Photo on Flickr by lumaxart

OK, time to get back to a regular service after all that chocolatey goodness!

When you start a blog, you post a few times and sit back and wait for the visitors to come.

You can wait a very long time.

Bringing organic traffic to your blog without using backlinks or article submission websites can prove very frustrating. The golden grail of getting to the top of Google can prove insurmountable for some people. I have tripled the traffic to this blog using one simple strategy which I will share in a minute.

First of all, check that your website has a sitemap and that you have submitted it to Google. This ensures that your website will be indexed more quickly. If you have a WordPress website, then you can use a plug-in to create your sitemap. Submitting it to Google involves signing up for a Google account and posting a bit of code on one of your webpages. This enables Google to check that your website is genuine and being maintained by a real person.

You are also best to have a privacy policy if you have a comments section or intend to run a mailing list. If you intend to monetise your blog with Adsense, then you definitely need a privacy policy. You can find lots of examples of privacy policies out there on the internet if you search for them.

Your website is now well set up: you have a sitemap and Google knows you are there. You have a privacy policy which ensures that visitors to your site know that you are not going to run offer and sell their email details to the first company that asks.

Now for my strategy:

I decided that I would start to blog regularly.

For me that was three times a week.

That’s it. Simple, isn’t it? I taught myself to schedule posts and try to write them in advance. I scour business forums and faqs for ideas for posts and I have managed to keep it going (with occasional hiccups) thus far. It is working. Choosing to blog so regularly is bringing traffic to my website and I am pretty pleased with it.

What about you? Would you like more traffic to your website? Do you think you need to blog more regularly?

How often you choose to blog is entirely up to you. Some people prefer to blog five times a week, others every day. Some people prefer to blog once a week. The more often that content is added to a website, the more Google will like it. However as long as content is added regularly then visitors will increase.

Of course, article submissions, forum and blog comments and backlinks all help too. But it has amazed me how such a simple strategy as making a resolve to blog regularly and consistently could bring such results.

Photo Credit: Photo on Flickr by Lumaxart.com

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Image via CrunchBase

Last week, the biggest search engine on the internet at the moment announced a change to the algorithm it uses to rank articles when responding to search criteria. The change was meant to help to weed out duplicate and low ranking articles on content websites, sometimes referred to as ‘content farms’. The idea is that more relevant content will be brought to the top of a search listing which should help to reward more useful articles and blogs.

This caused speculation as to which of the content websites are being targeted in this way. Suite101 and Hubpages, which are both revenue-share models, are two websites which have seen some of their articles fall from grace, although whether this is due to the implementation of the algorithm, who can tell? On the other hand, Ehow articles seem to have benefitted from the changes.

Demand Media owns Ehow and is considered by some commentators to be a content farm although it pays for articles upfront. The company has responded that it is not being singled out for this treatment and that of the articles it has, some are benefitting while others are suffering. The company suggests that it will pay more heed to what consumers want in the future.

In the early days of internet marketing, web marketers threw up websites with a little content and a lot of adverts. These websites were of little informational value; they were unashamedly there to encourage visitors to click on the ads and no more. Now consumers demand more of their websites: they use the internet regularly for information and expect the results returned by their searches to be of good quality and useful. The search engine could argue that it is responding to consumer demand and trying to crack down on low quality websites.

I think that this will even out in time. The results will show an initial dip and the companies affected will have to take steps to protect their page rankings and ensure that the content that they produce is of a good enough quality to count as useful information. However, Google has a symbiotic relationship with these websites. They use its adverts as part of their revenue share model and to destroy them completely would not be in the search engine’s best interests. It is therefore probably more likely to be a warning shot to the companies to encourage the production of well-written information rather than lazy, badly constructed content. This can only improve the internet for everyone concerned.

For more reading, check out this article.

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Image via Wikipedia

Keyword phrases help to define your blog and explain to the search engines what your blog is all about. If you want to lift your blog above others in the same subject, then it is important to get your keyword phrases right so that when customers search for a subject, then your blog is the one they find.

There are two aspects to choosing the correct keywords for your blog: the frequency of the search and the competition for the keyword. You can easily use the Google Adwords tool to search for your keyword phrase. Google Adwords will show you the volume of searches, based in your country for your keyword phrase. It will also give you an idea of the competition for the keyword, grading it as high, medium or low. It is a good idea to write down the information in a spreadsheet so that you will know which keywords will be the best for you.

Checking Out Keyword Competition and Volume

The competition tells you how many other people are trying to rank for that keyword in the search engines. It is generally best to look for medium-ranked keywords which a reasonable search volume. This is not an exact science, however and it is possible for low ranked keywords to have a high conversion rate despite reasonably low searches. It may be best to leave such experiments until you are more familiar with the process.

Once you have a list of keyword phrases that you would like to rank for, then try and work out a list of potential articles that could include one or more of your keyword phrases. I tend to do them in groups of ten. You can use forums, internet questions and the phrases themselves to help you work out a list of articles.

Write  a Natural Article Around Your Keyword Phrase

When writing an article, keep your chosen keywords in mind, but don’t overuse them. Write naturally, in a readable style about the subject, including useful information, bullet points and sub-headings. Once you have finished writing, then go back and check over your work. You are looking for an easy to read style with the words you are aiming for used four or five times over the work. The writing should be between 400 – 600 words. You can use your keyword phrases in the sub-headings and picture captions as well as in the body of the text. It should be obvious what the article is about, just not unnaturally stuffed with the words that you are trying to rank for.

Write Frequently

If you are able to write two or three posts, so much the better. A website will rank better in the search engines if content is added frequently and regularly. This blog is updated three times a week. Other blog owners prefer to post every day. You should at least aim for once a week, but bear in mind the more frequently you post, the more likely it is that your website will rise in the search engines.

Check Your Stats

Keep an eye on your website statistics and check regularly on the search engines to see how you are doing. You may have to adjust your keyword phrases if they do not seem to be working for you. Expect this to take a little time. The older the website, the more likely the search engines are to trust it.

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