SEO Strategies to Generate Targeted Traffic

Most bloggers and website owners end up concentrating their efforts on getting traffic. That is totally the wrong approach to take. Yes, at this point you’re probably thinking if I meant to say that or not. But bear with me on this – simply getting traffic on your blog or website is not an accomplishment by any means. But the ability to generate ‘targeted’ traffic – visitors who have an interest in your products, service or the content of your blog – is what matters!

The fact of the matter is that while most blogs find it easy to generate traffic, they struggle when it comes to generating targeted traffic.

A blog covering the smartphone industry would not benefit from visitors who don’t have any interest in smartphones. Similarly, a blog selling SEO services and Wordpress plugins would need to be able to get people such as those involved in SEO, bloggers and webmasters; a bunch of people looking for electronics online would be totally useless to that blog.

The inability to generate targeted traffic is damaging, to say the least, and ends up costing blogs significant amounts of money and revenue in the long run. It also has a negative effect on many of your blog’s metrics as well.

Here are 5 SEO strategies that will allow you to generate targeted online visitors for your blog, that will have an interest in the information or content you’re put up, or the products or services that you provide – essentially traffic that converts, and puts more money in your pocket!

1. Start targeting long-tailed keywords. Most blogger try ranking for single-term keywords. As a result, competition is usually very high for such keywords, and it becomes difficult to rank well for these keywords. Long-tailed keywords, or rather keyphrases (such as the one used in this post’s title) are relatively easier to rank for (because they have less competition) but still get a large amount of traffic.

Some long-tailed keywords are searched thousands of times on a daily basis, and have a relatively small number of bloggers trying to rank for them (less competition), which means that in some cases, using long-tailed keywords alone could provide you with a massive SERP boost, putting you on top of the search engine results page without the need of any linkbuilding!

2. Expand your keyword strategy. Instead of trying to rank for a single or a couple of keywords, create posts and pages which aim to rank for more than 2 keywords. This will allow you to be able to get relevant traffic for many different keywords and a constant stream of traffic for each keyword.

For instance if you put up 10 posts in 30 days, and each post targets 5 different keywords, you’ll have 50 relevant keywords, allowing you to be able to get traffic for all these keywords on a continuous basis.

A diverse keyword portfolio, consisting of a mix of terms that best describe your products/services will allow you to be able to get more visibility and exposure on search engines, and maybe even see your blog rank well for all these keywords that people may actually be searching for.

3. Blog-commenting, or posting comments on blogs can be an invaluable source of highly targeted traffic. For instance I spend a significant amount of my ‘blogging time’ posting comments on various blogs that (a) are relevant to the subject matter/theme of my own blogs, and (b) have the ‘dofollow’ attribute enabled on the comments.

This is beneficial because not only does it provide me with updates from within the industry, increase my knowledge, allows me to read on the happenings in my field, and allows me to network and connect with like-minded bloggers, I am also able to acquire a quick dofollow backlinks to my blog from a high-PR and authority source.

Blogs that use the CommentLuv plugin (or similar comment plugins) also place a link to one of your posts along with your comment. This means that your link (or the title of one of your posts) eventually comes across and is seen by a large group of people, who are all interested in what you’re offering – aka. targeted traffic.

4. Guest Blogging is one of the best, Google-friendly ways of building links and driving in traffic to your blog. Personally, I am a big fan of guest blogging, as it is lets you build quality, high-PR backlinks, improve SERP, build reputation and generating extremely targeted traffic to your blog.

A lot of blogs offer guest-posting opportunities, because blogs need a regular dose of fresh content to rank well and bring visitors in. When choosing a blog to guest post on, make sure that it has a high Page Rank and Alexa Rank, receives a good amount of traffic, and is generally active in terms of comments.

As far as the content is concerned, choose interesting topics, develop catchy titles and write well-researched and well-written posts. Ask the blog-owner about where how many times you can include the link to your own blog/posts in the write-up. It is also recommended to choose certain relevant keywords and construct your write-up around them.

Once again, as with blog-commenting, it is important to choose blogs that are the most relevant to the content of your own blog – relevance equals targeted traffic.

5. Press Release. If done correctly, press releases can be an extremely effective way of spreading word about your blog online, and of course, get targeted inbound traffic.

Google seems to be particularly fond of press release websites, mostly because press releases are a good way spreading highly-valuable content. If you can successfully write a news-worthy and buzz-worthy story related to your niche, it is bound to be picked up by a lot of people, providing you with invaluable exposure.

Submit your press release to one of the many PR-submission portals out there. For me, PRWeb.com and DirectionsMag.com (a PR7 website!) are two of the best in the business for this purpose. Both these do a good job of announcing your press release to every blog/website out these within your niche, and mass-distribute your release.

Special mentions:

(a) Buying targeted traffic through Google AdWords.

(b) Generating targeted traffic through Facebook and Twitter (among other social mediums).