5 techniques to increase your blog traffic

Thanks. I got a little lost at the meeting Tuesday. Some of the others are more advanced. This gives me a chance to look again.

Great. I enjoyed the presentation, and am glad I don't have to rely on faulty note-taking.
Thank you for being there, and thanks to Bill for setting it up.
-r

The 5 secrets to SEO success are the standard recommendations to get traffic. If google search provided 3000+ new strangers to your average blog then there would be more than 20+ million unemployed in America... People would quit their jobs to make a living blogging!

What should bloggers do that rank on page 1 of google search (on 20+ keywords) but get "<10 clicks"...zero strangers? First, don't give up on google search. The ads often look better than the website content.

Second and probably most important...if the 'little guy/gal' did what the 'big guys/gals' do then they would most certainly be as successful. So what do the big ones do? When the littles create content, the big ones get the link and the traffic as in ArticlesBase

In a more perfect world...full of happiness and sharing on a 'little' scale...bloggers would create content and then share a link to that content with a expanding circle (like a drop in a zen pond) of other bloggers. In return, when the other bloggers create content the original blogger would publish a link to it (subject to site suitability ).

The above network of links is why you would want to stick with google search...their page ranking is based on in and out bound links to a website/blog. This assumes that you have some sort of revenue generating 'thing' on your website. For most sites, this is a google ad block but it could be a 'subscribe to my newletter for $$ button' or 'see me in person for $$ button', a text phrase : 'please send a check to...', etc.

If you can build it...a social network...of in/out links...then they will come. If this meetup helps organize bloggers with the standard SEO secrets and sharing blogger links...I think that all that participate will see substantial gains assuming regular content production and link sharing.

Someone please tell me again why tags are not good. I see them on a lot of blogs. Isn't that one of the ways you get found?

I didn't know that tags were bad. I did some research years ago and recall that search engines have mysterious algorithms that distinguish between 'Meta tags' and 'content' for old-school websites. There are various Meta tags. One of which is called 'keywords'. According WC3, this is where you should put about 25 keywords MAX that RELATE to the content in the body of the website page. There are some online tools that analyze the relationship between the meta tags and the content. These tools work similar to the search engine robots and give immediate feedback about the site's 'visibility'.

But that's so yesterday. Today's social networking sites handle most of the boring technical details for the user/blogger. Many provide a place to enter a list of keywords/tags for the user content whether it's text, pictures, static video or dynamic streaming video.

Tags are the ONLY way search engines can find SOME video content/blogs especially ones based on WINDOWS SILVERLIGHT. I think Microsoft recommends that Silverlight video bloggers duplicate the entire video content with a text transcript! On the other hand, I think search engines can index Flash based videos without a transcript or tags.

Tags should be 'good' when they relate to the content and are placed in the right place.

I've got some example traffic numbers for http://www.areo12043.... using old-school data analysis. I used http://www.weblogexpe...to 'crunch' the web log file. I've haven't used new-school google analytics but hopefully the numbers should be similar:

• 2009: average of about 8K visitors/month.
  
• May 2010 : 15,000 visitors/month, 14 from search or 1/10 of 1% from major search engines.
  
• June 2010: 25,000 visitors/month, 17 from search or 1/20 of 1% from major search engines.
  

The good news from the data is that there is traffic and it's increasing to the point that it could transistion from a hobby into something more substantial; It's possible to build traffic without major contributions from search engines.

It would be great to have search engines make a major, additional, increase in the traffic numbers.

What I understood the speaker to say was that tags were not a good thing to use and that keywords were a different entity. I don't understand all the terminologies enough to know all the ins and outs.