Tactics to Drive More Targeted Search Engine Traffic to Your Blog

Posted by Steinar on Mar 18, 2010 in Blog, Marketing | 0 comments

If you’re marketing your brand, service, or products online, one of your goals should be to drive more targeted search engine traffic to your blog.  An overall increase in traffic is fine, but it really boils down to who is visiting your sight, why they are visiting and what the call to action is once they consume your content.

If you are not speaking to a particular niche, you might find that although overall traffic volume is high, engagement is low.

Here are 5 tactics to drive more targeted search engine traffic:

1. Use a long-tail keyword strategy when creating your content.  Think about what someone might use to find your content in Google and incorporate those phrases into your content.  For a more scientific approach use a tool like Google Keyword Search Tool or Market Samurai.
2. Consistently add new content.  Google likes new content and if you publish on a frequent basis, Google tends to index your site more regularly because you’re seen as more relavent.  Set up Google Webmaster Tools to monitor the rate with which Google indexes your site.
3. Add images to your posts and optimize them so Google Images can index them.  This not only adds visual interest to your posts but provides the necessary information so people can find your images when searching on Google.
4. Comment on other blogs and link back to related pages within your blog.  Many people make the mistake of only linking back to their home page.  Take the extra 10 seconds to link to an individual post instead so that Google has the opportunity to index backlinks to multiple pages throughout your site.  Try to comment on blogs that have a high Google PageRank and Follow tags.  Again, Market Samurai can help find these blogs.
5. Leverage your content and RSS feed by submitting posts to Friendfeed, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Technorati and other leading blog indexing sites.  Google tends to rank results from these sites higher in search results, thus giving you and edge on the competition.

These aren’t all inclusive, but do you think these tactics would help drive more targeted search engine traffic to your blog?

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4. How to properly tag your images for search engine optimization
5. Search Engine Optimization: Back to Basics