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21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic (Updated 2012)

21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic (Updated 2012)
It's easy to build a blog, but hard to build a successful blog with significant traffic. Over the years, we've grown the Moz blog to nearly a million visits each month and helped lots of other blogs, too. I launched a personal blog late last year and was amazed to see how quickly it gained thousands of visits to each post. There's an art to increasing a blog's traffic, and given that we seem to have stumbled on some of that knowledge, I felt it compulsory to give back by sharing what we've observed. NOTE: This post replaces a popular one I wrote on the same topic in 2007. #1 - Target Your Content to an Audience Likely to Share When strategizing about who you're writing for, consider that audience's ability to help spread the word. If you can identify groups that have high concentrations of the blue and orange circles in the diagram above, you dramatically improve the chances of reaching larger audiences and growing your traffic numbers. #3 - Make Your Blog's Content SEO-Friendly

SEO: The Free Beginner’s Guide From SEOmoz Welcome to your SEO learning journey! You'll get the most out of this guide if your desire to learn search engine optimization (SEO) is exceeded only by your willingness to execute and test concepts. This guide is designed to describe all major aspects of SEO, from finding the terms and phrases (keywords) that can generate qualified traffic to your website, to making your site friendly to search engines, to building links and marketing the unique value of your site. The world of search engine optimization is complex and ever-changing, but you can easily understand the basics, and even a small amount of SEO knowledge can make a big difference. Free SEO education is also widely available on the web, including in guides like this! Combine this information with some practice and you are well on your way to becoming a savvy SEO. The basics of search engine optimization Ever heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs? Here's what it looks like:

Boost Your Blog Traffic by Submitting to These 12 Directories Boost Your Blog Traffic by Submitting to These 12 Directories Posted by Pat Owings on Sun, Nov 25, 2012 @ 07:05 AM So you've written fabulous content that's relevant to your buyer personas and sales funnel. You've ensured your formatting is optimized for SEO, hit publish and shared on social media. How about driving some more traffic and generating inbound links, too? There are an estimated 42 billion blogs in the world - even the best content can use some help getting noticed. 1. One of the world’s leading blog search engines and directories, Technorati indexes over a million blogs. 2. Described as the “world’s largest blog directory,” creating a listing here is fast, free and easy. 3. Tens of thousands of bloggers are members of Bloggernity, with new sites added all the time. 4. A much-smaller blog directory, search existing content categorized on Blogadr by category or country. 5. 6. 7. A social bookmarking tool for each blog post you publish, StumbleUpon can drive tons of traffic.

9 Raisons D’utiliser Votre Blog Comme Pilier De Votre Stratégie Social Media Les billets de la série Social Media Marketing sont ouverts au parrainage. Si vous souhaitez parrainer un de nos billets, merci de consulter la rubrique « annonceurs » . L’engouement pour les médias sociaux a tendance à relayer le blog au second plan de la stratégie e-marketing de certaines entreprises. Ces dernières préfèrent par exemple investir dans une page Facebook au détriment de leur blog ou de leur site internet. Facebook leur apparaît comme l’endroit idéal pour développer leur activité professionnelle en raison de plusieurs motifs : un marché important de consommateurs, la gratuité et la facilité d’utilisation de la plateforme, le bouche-à-oreille etc … Cependant, le blog comporte des avantages indéniables par rapport aux médias sociaux. Aujourd’hui, je vous propose donc de découvrir quelles sont les 9 raisons qui justifient l’utilisation de votre blog en tant que pilier de votre stratégie social media. 1. Votre blog appartient à votre entreprise. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Garder son référencement en changeant d'adresse URL Votre site a grandi, vous achetez un nom de domaine, prenez un hébergement professionnel et quittez votre hébergeur gratuit. Et là, patatras ! Vous avez des gens qui continuent à aller sur l’ancien site et le [Google Rank|c’est la « cote » de popularité pour Google] de votre site reste sur l’ancien au lieu de venir sur le nouveau. La problématique est donc de signaler à tous, y compris moteurs de recherche que l’on a changé d’adresse. Je vais partir du postulat (largement vérifié chez les hébergeurs gratuits) que le serveur web est apache et que PHP est installé/activé. L’opération se fait en 3 mouvements : transférer le site sur le nouvel hébergeur (via FTP probablement) vider l’ancien site placer sur l’ancien site les fichiers nécessaires pour signaler le changement d’adresse Retour Sommaire Théorie du n’habite plus à l’adresse indiquée (301 Moved Permanently) Dans sa documentation pour les webmasters, Google indique : En pratique, le 301 Moved Permanently index.php La page par défaut du site.

Maximize the All In One SEO Wordpress Plugin How Search Engines Work - The Beginners Guide to SEO Search engines have two major functions: crawling and building an index, and providing search users with a ranked list of the websites they've determined are the most relevant. Imagine the World Wide Web as a network of stops in a big city subway system. Each stop is a unique document (usually a web page, but sometimes a PDF, JPG, or other file). Crawling and IndexingCrawling and indexing the billions of documents, pages, files, news, videos, and media on the World Wide Web. The link structure of the web serves to bind all of the pages together. Links allow the search engines' automated robots, called "crawlers" or "spiders," to reach the many billions of interconnected documents on the web. Once the engines find these pages, they decipher the code from them and store selected pieces in massive databases, to be recalled later when needed for a search query. These monstrous storage facilities hold thousands of machines processing large quantities of information very quickly.

Why Content Goes Viral: the Theory and Proof The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz. Not all great content goes viral, but (with the exception of awesomely terrible videos) content that does go viral is great. No one can guarantee that any piece of content will take the web by storm, but we can make sure that a piece of content has what it takes. Long-time citizens of the web can often tell from a first-reading or viewing that a piece is going to explode, but why? Opinions about what it takes to be viral are easy to come by, but let’s look at the facts with data to prove it. Write long, in-depth posts In a scientific, statistical look at what makes content most shareable online, two University of Pennsylvania professors looked at the New York Times’ most emailed list to see if they could determine what cause people to share article. The first finding is that longer articles tend to be shared far more often. Inspire anger, awe, or anxiety

18 Social Media Mgmt Tools for Smart Social Media Users Are you interested in methods that can boost your social media marketing? Do you want to know about tools that can make your job lot easier? If your answer is yes, you have come to the right place. Please find below details of top social media management tools that are tailor made for smart social media users. Unlock to Share Plugin For majority of social media users, this is one of the most popular social media management tools. The advantage of this plugin lies in the fact that at this point of time, every website has a Like button. SlideShare This does not come under the category of a new tool but it is very surprising to know that lots of marketers still do not use SlideShare. When it comes to social media distribution, SlideShare can be quite an effective tool. Commun.it What makes Commun.it such a good option as social media management tools is that it plays a pivotal role in building relationships with potential clients and supporters on Twitter. YouTube’s Audience Retention Report Cyfe

20 of the Best SEO Plugins for WordPress With more than 120 million blogs in existence, how do people find YOUR content on the Internet? The key starts with great search engine optimization (SEO), which is an art and a science that helps search engines discover your content and understand how relevant it is to specific search queries. You can blog your heart out, but if you don't have good SEO, then odds are you won't have many readers. Have another SEO plugin to recommend? All in One SEO Pack - One of the most popular plugins ever for WordPress, this plugin does a bit of everything for you from helping choose the best post title and keywords, to helping you avoid duplicate content and more. Automatic SEO Links - Automatic SEO Links allows you to choose a word or phrase for automatic linking, both internal and external, set anchor text, choose if it should be "nofollow" or not, and more. Google XML Sitemaps - An essential tool in any blogger's armory of SEO tools. More WordPress resources from Mashable:

How People Use Search Engines - The Beginners Guide to SEO One of the most important elements to building an online marketing strategy around SEO is empathy for your audience. Once you grasp what the average searcher, and more specifically, your target market, is looking for, you can more effectively reach and keep those users. We like to say "Build for users, not search engines." When users have a bad experience at your site, when they can't accomplish a task or find what they were looking for, this often correlates with poor search engine performance. On the other hand, when users are happy with your website, a positive experience is created, both with the search engine and the site providing the information or result. What are users looking for? "Do" Transactional Queries - Action queries such as buy a plane ticket or listen to a song. When visitors type a query into a search box and land on your site, will they be satisfied with what they find? It all starts with the words typed into a small box. Why invest time, effort and resources on SEO?

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