How to Get Search Engine Traffic To Your Blog
Rumor has it that if you spend countless hours implementing tons of SEO WordPress plugins your traffic will explode.
I disagree.
Now, I am not saying that SEO isn’t important, and that guys like Aaron Wall don’t know what they are talking about - because I know they do. Otherwise they wouldn’t charge $500/hour, which by the way, I’m guessing is still worth it.
However, I just wanted to state something which I feel is still worthy of sharing. Because I haven’t spent any time installing any SEO WordPress plugin, yet still am getting great results in Google Search, I feel that I can say this:
Content is king.
You may hear this time and time again, but the fact of the matter is this - if you have zero SEO plugins, but write good content, you will see better results that SEOing the heck out of your blog, and using duplicate content. But one more thing I’ve noticed…
Post titles and permalinks matter.
If you are targeting specific search terms, try using them in your post title and permalinks. This will most certainly help you get good rankings. Here’s how I know - my blog is obviously focused on design, and topics that include WordPress, themes, and a degree of blog consulting.
But go search Google for Rachel McAdams Pink Hair and check out the first page of the results and you’ll see my site listed among the many entertainment sites that you’d expect to find for that search. Case in point.
You are so right. Content is very important when it comes to SEO. I’ve found out that after all the time and money I’ve spent trying to learn the secret to driving traffic to my websites, I could have built one really good website that was full of original content and be generating hundreds of thousands of unique visitors per month. That is the secret. Good ol’ fashion content. The problem is that no one is willingly to take their time and type up good content & those are the people who won’t get any traffic. (Well free traffic.)
-Great post.
Content is very important to SEO and is King. Without a doubt, and I bow before it’s humble reign. However, the rest of the SEO elements used are the princes (eg. post titles, permalinks, page title, heading tags, and even meta tags). Using them all in concert with each other will go a long way in boosting not only your search engine traffic, but your relevance to the search audience. It is far better to have quality traffic than spikes of ‘fluff’ traffic. Relevance will drive visitors, sales, and subscriptions (if its a blog) and let’s face it that is all you could ask for.
Just a few pennies from my pocket.
I agree with you Brian that the SEO plug in are not needed. They are just lazy SEO tools that do not provide an instant solution.
Besides using good perma link structure and good titles here is one other key thing.
Time-hey you are not going to rank on day one, just deal with it.
Brian, I’m glad you have not been seduced by the sirens of SEO. It is like creating flashing television commercials, slick print ads and spending mucho bucks on a cutting edge logo to draw people into a store with empty shelves. What use is traffic if they just pull a u-turn once inside and tell their friends to never shop there? As the tiny corner store that thrived alongside a giant mega-mall, the key to successful blogging is simple, but takes more time than a plug-in or shelling out bucks to game the system: well-written content people can use and that they’ll tell friends about. I’ll take a dozen well-satisfied readers over SEO any day.
Amen !!!
Thats it. And some funny guys don’t have anything in their blogs but trying to be … on first 10 in google
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There is nothing on this site about the all mighty back links. There is a ton of advice out here that says that irregardless of all the other SEO stuff you need to do, and one of the very best activities you should be doing on a regular basis is getting one way links out here. The best way to do that is submit articles to the article directories, good articles that will be published and those links back to your site will be there for a long time. This is time consuming work, but rest assured once it is done, you will be able to see the results with the residual traffic that will keep coming in. I personally have never used Wordpress, although I have blogs and they do bring in traffic to my web sites. Gotta blog and ping tho.