By Wayne Davies - SEO Specialist.
This article is part 7 of a series. See part one. See part six.
Want to get more traffic to your site? Then you're going to want a blog.
A blog is a publishing medium, allowing anyone to create content and show it to the world. It's possible to have blogging software added to your own site, installed to a site in its own right, or write articles for other people's blogs. This very article is published on a 3rd party blog (The Best of Brent). It offers me the opportunity to attract a specific audience, and give that audience reasons to link through to my own site.
And that's not all it does for me. Every link in every article I publish on this blog delivers a small amount of SEO value to the sites I link to. Over time as I write more and more articles, that SEO value adds up. This helps my site attract even more visitors from search engines.
You can take blogging one step further by introducing the packaged blog concept. This is where additional resources are brought to bare to attract more traffic to each article.
For example, you might tweet about each article you publish. You might also link to each article from your Facebook page. And send it to your Facebook group. Then you might link to it from your Delicious, Stumble Upon and Digg accounts.
A switched on marketer might then ask his/her followers to retweet the article, or comment on it in Facebook.
What this does is increase the odds that somebody likely to be interested in your article will see it and visit your blog. It also creates a social media buzz, and this is picked up by search engines who add to the traffic the article is generating.
Once at your blog, you must encourage each visitor subscribe. For example, you might offer a subscription via RSS and Feedburner. You might allow people to join your mailing list. There are numerous ways you can grow your subscriber base - especially you're using WordPress (blogging software).
Most subscription systems will then email your subscribers every time a new article is published. If your articles are interesting, they will bring people back to your blog over and over again.
You can take this concept another step further by writing blog articles that lend themselves to keyword richness. For example, I might write an article about lead generation. This article will contain numerous uses of the keyword phrase 'lead generation'. There is a very good chance such an article will attract visitors from search engines who type in a 4 or 5 word search term based on 'lead' and 'generation' (e.g. advanced lead generation conversion techniques).
This packaging (or coordination) can be further enhanced by creating a page on your website designed to receive visitors from a specific blog article. For example, I might write an article about lead generation techniques. One of these techniques might be explained in detail by a page on my main web site. This page might then lead to one of my products or services (e.g. consulting on lead generation).
It's this coordination of activity that ensures you maximise your marketing effort, and make the most of the time you invest in blogging.
Next Instalment: Facebook Group.
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