Increase WordPress Blog Traffic With 7 Simple Methods

by: Mr. Ven 3

It is true that wordpress blogs are meant for profits and when utilized properly, you could achieve a lot with your blog. When you take your blog as a business, you have to definitely drive a lot of traffic and more important, targeted traffic.

Traffic is the source of business and it decides everything from the success of your blog to how much money it makes ?

drive it faster...

WordPress based blogs are easy to manage however, you have to work or optimize it once or twice. Once you have reached that saturated level of optimization, you could fully concentrate on content generation and adding value to the visitors.

Since wordpress is an open system, you could find lot of resources and plugins which makes the toughest task similar. All you have to find the right plugin to use for the exact purpose.

In this article, i will take you through those simple methods which are yet powerful to increase your wordpress blog traffic. Lets get into the topic….

#1 All-In-One-SEO Plugin

SEO is the key to blog success. All-In-One-SEO is one of the most downloaded wordpress plugin. That means, its trusted and it is the best in market. Though the plugin does 50% of SEO, the remaining depends on how you are configuring the plugin. Few of the recommendations (that i used to follow) are:

• Don’t add nofollow noindex to category, tags (yes, its contradicting to duplicate content statement however, i am seeing this works the best)
• Set proper title and description to your homepage and include your keywords as a sentence (don’t over-stuff with comma separated keywords)
• Manually enter meta description for each blog post your submit and don’t let the plugin to automatically pick the first line of blog post.
• Otherwise, keep it with default settings.
• Consider upgrading to their premium version which has lot more features…

As a recommendation, use Keyword Winner Plugin if you haven’t tried before – it helps to define great titles.

#2 Search Term Tags

SEO search term plugin is one of the simplest yet powerful plugin. It captures the incoming search keywords and automatically converts them into tags. Also, it lists the searched keywords below the blog post. Also, it has the options to show the most popular search terms in your blog.

• My recommendation, just enable the keyword list and keep the list short (have 6 or less than 6 keywords in the list) – otherwise, it looks like spamming and doesn’t adds value to reader.
• This way, your low performance blog posts will get quick boost and traffic naturally increases from search engines.

#3 Make Right Use of headline h1, h2…

This is old school SEO, still works. Revise your blog and see the headline hierarchy. Make sure your title has tag as well as
h1 tag used in every blog post. Not only for the home page, make sure it is used in all the blog posts, pages.

• Use low headings (h5 or h6) for less important columns in the sidebar (esp. advertisements or links pointing to other web sites), doing this simple change results in quick traffic increase.

Use h2 tag for blog posts title listed in the home page and also, inside your blog post either use h2 or h3 for sub-headings.

#4 Controlled Tag Clouds

Tag clouds are bad, when really used bad and they are great, when greatly used. Don’t show 30 or 50 tags in your sidebar. Keep the tag count less – this helps the visitor to see the important pages and also, for the search engines you are showing important tag pages.

• Preferably, tag count of 10 is good.

#5 Reduce Load Time

Loading speed is important factor in search engine ranking and also, people love to visit fast loading web pages. Reduce unnecessary images in your blog, use wp smush plugin to optimize your images on every blog post. Optimize HTML, CSS, Javascript (use plugins like Auto optimize (i prefer this), head cleaner) which combines the code and also, removes spaces, comments to make it lighter (there are gzip compression, caching options too).

Enable page cache using plugins like super cache or hyper cache (i prefer this), this heavily reduces the load time by serving processed static HTML pages instead of dynamically creating HTML pages every time.

Here is an article on speed up wordpress blog and another wonderful experiment by comparing cache plugins.

#6 Who are those Neighbors ?

This looks silly however, for the long run – the quality of your blog is measured by this. Yes, i am speaking about what you are linking out. Internet is bounded by links and people navigate from link-to-link.

Search engines has the power to navigate wisely and it cares more on what you are linking out because it has to serve the visitors with correct destinations.

• Don’t just link to any URL, instead – see what the external link is about and how it helps the visitor – think yourself once before you link with your own common sense.

Naturally, your blog post ranks well in search engines and your authority increases with search engines for the long run.

#7 Useful Content than Anything…

Back to the topic of quality.

• Nothing to say – your blog must have useful information and make sure you are publishing great every time.

Also, understand that blog posting frequency is also more important which creates way to drive more search engine traffic.

Over to readers: How do you increase wordpress blog traffic ? any specific tips ?

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