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Monday
Mar012010

3 Blogger SEO Tips: How to Attract Traffic to Your Website

Creating a blog for your company provides opportunities for having conversations around the topics that brought your visitors to your blog/website. And attracting more traffic means answering more questions about the topic you know and love. During the course of answering all of these questions, you'll realize you've created a nice, low-cost lead pipeline. In fact, a recent eMarketer article reports that the blog continues to be one of the most cost-effective means of creating new leads. And a great way to attract traffic to a website is through search engine optimization, or SEO.  Today's post centers on three blogger SEO tips on how to attract traffic to your blog or website.

1. Free Google Blogger SEO Tools

When you're writing your blog posts and especially post titles, it's important to include popular phrases and terms specific to your line of work. Including these "keyword phrases" more throughout each article helps Google deliver more searchers to your doorstep. Google has several free tools that always come in handy:

  • Google Insights for Search - This search aggregate tool can help you spot trends in what people are searching for over time and by geographic location. Make investments in future SEO traffic by writing about topics that are gaining in overall popularity.

blogger seo tip insights for searchInsights for Search provides search trending analytics.

  • Attract Traffic Your Website Wonder WheelWonder Wheel shows relationships between search keywords.Wonder Wheel - In Google's mind, all search terms are related. Blogging about closely related topics over time will create signals of authority from your site that Google references in its search algorithms.  You can access Google's Wonder Wheel through any standard search result by selecting Show options from the top navigation, then Wonder Wheel from the secondary navigation that appears.
  • Search Keyword Tool - Still the best free SEO tool out there, this Google tool allows you to see which keywords people are searching for most and how much competition there is to rank highly for each term. Bloggers typically have the the most luck attracting SEO traffic by selecting keyword phrases that are the ideal mix of high volume and low competition.

 Blogger SEO Tip Search Keyword ToolThe Keyword Tool shows potential traffic and competition for target keyword phrases.

2. SEO Site Tools Chrome Extension

SEO Site Tools is a new extension for the Chrome web browser that quickly allows you to compare the relative SEO value of a web page.  I had the opportunity to provide some beta testing to Twitter friend and fellow blogger, Carter Cole, who recently launched his new SEO tool on his blog and SEOmoz. SEO Site Tools presents standard SEO scores (e.g., AlexaRank, MozRank and Google's PageRank) as well as all sorts of other SEO bells and whistles, such as features for social media and SEO suggestions.  Tools like Carter's help bloggers aggregate SEO research into one tool, helping them to quickly assess their ability to rank for a particular keyword.

Blogger SEO Tip: SEO Site ToolsCarter Cole's new Chrome SEO extension

3. Create Excellent, Linkable Content

Many traditional on-page SEO tactics just aren't as effective as they used to be.  Optimizing the placement of keywords throughout your site provides less benefit than it once did.  Instead, the overall trust and authority of the site plays a much more important factor on how a page ranks for Google.  And the ultimate signal for Google for trust and authority is an inbound link from a related website.  If people with similar sites are including links to your site in their content, it's a pretty good indicator that they're referencing you as an expert. Creating plenty of excellent, linkable content is one of the best ways to attract maximum SEO traffic to your blog.

Blogging on behalf of your business can be a great way to establish credibility and obtain low-cost leads. But SEO is just one of many tactics to attract traffic to your website. And there are many more tips out there. Leave a comment below to share your blogger tips, SEO or otherwise, on attracting traffic to your blog/website.

Reader Comments (10)

These are some really great tips. I really like the Google Insights tool.

March 1, 2010 | Unregistered CommenterGrant Novey

nice extension you got listed there... thanks for all your suggestions while it was still in beta we are now to about 2.5k installs and have pulled over 2 mil lines of data from linkscape in just a few days so i consider it to be a big success

March 1, 2010 | Unregistered CommenterCarter Cole

nice work :)
also you didn't mention one great extension for Google Chrome - SeoQuake. i use it by myself and really glad for results, you know. By the way there were an update a few days ago... well if you're interested you may download it here: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/akdgnmcogleenhbclghghlkkdndkjdjc

cheers :)

March 1, 2010 | Unregistered Commenterfreitod method

Glad to hear you guys like the tools. I'd be interested to see a side-by-side comparison of SEO Site Tools and SEOQuake Chrome Extensions.

March 1, 2010 | Unregistered CommenterJosh Braaten

Great resources... I love the Wonder Wheel and suggested searches

March 2, 2010 | Unregistered CommenterAndy Brudtkuhl

Hey thanks a lot, Andy. Great to see you on the site. Maybe you'll do a spin off podcast on Wonder Wheel during your next Managing the Edge Internet marketing podcast episode?

March 2, 2010 | Unregistered CommenterJosh Braaten

SEO Quake has a little better keyword research tool(im working to make mine better) and shows a few more metrics on Google SERPs(but it pulls pagerank too fast so it fails often... mine rotates which data centers it pulls Pagerank from so it doesnt get blocked by rate limit) my tool also adds PageRank to Bing and Google SERPs, shows social media from twitter, Reddit, Digg and Facebook, enhances Google webmaster tools, Google analytics and yahoo site explorer.. not to mention nobody has the tool that can browse the hidden Google webmaster tools external keyword data that mine can do :)

March 7, 2010 | Unregistered CommenterCarter Cole

Good effective tips...

Thanks for the post.

March 11, 2010 | Unregistered CommenterSeo Company

Thanks for this awesome post. I was looking for this kind of information. Please continue writing....

Regards:- Orange County SEO

July 23, 2010 | Unregistered CommenterOrange County SEO

Each link increas reputation of site links are very important for ranking in search results. But the basic element of optimization is page itself. On-page optimization needed to clearly describe the content of the page and to emphasize main keyword you are optimizing for.

December 1, 2010 | Unregistered CommenterKiara2010

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