How To Increase Traffic To Your Blog

While I am no expert, I have been able to increase visits to my blog 3 fold using these very simple steps:

1. Make sure Google's, Yahoo's, and MSN's web crawlers can crawl through your blog. Dynamically generated blogs - those using a database backend - are a lot harder for web crawlers to archive correctly. If you use blogger.com like I do, you will notice that each entry is its own page and nothing is dynamic. This makes your blog much easier to crawl.
   
   
2. Comment on other people's blogs! This has got to be the number one way to increase traffic to your blog. Visit blogs that are similar to yours, but much more popular, and leave a thoughtful comment on different entries. Most of the time, they allow you to leave your website address when leaving a comment, which really helps drive traffic.
   
   Now please understand that spamming blogs with your blog address is NOT going to help! You have to leave a real comment! This will also help you develop alliances with other blogs and hopefully have them link to you on their homepage.
   
   
3. Write often. You can't drive traffic if you haven't written an entry in months. Ultimately, you want the people who visit your blog to LIKE your blog and hopefully bookmark it.
   
   
4. Write about recent events. If you're writing about everyday things, make sure you also bring up and discuss top news stories. People are searching for these on Google and you want your site to appear somewhere in those search results. In addition, many people will reference your site when discussing the topic. My copy-paste of George Carlin's The Planet is Fine is bringing in more traffic than all my other entries combined! This is because a lot of websites are referencing my site for the quote.
   
   
5. Put your blog address in the signature of your email, along with your name. Every time you send an email out, you will also be advertising your blog.
   
   
6. Tags! These are becoming VERY hot in the blogosphere. Visit the leader in the tagging game, Technorati, and sign up! It really helps boost visits.
   
   
7. Write a meme (rhymes with dream). While a lot of the ones I see on sites like myspace are usually utterly immature, you can write a very decent and thoughtful one to give insight into your life. As stated on The Daily Meme, a meme is a list of questions that you saw somewhere else and decided to answer. Check out the examples on their page. The goal is to have some other blogger see yours, decide to answer the questions themselves, and credit your site for the inspiration.
   
   
8. Spell check spell check spell check!! There is nothing worse than misspellings on your blog, especially on important keywords. That's pretty much shooting yourself in the foot. Don't shoot yourself in the foot., especially if you are on the second floor. You might end up hurting someone, you know!
   

These are all I can think of for now. You can read more here:
Blogger Help: Promoting Your Blog
Search Engine Journal: Increase Traffic to Your Blog from Search Engines
Why Blog? How to Increase Traffic to You Blog, Provide Value to Your Readers

In the end, they all say the same thing, but it's good to read different perspectives on the topic.

That's it for now, happy blogging!



Blatantly stolen from Davezilla