Setting up a blog is one thing. Making it work as hard as possible for your business is another. Here are twenty five ways to attract more people to your blog and keep search engines happy.
25 tips for getting more blog visitors
- Use key words and phrases within your posts and post titles to make your blog search engine friendly. When search engines ‘know’ what your blog is about they can classify it accurately and make sure it pops up in front of people who search on your key terms. Need advice? WordPress and the other major blog platforms all provide blog SEO tutorials and guides. And Google’s keyword research tool is as good as any
- Take advantage of SEO-related plug-ins that do a lot of the hard work for you. I use an all-in-one SEO pack plug-in for WordPress
- Include images. They make such a difference to the way blog posts look, and people are more likely to read illustrated posts
- Vary the length of your posts to keep human visitors interested. Some short, some medium, some long
- Tweet your posts on Twitter and promote them on Facebook, LinkedIn etcetera for an integrated approach and extra traffic
- Make sure your blog post urls are simple and readable, not great long strings of letters, symbols and numbers. You can get information about how to create user friendly URLs via most popular blog platforms, and with some you can get it sorted in one click
- Put your blog on the same url as your business so all that lovely SEO juice benefits your site
- Check Google Analytics regularly to spot trends, peaks or troughs. You might find some subjects attract more interest than others, acting as valuable link bait
- Download a good spam filter so your blog doesn’t fill up with crappy spam comments
- Make sure your blog ‘pings’ out to the world every time you create a new post. Check out your back-end blog CMS to find out how to make it happen
- Include links to useful, entertaining, interesting, relevant and exciting places
- Make your blog look as good as possible, while keeping it simple. Eye candy helps pull in readers!
- Be consistent. If you’re the only contributor, make sure you use the same tone of voice throughout your posts
- Add your blog address to your email communications, as part of your contact details
- Invite comments by actually asking people to interact, posing questions like, “What do you think?”and “What are your experiences?”
- Create blog titles that knock people’s socks off, make them want to read on and give you back-links
- Vary the subject matter to keep things interesting: Q&As, special offers, useful links, surveys, news and views, thought pieces, funny stuff, controversial stuff, product launches…
- Keep it soft sell. There’s nothing more boring than reading a hard sell blog full of excessive trumpet blowing
- Keep your eye on trending topics and react to breaking news as it breaks
- Allow guest blog posts from reliable sources
- Ask for contributions from people in your field you admire and respect
- Write about customers or business partners, encouraging them to link from their site to your blog for extra link oomph
- Blog regularly to keep search engine bots and spiders on their toes and get your blog re-indexed frequently
- Write in plain language and don’t be scared to express your personality. The theory of Likeonomics is huge these days and marketers everywhere are discovering the value of being human in a business context!
- Allow comments, but learn what’s spam and what isn’t. Once you get the hang of it it’s easy to distinguish genuine feedback from comment spam, which can devalue your blog in savvy readers’ eyes. Your blog’s spam filter plug-in will catch some of it, but not necessarily all of it
What about your own tips to attract more blog visitors? Feel free to leave a comment.
