of his soldiers (promotion) to win the battle. Neither one of them will survive if they work alone without supporting each other.
0 comments:
Post a Comment