How to increase traffic to your blog

You need traffic (ie. visitors) to your blog in order to make money. This will take time and does not happen overnight, especially when you are new to blogging. Since a lot people have discussed about this topic, I only want to summarize it with some qoutes from the experts, as this is an important topic and I am sure a lot of us especially the beginners are working very hard to get visitors to our sites.

Here is the summary of increasing traffic to your blog:

• Write frequently especially at the beginning, probably at least one post per day or every other day so that both readers and search engines will visit your site more often


• Write good, original and interesting topics to attract visitors and they are more likely to come back. Good content also attracts search engines


• The appearance, colours and style of your site, will affect whether anyone is going to read your blog.
  

  
  I know if I visit a site and the background or colour hurts my eyes, I will close it off immediately. So it is worth your time and effort designing a good blog.
  
  
  I spend several hours on most evenings reading Darren Rowse's problogger and I find there are lots of useful and interesting tips there.
  
  
  
  Here is one of the useful tips from Darren:
  
  
  "Good Blog Design is really important if you want your blog to create a good first impression. With millions of other blogs and sites out there its worth some effort to make yours stand out." Visit Darren's
  
  Problogger and I am sure you will find useful tips there




• Your site needs to be viewed and visitors taking part in it. Hence it is important not to ignore the comments on your blog. Participate in your readers' comments and invite visitors to your blog.
  

  
  Here are a couple of useful tips from Yaro Starak's (Blog Traffic King) newsletter:
  
  "Don't ignore the comments on your blog. They are really important tools for generating traffic."
  
  
  "When first time visitors to your blog see other people making lots of comments they are more likely to decide there is something valuable at your blog and bookmark or subscribe to it and may even make a comment."
  
  
  Visit Yaro's site,
  Entrepreneurs Journey and I am sure you will find useful information there




• Participate actively in online forums and leave a signature with a link to your blog. Make sure that your signature is also included in all your outgoing emails. Comment on other sites



• Optimize your posts for search engines and there are several ways to do this:
  
  
  
  • Include the primary keyword in your link (URL)
  
  
  • Include the primary key phrases in your header tags (h1, h2) and the titles of your posts
  
  
  • Use the secondary keywords in the body of your posts, but do not overdo this or your posts will look awkward and spammy to readers
  
  
  • Build links to your site. Offer to exchange links with sites of similar content. Search engines will rank your site according to the number of incoming links
  
  
  
  
• Submit your blog to the major search engines, blog search engines and directories. Most people search for blogs on blog search engines and not so much on the major search engines. So make sure you submit your blog to the majority of them. A lot of these blog search engines and directories want you to link back to them. So this is another way to build links to your site for free.
  Visit
  Submit Blogs and RSS Feeds and you can submit your blog to many sites for free. It is worth linking to the good ones, for examples,
  Technorati and
  Blogtopsites


• You can have your site analyzed and links checked before
  submitting to the search engines, see
  Quick Register for free search engine submission service


• Write articles about your blog posts and submit them to ezines and forums. Make sure you include a hyperlink to your blog

Please feel free to comment on my post and add anything that you feel
appropriate.