19
Apr 07
Apr 07
by Neil Patel Strategy with 5 Comments
We all know that search engines can drive thousands of visitors to a website within a short period of time, but very few of us actually get that kind of traffic. If you are looking for more organic search traffic for your blog, here are a few blogging tips that can help you:
The long tail
In the past I blogged about going after long tail keywords because they are a lot less competitive, but how many of you actually go after them? Programs like HitTail are great at helping you determine which non-competitive terms that you can go after that drive tons of traffic. For all the blogs that I optimized such as TechCrunch and Mashable the majority of their search traffic comes from long tail keywords. You would be surprised at how long tail keywords can add up to 10,000 or even 20,000 daily search engine hits for these blogs.
Product / Website reviews
If you are a blogger you probably hate getting hit up by people with products who are requesting a review. In most cases these products or websites will not get popular so if you rank for them you will not get much traffic at all, but some of these terms will turn into brand names and can drive thousands of visitors. Just look at terms like youtube, bebo, myspace, facebook, and ebuddy.
You don’t always want to blog on things just for traffic but the goal with reviews is to write on stuff that will benefit your readers as well as drive tons of search engine hits.
Breaking News
The thing with breaking news is that you have to blog about it right away or else you will not get much search love on the topic. If you have the time to blog on news right when it hits it will not only drive tons of traffic right then and there, but it will drive traffic months after the news is old. One good example of this is all of the people who blogged about Utube.com suing YouTube. They got tons of traffic for the phrase "Utube". On our company blog, Pronetadvertising.com, we get tons of search traffic for the term utube.com, even though the news is really old.
If you are having a hard time finding breaking news, you may want to check out sites like TechMeme.
Linkbait
Writing quality content for links and social sites is always a great way to improve search traffic. Sites like Digg, Del.icio.us and Netscape can drive thousands of visitors and more importantly thousands of links. If you write how to guides or lists you will have a great chance of getting tons of natural links which will improve your overall sites search traffic. An easy way to find out what works well on these social sites is to do some searches and look for what was popular in the past.
There are probably tons of other techniques you can use to increase search traffic to your blog, these are just the ones I use on a regular basis. What specific methods do you use to increase your search traffic?
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long tail keywords can really bring in lot of traffic. 65 percent of the referrals to my main site comes from long tail keywords. It might be searched once once in a bluemoon but still it counts.
I’d tread carefully with HitTail. It has hiccups sometimes and when it does it keeps your site from loading. I’ve experienced this on my own site and a friend had it happen to him too. I’m guessing it’s related to server capacity so hopefully they’ll get the issue resolved soon.
Long tail keywords is the key to success in my opinion.
I like to write the occasional “breaking news” article as that tends to get a lot of attention and drives traffic to my site. The more cutting edge the news, the better too.
We endeavor to make HitTail the fastest loaded and most well behaved tracking systems on the Internet. For example, it only calls back to mama on the first page-load of the session, meaning it effectively “goes quiet” with every subsequent page-load, dramatically cutting down the possibility of slowing down page-loads.