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Each day thousands of new websites and blogs are added to search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Blogging in particular has become a household term not to mention a popular source of a good chunk of today’s internet traffic. Whether you’re representing a company, organization, sports group or even just representing yourself and your point of view, there’s an endless source of reasons to start your own blog. The hardest part about maintaining a blog though is generating enough traffic to keep you interested and/or eventually making money from the visitors to your site. The basic goal should be to not only attract new visitors to your blog, but also make them want to come back regularly for more.

The two biggest factors in blogging boil down to keywords and content. In order for people to not only find your blog on the internet but also understand what it’s all about in a brief ’site-scan’ you should focus on creating a set of keywords that will serve as the generalized theme or ‘topic’ that your website is about. These keywords will help your site if you properly incorporate them in blog posts, categories as well as by using them in HTML tags and potentially even the title of specific pages. Once you’ve determined what your blog will be focused on you will need to create content based on that keyword list you just made. Keep each post to a specific topic, as it will help with both onsite SEO not to mention will help your reader stay focused on the message you’re hoping to convey. Treat each post as a properly formatted email or letter, using new paragraphs for large segments or changes in tone. Including polls, images, video and links to similar content is an easy way to keep your content interesting and fresh.

Facebook, Twitter and Myspace are just a few of the popular social networking sites that you can use for free to increase your new blogs exposure. They’ve managed to become hubs to millions of users who interact on a daily-basis with other members on just about every subject known to man. Not only that but there are new social networking sites sprouting up each day to serve as a meeting place for specific topics or groups. To expand your reach by using these sites, first create a public profile, remembering to add a link to your blog as your ‘homepage’ or ‘personal URL’ and then do a search for topics discussed in your blog. Once you’ve found users, groups or topics similar to your own, try to engage participating members in a discussion furthering the subject matter and if possible adding an eventual link back to your blog for them to continue the conversation (or to view similar media that you’ve posted to your blog). Don’t link-spam though, this is the act of hammering discussions or threads with links for self-promotion. The general rule of thumb is: If you can’t add something positive to the conversation, stay out of it. Another tactic to increase traffic to your blog is to get listed in the various blog directories that are available on the web. These directories can be found pretty easily by performing a search for blog directories + “subject-matter.” For instance i’d search for (removing the quotes though) “blogging directories + seo” for SEO related directories.

Try to think outside the box on this one by going beyond electronic media. Apart from online marketing you can also go for offline marketing by way of newspapers, magazines, journals, yellow pages. This is another medium to increase traffic to your blog. Another tactic is to offer free downloads. This is another new and most popular thing which is found these days on almost every site. Put interesting software such as freeware, demo etc and let the visitors download them for free. Like this you can attract visitors and influence there curiosity to visit your blog for some interesting and new downloadable software’s.

The big question most new bloggers ask is how other internet users will find their site. The primary way that most users will find their way to your blog is through search engines. Whether its Yahoo!, Google, Bing or any other search portal, they’ll find your site when they search for some of the keywords that you should be creating content about. For instance if a user was looking for articles on ‘blog seo’ and I have an article or post on that topic then there’s a good chance it will show up when searched for. These search engines will catalog your website content every time that you update or add new content. To speed up the time it takes for the search engines ’spiders’ to crawl your site you should ‘ping’ new pages after you’ve created them to alert search engines to the new content. If you’re using a blog hosted on wordpress.com, blog.com or similar sites then this will be taken care of for you. If not (or if you’d like to be double-sure that your new content is indexed) then you can use free online ping tools like Ping-O-Matic or the PingNinja. Each is pretty self-explanatory, you just enter in the URL of the new post or content, then hit the submit button.

Learn more about website seo and use the free blog ping tool at PingNinja.com

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