Five ways for your blog to attract attention

A blog is more than a webpage and it's more than a collection of webpages. Blogs have a social content, a successful blog doesn't just attract search engine traffic, it also attracts readers. In fact, the way to attract search engine traffic to your blog is to attract readers first. If you attract the readers, if you give the readers what they want, then the search engines will find you.

There are millions of blogs, probably hundreds of blogs just in your small niche. You have to call attention to yourself to be noticed in that wilderness. Here's a few ways to do that.

1. Have a voice. Have a clear, discernible bias. A voice will attract readers who share your bias. They'll tend to agree with your positions and will spread the word about your brilliant thoughts.

2. Read your competitors. Link to them from your site. Leave comments on their posts on their sites. Don't pimp your own site when you leave comments, readers will find you.

3. Encourage comments. Reader comments are free content for you and they are strong indications to other readers that your blog is popular. Don't engage in heavy-handed moderation of your comments. Keep the spam out, but let the critics in.

4. Use titles and tags. Search engines like descriptive titles, they like descriptive keywords in anchor tags in references to other sites, and they like tags based on common terms used by other blogs. Cooperate and pay attention to your titles and tags.

5. Use analysis tools. Use analytics to track which pages or posts attract attention. Replicate those topics. Use keyword services to identify search keywords relevant to your topics that are in common use by users of search engines. Target those keywords.


Related link:
The Bloggers Guide to SEO
The basics of SEO