Search engines like Google, and Bing regularly send a “spider” to websites. Spider is a program to crawls the website to copy the pages and download a copy of them to their web servers. After crawling by the spider, search engines index the information available on the site like keywords, tags, and other stuff. Whenever somebody searches anything on search boxes, search engines show results out of these indexed pages generated by the above-mentioned process. Nevertheless, various sources provide information about a specific searched term. So next question is which source will come first in the search results. All search engines have their own algorithm and ways to handle this. Any result that comes first has ranked #1 followed by subsequent ranked websites. The basis of ranking is not fully understood. Many of the facts are known but the complete process is never disclosed by any search engine. So people can never completely understand the whole process. However, from time to time search engines tell us how they rank the websites. These facts can be used by webmaster to improve the ranking of their content. Search engines are a way to increase traffic by natural/organic visitors. You don’t have to do any direct advertisement for that. Search engine optimization is the collection of steps you do to improve your rank to get more natural/organic traffic. Webmasters can do the following things to improve the rank of their content.
- Blogs are preferred over static websites. Frequently updated content on particular topics has the advantage of getting a better rank. So update your blog regularly and stick to a theme/topic.
- Keywords are very essential for higher ranking. Your content should well represent the major keywords related to the theme of your blog. Keywords should appear in titles. Texts in bold letters are preferred over normal text by search engines. Therefore keywords should be made bold wherever possible. Your blog will be better indexed for those keywords if you properly use them more often. With higher “keyword density” your blog will be ranked higher for those keywords and will be shown on the first page of the search results. Keyword density increases with your subsequent posts. But you should be more focused on increasing content on your keywords. Also exceptionally high “keyword density” can annoy your reader and your blog can be considered as splog (a spam blog) by search engines. A keyword density of 5-10 % is good.
- Try to get as many back-links as possible. Link all of your blogs to each other. You can exchange links with other bloggers. Build backlinks to your blog from other websites (by submitting articles in the article directory and submitting details in online press release websites). Join online forums and use your signature to link your website there. Post comments on the other blogs and leave a backlink there.
- Write articles and submit them in article directories. These articles can be unique or you can modify your regular article and submit it. In the end, you should give a “byline” to describe yourself and your blogs by giving a link to go there. Many article directories give permission to submit the same article in other directories as well. Other bloggers and website owners will also link these articles with their own web content creating more links for your blog. It is one of the easiest ways to build links that increase your search engine ranking.
- Online press release websites are also an important way to increase the number of links. Websites like prweb.com and prfree.com are popular in these categories. You can create a nice abstract of your blog along with giving links and post it on press release websites
- Each visitor can be a potential advertiser who will tell their friends and acquaintances about your blog. Therefore give a social touch to your blog. There should be an article-sharing facility. If readers like a particle article, there should be a way to share that article with their friends. Share with social networking websites option works like a virus that quickly spreads your blog to a wider audience. It will spread links to your blog at different places.
- Place meta tags for your posts. These are “tags” which are hidden pieces of code listing keywords that can be read by search engines. This is not visible to regular readers but search engines use it to get relevant information. Such tags help the search engines index a website better. These tags help to index your blog for all of the mentioned tags. You can include tags that are not relevant to the post/article but are related to the theme (niche) of your blog.
- Ping your blog regularly. Spiders of search engines regularly visit websites to index them in their directory. However, the frequency of visits depends on the size of the website and the frequency of updates. Pinging is the way to inform search engines about your updates and invite them to index you again as you have updated the content. There are many ping websites like Pingomatic and Pingoat which provide pinging facilities without any charge. Just type your URL there and press ping. e
- Comments on articles published in others’ blogs and leave a link there. Quality comments drive readers of that blog towards your content. It is also a way to get more backlinks. Never post spam comments on others’ blogs. By doing so you will either be banned from posting your comments there or people will ignore you
- Submission of the blog to blog directories and catalogs also improves the number of back-links along with getting targeted readers. Many people prefer to search for relevant information in these catalogs.
- Exchange links with other bloggers. Such links are called reciprocal links. Search engines prefer back-links over reciprocal links; still, any link is better than none. Blogroll is the list of links to other blogs with similar topics.
- Guest posting on others’ blogs ending with a byline (your introduction along with links to your blog) is also a good way to increase your ranking. Guest blogging is also useful for exchanging readers.
Ultimately, relying solely on search engines for blog traffic is not advisable. Diversify your traffic sources by actively engaging in marketing strategies to boost blog traffic. Further insights into alternative approaches will be explored in upcoming articles.