How to Increase Your Blog Traffic with 12 Easy SEO Techniques

Knowing how to increase blog traffic will soon become something you will no doubt want to understand once you have chosen your blog name, selected a WordPress template, and started to write content?!

(Please note this post may contain affiliate links. I may earn a commission if you click them and make a purchase. I only recommend products that I have tried).

So now it is time to get the most out of your site and start to benefit from all your hard work right?!

So let’s get stuck into 12 great techniques to really help you develop your site in terms of search engine optimization so that you can draw in more traffic and visitors.

1. Improve the Page speed

It is essential that your site loads speedily and this is a key factor in Google algorithms.

Clutter up your site with slow to load images, a theme that is very heavily coded, and so on and you will find that your site may drift down the search rankings.

Make your site fast and you have a much greater chance to rank higher.

There are a number of page speed tools available online including the one that I often use from Pingdom, which you can try here.

ACTION: One thing that you can immediately do to speed up your website is to install a caching plugin and the one I would recommend is WP Rocket. See Our post here on using WP Rocket to speed up your site.

2. Write Content that Gets Results

Creating high-quality content is part of a 2-part process for generating high levels of traffic to your blog. The 2 stages are:

1. Creating viral quality content that is well-written, easy to read on all devices, well-researched, and provides solutions for people’s problems means you have content that is highly shareable.

Make the content around 2000 words and make sure to use social sharing icons (I highly recommend the Social Warfare Plugin)

2. To get viral and high levels of traffic for content, you cannot then sit and hope that the content will market itself.

You need to reach out to some key players in your niche and reach out for the article to be shared. 

If you have included a link to these power players, within your content, they are much more likely to embrace your content and share it

ACTION: Either build 3 new pages of high-quality content anew or improve old posts you have done to be better quality.

3. Link out to Other Quality Sites

As touched on above, regards content creation and marketing, linking out to other people’s blogs and sites is actually a good thing for SEO!

It might seem bad to send people to other sites but linking out to others is good for 3 reasons:

• Some search engines include outbound links (links from your site to others) as a ranking factor. Search engines such as Google, in other words, put value on those sites that make a genuine attempt to be a part of the connected web.
• It helps you to develop trust with your readers that you are interested to provide them with genuine resources.
• You can use these outbound links sometimes to win over influencers in your niche as you seek to get your content shared and to go viral.

This is not to suggest that you have to plaster your site with links to all your competitors! You can link to useful sources related to your niche though.

ACTION: Either in new posts, you write or old posts you refresh, try to add in at least two links to external quality resources.

4. Name Images Properly

Whilst you do not want to be over-using keywords (words that are key to your site) unnaturally on your site, you should name all of your blog site images with SEO in mind.

Rather than name an image: Untitles2.jpg for example

You might want to name it: how-choose-blogging-niche.jpg

Name your image well so that search engines can much more easily understand exactly what the image refers to and what it is about.

Having images that can be better understood by search engines means a chance to further increase in blog traffic. 

Be aware though that another part of the consideration in how search engines rank images is by relating the text that surrounds an image, to the image placed nearby.

So keep image names and surrounding text related and relevant.

ACTION: Take the time to give your image an appropriate title.

5. Add in Alt Tags

When adding an image to your site in WordPress, another easy way to help to increase blog traffic is to ensure you always include an ALT TAG to the image.

Alt tags are another factor in many search engine algorithms, so make sure also to add in text that describes the image you are adding to your blog.

6. Write a Strong Meta Title and Description

Ensuring that every page on your blog or website has a Meta Title and Meta Description that is optimized for search engines is important if you wish to give yourself a better chance of showing in search engines and hence driving organic natural traffic to your blog.

One of the very best tools to guide you for creating good meta titles and descriptions is the Yoast SEO plugin (you just need the free version).

Yoast uses a traffic light system (i.e. red and green lights) to tell you if your pages are correctly optimized for search engines.

ACTION: Install the FREE version of the Yoast SEO plugin and make sure all of your posts show as a double green light for SEO level on each post.

7. Build a Following on Pinterest

Pinterest is a highly under-utilized search engine that is really an incredible resource that so often gets ignored at the expense of Google.

Pinterest though is a stunningly great resource for driving traffic if you follow certain techniques. (Learn more about using Pinterest for driving traffic).

8. Start Answering Related Questions on Forums

By being active on forums related to your niche, it can be surprisingly easy, in a short time, to drive some decent traffic to your site!

Why not start, for example, with Quora by answering questions in your niche, not only helps to raise awareness of your profile, but it is also a fantastic way to understand the key terms and topics that people want answers to in your niche!

Great, in other words, for ideas for content creation.

ACTION: Go to Quora and answer 10 questions related to your niche.

9. Do Regular Content Updates

I have already alluded in part to the need to consider high-quality content.

The days of old trash content are gone and to do well these days, you need to think quality over quantity. 

With this in mind, consider going through any existing content you have on your blog or website and improve it further.

Try and include images and different media and keep in mind the previous points regards meta tags, alt tags and image names.

Consider the following also though:

• Content needs these days to be readable on small mobile devices so make paragraphs short i.e. 1 or 2 sentences maximum! Better content means you will likely get more post reads.
• Ensure that you use several and clear headings  – people these days also tend to scan for information and with this in mind, you should make it easier for them to find relevant information on your blog/site.
• Consider aiming for 2000 words on a post so that you offer really great in-depth content, as mentioned earlier regards power content.

ACTION: Strive to not only build great new content but, if you have old content, improve 1 page a week of your old content.

10. Build Some Quality IBLs (Inbound Links)

When you first start off, it is worth developing 5 – 10 or so links to your site so that the various search engines can at least find and crawl your site.

You can very easily start, for example, by getting links from:

• Facebook profile or create a Business page.
• Creating a Twitter Business Profile.
• Pinterest profile.
• Set-up a YouTube channel.
• Reach out to some people you know or who are in your niche. Do whatever you can to get your site cached (read and stored) by search engines. If you are creating high-quality content, you will begin to see some traffic slowly develop. It’s a start!

WHY IS BUILDING 5-10 LINKS IMPORTANT?

You will want to maximize every possibility you have to get traffic to your site and that includes in Google search results.

The problem though is that, if you start to add a lot of content at the beginning (which you will want to do with 2 or 3 articles a week if you can) and if you have no links to your site, Google might identify your site as potential spam.

For new sites, Google, in other words, have what is known as the Sandbox. Google is wary of new sites and sites can be categorized as high risk at the beginning.

How do you avoid getting put into the sandbox for the first 3-6 months?

In addition to adding lots of new content, ensure that you also create some links to your site. I suggest 5 – 10.

You can get these for free by using local directories related to your niche and local geographical area (if you are a local business).

ACTION: Build 5 links to your site.

11. Local Search

Depending on the topic of your site, you may or may not wish to consider ‘Local Search’. Let me explain!

If you are a local business serving a specific geographical area, then ‘Local Search’ will be important to you.

In other words, showing high in local search results will be important.

If you are a garage, then you will no doubt be keen to attract people within 2 or 3 miles or Km of your facility. If local search is useful for you then consider:

• Signing up for FREE to Google Local Business Listings.
• Ensuring that all of your NAP (Name, address, phone number) details are consistent site-wide. To do well in local business listings in Google you need to have the address on each page, for it to match the address on your contact page and for it to be 100% consistent on local directories. Do not, for example, write “street” on one listing and “st” on another. Make it 100% matching.
• Creating a profile on the 10 main SEO Local listings (These normally include getting a free Yell.com listing for your region, Facebook Business page link, and other key directories, depending on your country). You can email me for specific info as needed.

ACTION: If local search is relevant to you, sign up for the 10 key directories in your country and create a Google Business Listing.