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).
