Drive traffic to blogs through search engines: Tips SEOs forgot to tell you

Image by ocean.flynn via FlickrAfter reading out the title you may have guessed , I would talk about search engine optimization.But in this post I would not say a word about it. I would not talk of keyword research or anchor text optimization or anything else about SEO. Instead I will talk of how you can apply SEO techniques to get more hits(not high search enginerankings).There is some difference between getting more hits and getting high search engine rankings.You will unfold the difference between the two somewhere in the following paragraphs.

Optimizing just your home page is biggest mistake-

I have seen many bloggers who have optimized their homepage quite well but if you take a look at inner pages they are poorly optimized.Even the best of your keywords can't drive loads of traffic if you have just optimized your main page.To drive more traffic from search engines you need to optimize many of your pages. Just create many entry points to enter your blog.

Let us take an example. Suppose you have one page beautifully optimized and it gets 50 visitors per day from search engines.50 visitors from one page is impressive ,isn't it?But since you have just one optimized page , you will not be able to go beyond that number. Will you? Now what happens if you have 10 such optimized pages.Do the simple maths and calculate.You will get 500 visitors and what if you have 50 optimized pages.My god!!! you have thousands of visitor just from search engines.....

So, the first lesson is optimize SOME OF YOUR inner pages apart from your home-page.

Optimizing all your pages is not easy (possible) either-

To succeed as a blogger you have to update your blog frequently, means, you have to write daily ,right? Right!! So, you are already in a pressure of writing daily and once you start optimizing each of your pages ,you will feel additional pressure. The pressure of doingkeyword researches and building links for all your posts.

But all SEO experts told you to optimize your all pages, isn't it? Ok ,they are right. But they write for all the pages on internet and they most importantly write for websites which are not updated as frequently as blogs. So, a website owner can afford to optimize all of his/her pages but same can't be said about blogs.

So, What the hell should I do to drive traffic through search engines-

From above paragraphs it is clear that you can't drive traffic by optimizing just your home page and optimizing all your pages is not possible. So, the big question is - What you should do to drive traffic to your blog from search engines?

Here comes the secret-

Classify your blog pages into three tiers or strata. Your home page comprise the first strata ,some of your long, tutorial type posts (pillar posts) will come in the second strata and short posts and newsy posts in the third strata. I have shown this in the figure below.

Once you have classified your posts ,focus your attention on tier-1 and tier-2, that is, your homepage and your pillar posts.Optimize these two tiers with best keywords and get some links for them. Make sure all your pillar posts are accessible from your homepage and all relevant pillar posts exchange links between themselves.

So, what is the use of tier-3? Well, tier-3 (the short articles and newsy items) are just meant to provide internal links for your home page and your pillar posts. They feed your important posts with links without getting link from them.Thus, your pillar posts get one-way internal links from these posts. Isn't this cool.

If you write a pillar post each week, you will have 24 posts in six months and if you can manage to write two, you will have 48 pillar posts.If you can optimize all these posts you will create 48 entry points for your blog. Another good news , you will have a lot of newsy items or short posts to get your pillar posts linked.


Does creating entry points drives more traffic to blogs-

In the first paragraph i have said, "there is difference between getting more hits and getting high search engine rankings."I know you are getting confused here because you have been told that higher ranks mean more hits.OK let me clarify the things.

Let us suppose you are in the top ten (1st page) for a term in google results page.Well, you have 10 other sites to compete with even if you are in top ten for your targeted keyword. Furthermore, these competitors are often the toughest one.I know you can still get some traffic competing with them but my point is to leverage your high rankings to get maximum you can get from search engines.

How can I do this?

You have to simply focus your attention on search snippet. A search snippet looks something like this-


You can see here, a search snippet has two parts-

1. The title which is written in blue colour.
2. Description which is written in black.

Both these parts are quite important as it reflects the stuff in your blog.Many people decide whether they should click the link or not on the basis of this snippet.Thus, if you can assure people that you have the stuff they were looking for ,you can make them to visit your blog.

Make sure you have written an intriguing and 'killing' title. Also , make use of meta tags to describe each of your page.This way you can get more traffic from search engines.

These are all little things but are most often not given the attention they deserve.If you have some fantastic ideas to share or otherwise my points were not clear to you then you are most welcome to start a discussion here in the comment section.I look in to every comment i get and personally answer those.