Saturday, September 27, 2008

Quick Tricks For Driving Traffic to Your Blog

By Nathan Denton

Link Exchanges

Participating in link exchanges is a crucial part of blog promotion for any budding blogger. Link exchanges - organized and unorganized - allow bloggers and webmasters to get backlinks on sites and also allow them to add useful resources to their own blogs or sites.

One of the best ways to improve your search engine rankings is by tuning your offpage factors - or all the factors that you cannot control by optimizing your blog. The most important offpage factors are the links incoming to your blog - reciprocal or one-way.

There are two important things to take into consideration when creating link text or code for future link exchanges: the text in the title and the text in the description. According to most search engine optimization experts, the text in the title is most important. You will want to put the keyphrase you wish to optimize for in the title. While there is more debate over the relevance of the text above and below the link, most experts agree that there's a good chance that it will affect how your site is ranked. For this reason, you may want to attempt to optimize it. Additionally, when you engage in link exchanges regularly, you will want to switch your title text relatively often. This will allow you to optimize for multiple keywords.

The last thing you will need to consider is how you will go about finding link parts for your blog. You can start by looking up related blogs in Blog Wise. You can then send a personal email to each of the blog owners, asking whether or not they would be interested in some link exchanges. At the same time, you should consider signing up for a free link exchange system, such as Link Metro, which will allow you to freely exchange links with other bloggers and webmasters by looking up their sites and then sending them an automated message.

Submitting Your Blog to RSS & Blog Directories

Submitting your blog to RSS & blog directories is considerably easier than submitting fully-functional sites to website directories. This is because there are free, automatic systems in place that allow you to submit an updated version of your blog to directories without doing any form-filling.

This automatic system for submitting your blog to RSS & blog directories is known as pinging. You ping your blog at sites like kping.com and pingoat.com. When you ping your blog, the system will automatically send the latest update from your blog to all of the largest blog directories - usually on the order of about 40 or so. This means that submitting your blog to RSS & blog directories can actually be as simple as filling in your URL and title - and then hitting submit. The only thing you will want to be careful about is the title you use. You will want to make sure that you use your most targeted keyword in the title you submit, as that will be attached to all of the backlinks you receive from these directories.

Additionally, submitting your blog to RSS & blog directories will get your blog placed on the front page of a number of blog directories. This may generate some quick traffic for you from people who are looking at the latest blogs to be updated.

Once you are finished submitting your blog to RSS & blog directories via ping, you will then want to search out directories that you cannot ping and submit to them individually. Vilesilencer.com provides a fairly complete list of RSS and blog directories. You will want to first submit to directories that offer certain perks (i.e., first page listings) or have higher PR - as this will confer higher more PR to your blog. Since you cannot submit to most RSS directories via ping, they will probably make up the bulk of your submissions.

Leverage on Article Marketing

Article marketing - or the process of getting traffic by submitting articles - is considered to be one of the most effective forms of traffic generation currently available today. However, there are a number of important things you should take into consideration before you begin to gain leverage on article marketing campaigns.

The first thing you will want to consider is your use of keywords. While it might seem like a good idea to optimize your articles for keywords you will use for your own site pages, this actually could be a serious faux pas in the long run.

This is because the article directories to which you submit will unquestionably have more backlinks and higher page rank scores, which means that a well-optimized article could effectively prevent your own site from capturing the first spot on the search engines, decreasing your leverage on article marketing efforts.

This is especially true if you optimize for relatively obscure words for which you do have a chance to capture the first spot. Additionally, as you gain leverage on your article marketing campaign, you may lose leverage on the algorithm ranking of your site. This is because an identical article will only count as unique content on one site. If you submit to a directory, that directory will get spidered before your site, which means that directory will get recorded as having provided the unique content, even though it was actually your work.

If you want to gain leverage on article marketing and site optimization, you will need to follow three simple steps:

1) select keywords for which you will not optimize; instead, use your site optimization keywords in your resource box and link title;

2) modify articles if you perform multiple submissions (i.e., make each article look unique without ruining the information or readability); and

3) ensure that articles actually contain high-quality information that will inspire enough curiosity to drive visitors to your site.


So there you have it, simple methods anyone can use to boost the traffic they receive on their blog.

Nathan Denton is the owner of The Ultimate Profit Site - A new resource offering tips and free resources to boost your profits online. Visit http://www.theultimateprofitsite.com to learn about the resources and get your FREE video course.

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