Improve Blog traffic in 5 steps!

1. Post regularly... I've noticed that total visits go up when content is kept fresh. I'm trying to post once a week at the moment and one thing I've noticed is that I'd rather spend a few hours writing a couple of articles at a time. I've found this works well for me, because I get really busy (like everyone else). So once I have a few nearly finished SEO articles in my drafts folder, I know a new post is probably just a little bit of work away. Get a few draft posts going and you'll find you can start a good post with a few notes and come back to it at a later date and make sure it is well done.

2. Get Stumbleupon... I'm getting quite a bit of referred traffic from other website at the moment and to increase this even more I told you a easy tactic in my traffic generating tips article. You want traffic from a high traffic blog or story, whatever. Stumbleupon simply allows users to add any webpage they think is good to Stumbleupon. Once added, other users will be able to find the webpage via the Stumbleupon toolbar and give it a thumbs up or thumbs down or nothing at all. The more users that find and click the "Thumbs Up" to show they like the Stumbled site, the more traffic Stumble will drive to the webpage. This tends to drive a lot of traffic to content that is genuinely good. Because users judge sites themselves, spam/low quality sites won't really get anywhere. To benefit, download Stumble find a blog using Stumble that is suitable and add a decent comment to the blog, making sure you add a URL. Some of the substantial traffic from these pages can rub off onto your own blog/website. Be careful not to spam for the sake of it though and watch out Stumbleupon will waste days of your life!

3. Give users the chance to feedback... Give your users the opportunity to add comments or feedback to your blog. I've seen articles on seomoz that say not to switch on comments till you have enough traffic to actually get comments, cos your site may look like a ghost blog... But I'd switch it on all the time and see what happens. Put Digg and Delicious buttons on each post and promote your RSS xml feed too. This should keep people coming back!

4. Internal linking... I get more search engine traffic to one particular SEO article than any other. So I'm in the process of going back through all my old articles and making sure they link to other relevant articles I 've made. So an article on "link building" might link to an article on "paid links". It helps the user find your other relevant posts, so if one post gets a lot of attention users can easily find more of your excellent content!

5.Check the basics... Make sure you spell everything correct and the post is easy to understand (Include diagrams if needed). Take a look at your blog settings and make sure you have unique title tags and descriptions. This is something I am doing right now, I don't know how to switch on unique titles and descriptions on blogspot... But I will let you know if I find out how...

Stealing competitors traffic & controlling your brand online

SEO: Stealing competitors traffic with brand comparison pages

Creating a brand comparison page is easy in theory. Put together a page of info about one of your competitors and you will get traffic into your site from searchers looking for your competition.

To make a good comparison page is a bit more difficult. An easy example would be a page comparing rival credit cards to your own credit card product. This would show a user why your product is good (APR, 0% balance transfer etc) in comparison with your competition (this could be done in a nice neat table).

This way of making a comparison page is good because it offers the user info on what makes your product better than the competition and you will be able to steal some brand term searches from your competition. Although this sounds great, most pages constructed with this in mind are very low quality and offer a user very little other than a load of content seemingly stolen from another site. As long as the idea of the page is good, you will be able to steal traffic from your rivals and keep the user interested in whatever it is you are selling. The key to this is to have a useful page anything else will not captivate a user.

SEO: Protecting your brand online

I found a nasty looking search engine result page recently, this example of a search engine result page (SERP) is for the brand search term "starbucks". Although it was worse not so long ago, the results still feature some sites that Starbucks won't like. This got me thinking, how hard could it be for Starbucks to get a load of new domains pointing to different pages about Starbucks? Set up a few subdomains too, and load it with content about the good things Starbucks do (can they really be that bad?), this along with some good link building (internal and external) will allow all these new domains and sites to rank for the keyword "starbucks", and because of the links from actual Starbucks websites, these pages should move up the rankings and push out the results you don't want people to see!