25 Simple Blog SEO and Traffic Tips

This is a nice concise list of 25 ways to greatly increase your blog’s traffic and search rankings.

1. Content is king!
2. Submit your site to as many search engines as possible. After the initial indexing I would recommend resubmitting every 6 or so months. Although it isn’t required, it can help index some pages that may have been left out.
3. Comment on as many blogs as possible. Make your comments thoughtful and not spammy.
4. Link up with popular blogs - trackbacks can be good for SEO as well as your traffic.
5. Write a good article and if no one has already, post it on a site like Digg, although this won’t help as far as traffic goes (you will get a HUGE boost for a few hours, then it will tone back down, you probably won’t get many permanent readers from Digg) and it sure doesn’t help with your relationship with your web host, it can create some new inbound links; thus indirectly getting you more traffic by increasing your search rankings.
6. Use Google Sitemaps! Instead of the GoogleBot searching for your pages you can tell it where your pages are. This is a great way to get your whole site indexed. And now Yahoo, MSN, and Google are teaming up to create one “Google sitemap”-like protocol for all three of the big search engines.
7. Content is king!
8. Get listed on web directory like dmoz. Although many SEO “experts” think it is overrated no one disagrees that it can help boost your site’s rankings.
9. Add some links for feed readers and blog aggregators like BlogLines, Google Reader, and Yahoo! MyWeb.
10. Add some social bookmarking links at the bottom of each post (for obvious reasons)
11. Make it easy for your users to find your RSS feed
12. Add a “E-mail This!” link either on the header or the footer of each post. This provides a quick way for users to share your article with friends.
13. Content is king! (see a pattern?)
14. If you write a really good post try e-mailing the URL to some big-name bloggers with a short personalized message. You never know, they might like it and link to it.
15. Try asking some big sites who are in your niche if they would want to trade links. More often than not they will say “no”, but at least give it a try.
16. Don’t obsess over “get rich quick” schemes.
17. Don’t obsess over “get lots of traffic really quick” schemes.
18. Submit your RSS feed to a bunch of RSS directories.
19. Use Ping-O-Matic to notify a bunch of aggregators that your site has been updated.
20. Don’t obsess over the numbers - it takes time to build up a good reader base.
21. Make your posts as keyword rich as possible. Whenever you can use a word that has to do with your niche use it!
22. Use lists, especially if your site is targeted towards more tech-savvy users
23. If you have a MySpace page or a home page on a similar service put up a link to your blog.
24. Tag important keywords
25. Last but not least, offer free stuff. Everyone loves free stuff!

The really important thing you have to remember is, just have fun. If your blog is causing you to become stressed out then it probably is not a good idea to continue blogging. If your readers can tell you are having fun while providing good content they will become permanent readers.

Getting backlinks is important also, but always make sure the links are from quality sites.

Now you might be wondering why I included things like “don’t obsess over…” Well, a lot of new bloggers will make their eyes explode from looking at the numbers too much. If you obsess over “get rich quick” or “get lots of traffic quick” schemes you will most likely do something stupid that will actually hurt your blog’s ranking.

And also, don’t use automated link exchanges. Manual exchanges are much better for SEO.

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