Traffic to me is the simplest thing on the planet. It is so easy to get! All you have to do is provide people with a solution to their problem and they will come and read it & they will share it with their friends!

I have created over 100 ‘top list’ type posts which have been viewed by millions. They are so popular and well received that they have been featured on Reddit Homepage, New York Times, Yahoo News & one even became a Trending Topic on Twitter! The best part… I can get these types of posts created for just $25. Let me teach you how.

Why Creating Lists Will Drastically Increase Your Traffic

When you Google, think what you are typing in, lets say you are looking for a cure for a health problem. Just for example, you are going to type in Cure Acid Reflux. That’s a big search term. Same with anything else in the industry that people are trying to cure. Firstly you would be surprised how many people don’t name the article what people are searching for in Google. This blows my mind. Why are you calling your article something fancy and using words people don’t ever use, just to make yourself look smart. No one is typing that in Google, so you shouldn’t be naming your posts that.

I’m no SEO expert, there I said it. But I do get around 200,000 visitors a month from Google alone so it’s kind of a big deal for me. Here’s what I believe: Google ranks sites which are naturally awesome. Forget everything about buying links and social love. Just imagine that your posts are so cool, people spend ages on your site and people love to share your stuff. That’s what GOOGLE wants! Great content because they are in the content industry. There job is to provide users with the right content and the best possible option, if yours is not that, then you don’t rank so well.

Back to my health post, I will call it :

10 Ways To Cure Acid Reflux

Somewhere I heard that odd numbers work better for open rates and marketing so I often will change the 10 for 7, 11, 13, 17 basically any odd number that looks good. I will decide how many I want before I even create the post.

But lets look at those silly people I love that make my life easy when I try to out rank their articles because they name their articles something stupid, for example:

Surefire Ways To Eradicate Acid Reflux

Are you freaking kidding me. I’m sure some idiot will type in Eradicate Acid Reflux every month or two but Surefire Ways? No Way!

You think this is an extreme example? Heck no, this is a nice example.

Tip 1. Name Your Posts Something People Search For!

Here’s where top lists dominate:

• Firstly, they are quite long so people tend to spend a while reading them.
• Each part is in section, for example, our Cure Acid Reflux post, its 7 cures, so we have 7 headlines with each option. Because of this, people can quickly decide YES, there’s something here I am willing to do, so I will read it all. I think a lot of articles don’t do well because people are not prepared to commit time to read a page if they don’t think it’s going to help them.
• The title says exactly what you get, so you know what you are getting into.
• When shared on social media, again, people know what they are about to get. I swear, people will retweet and share stuff just because of the title, not even knowing if the article is good or not.

Step 1. To Dominating Any Industry

Post a crap load of top posts. That’s what I do, I show up in dozens of industry’s and just do the same old top list posts but for different industry’s. Here’s some examples:

Blogging/Make Money Industry

• Top 30 Most Influential People In Blogger
• 10 Reasons Why It Rocks To Be a Internet Entrepreneur
• 10 Christmas Gifts For Entrepreneurs
• 17 Tips To Cure Bloggers Block
• 20 Bloggers To Follow on Facebook

Photography Industry

• Top 30 Most Influential People In Photography
• 10 Reasons Why It Rocks To be a Photographer
• 10 Christmas Gifts For Photographers
• 17 Tips To Fix Bad Photos
• 20 Photographers To Follow on Facebook

Health Industry

• Top 30 Most Influential People in Natural Health
• 10 Reasons Why It Rocks To Be Healthy
• 10 Christmas Gifts for Super Healthy People
• 17 Tips To Cure Acid Reflux
• 20 Health Experts To Follow on Facebook

Young Entrepreneur Industry

• Top 30 Most Influential Young Entrepreneurs
• 10 Reasons Why It Rocks To Be a Young Entrepreneur
• 10 Christmas Gifts For Young Entrepreneurs
• 17 Tips To Stop People Treating You Different Because Of Your Age
• 20 Young Entrepreneurs To Follow On Facebook

Are you getting the gist yet?

And it doesn’t stop there. Each post can be done in so many other ways. For example:

10 Reasons Why It Rocks To Be a Photographer… you could flip this on it’s head and do 10 Reasons Why It Sucks….

Tip 2. Turn One Top List Into a Series of Top Lists

Remember our post suggestion: 20 Bloggers To Follow on Facebook

How about doing that with every social network:

• 20 Bloggers To Follow on Twitter
• 20 Bloggers To Follow on Youtube
• 20 Bloggers To Follow on Pinterest
• 20 Bloggers To Follow on Google+

Instead of doing a post such as “20 Ways To Improve Your Website” – you could split it into a series and niche each one down, so for example:

• 10 Ways To Improve Your Websites Load Time
• 10 Ways To Improve Your Websites Usability
• 10 Ways To Improve Your Websites Blog Layout
• 10 Ways To Improve your Websites Conversion Rate

Step 2. Getting Articles Created (20 at a time)

So in order to achieve great success with my blogs, I need a crap load of content…. by doing basically no actual work. Want to know how I get articles written for $25 with a 24 hour turn around period, 20 at a time.

Just to confirm. I pay $25 for each article, I often buy 20 at a time and each article only takes 24 hours and can be written by thousands of different authors. The best thing is, if I don’t like it, I either get them to edit it or I can refuse to pay for it. Incredible?!?!!

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Love what you have read so far?

Get the rest inside Traffic Domination – online training that will teach you exactly how we get over 100,000 visitors every month to multiple sites, year after year.

You will also get access to a new bonus, 110 copy and paste blog post headlines that have got me 10,000,000 visitors!

The post How I Get Over 100,000 Visitors a Month With Top List Articles appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

It’s also the most fun.

Don’t be afraid to put a significant amount of mental energy into your headlines…

Your title is what audiences recall, even more so than the content itself.

It’s what’s displayed in the search results and their bookmarks menu – setting the stage for the entire blog post.

I invite you to create a word document with about 100 headlines for inspiration and reference it anytime you’re creating new post titles. Alternatively, you could just use the 110 headline templates in Traffic Domination.

Straight up, if your headlines sucks, your posts won’t get viewed and your site won’t keep as many visitors.

10 Post Titles Guaranteed to Get YOU Results

1. Classic How-to

A lot of popular blogs and websites have discovered formulas that deliver results every time.

One headline formula that’s been incredibly effective for more than a century is the classic how to. This is a great way to increase engagement, just be sure to deliver on your promises.

They don’t even necessarily need to start with the words “how to” to be a how to headline.

“How to Have a Healthier and More Productive Home Office”

“10 Step To Successfully Outsourcing Your Online Business”

“21 Ways to Dominate Youtube: The Ultimate Guide”

2. Identify and Solve a Problem

One of best ways to get new readers is to Identify and solve a problem with trigger words.

The top companies use emotional triggers in nearly every headline – another classic style that’s withstood the test of time.

You’ll notice major companies like Cosmopolitan, DailyMail and Yahoo using this style often:

“6 Instant Confidence Boosters”

“Parenting Guru: From Chaos to Access”

“Gene Breakthrough Restores The Sight Of People With Inherited Eye Disease And Could Save Thousands From Blindness”

3. Make A Statement

Sometimes we get writers block and can’t think of a clever headline… This is where making a direct statement is the easiest and most effective way to engage your reader.

“Twitter Goes Public: 21 Things You Should Know”

“Tips That Show Anybody How To Make Money Online – Guaranteed”

“Thousands Already Make Millions Online And So Can You”

4. Strike A Note Of Controversy

Blog posts that have controversial titles grab more attention.

Riding the wave of controversy is good for blogs that want to pull audiences in, get them emotionally involved and commenting on your site.

“Why All Guys Cheat, Fresh Insight”

“Which One Deserves To Die?”

“10 Reasons Civilization May Collapse Because Of Organic Foods…”

It’s a very effective tool for generating attention. Just try not to land on the wrong side of an issue or be disrespectful.

You don’t want to offend your primary audience unless of course you’re trying to not make money.

Remember, you want to pull readers in not push them away.

5. Shorter Titles Are Great

Concentrate on keeping your headlines to the point.

People like short and sweet and have limited attention spans – especially online!

“No Cellphones – By Law”

“Rob Banks Legally”

“Fat Makes You Thin”

Try to avoid wordy headlines as they dilute your message and distract from the point of your post.

6. Ask Questions

Using a question as a title is an excellent opportunity to get people to click through to your post.

When people spot a question in a title, they’ll automatically think of a response. It’s natural…

“Are You Too Clever For Success?”

“Want To Immediately Reverse All Your Health Issues?”

“Six Types Of Investors – Which Group Are You In?”

Increase the chance the question resonates with your audience by being certain it’s relevant to your demographic.

An easy way to do this is by installing a survey plugin like YOP Poll or FluidSurveys and asking what type of posts your readers want to see more of.

7. Use Headlines That Offer Explanations

Explanatory headlines make things instantly clear to readers by doing exactly what the name suggests, explaining something…

“How I Doubled My Money With Facebook Ads”

“For At Risk Youths, Learning Digital Media Is A Luxury”

“New Shampoo Leaves Your Hair Smoother – Easier to Manage”

Sometimes it pays to have breaking news in the title itself.

When you turn your news into explanations, your audience knows exactly what they’re getting into before they ever start reading.

8. Go For An “Intrigue” Style

Write a headline that makes people do kind of a double take when they read it.

Make them wonder and ask if it’s even possible.

National Enquirer is notorious for this…

“Father Goes For Kidney Treatment – Leaves Hospital As A Women”

“How Jack The Weakling SLAUGHTERED THE DANCE FLOOR HOG!”

“Wall Street Getting Kicked In The Face By Asian Techs!”

9. Try A “Finality”

Another way to generate interest is by using finality style (power) words like ultimate, best, exclusive, only, guaranteed et cetera.

If you can deliver after somebody clicks the headline, you’ll almost certainly earn a new reader.

“The Ultimate Guide to Making Money Online”

“Every Internet Entrepreneur Regrets Not Doing This Sooner”

“This Blog Post Will Make You More Money Guaranteed”

10. Craft A “Top List”

This is one of the simplest formats to follow, and it’s ideal for SEO and getting ranked in the search engines for the more competitive terms.

Put the topic first, ideally optimized for popular search terms, and then use a “emotion-provoking” description.

Numbers grab attention and tell your audience you’re an authority. It lets them know you have something specific, concrete and real to offer them.

“24 Rules I Follow When Creating Successful Websites”

“5 Ways to Make More Money Online – Even If You’re Just Starting Out”

“Top 10 Facebook Advertising Mistakes To Avoid”

These types of posts get us over 100,000 visitors to this website every month, click here to learn how.

Headlines are a critical element because they’re what draw the reader into the body of your post.

Recognize what posts captivate you and start a list of the headlines that compelled you to click – I bet you’ll notice something strikingly similar about each.

Identify that “something” and use it to your advantage.

If you want to learn more about how we get millions of visitors to our sites every year, I recommend you read the following posts:

• 7 Lessons From 50 Blog Posts That Send Me The Most Traffic
• 101 “B.S. FREE” Ways to Drive More Traffic To Your Website
• 9 Reasons Why You’re Not Getting Search Engine Traffic

The post 10 Article Headline Examples That Got Us 10 Million Readers appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

I am often asked: ‘If you had to start over online, from scratch – what would you do to promote your blog and build up your traffic again as quickly as possible’

A very good question and one I have been giving quite a bit of thought to recently.

I think most people over-complicate traffic. They’re reading too much into all these techniques and spending all their time making sure their blog looks good.

There’s nothing wrong with having a great blog design or doing SEO the right way. But it is a problem when you’re spending so much time on the technical stuff that you forget your site’s purpose: to provide immense value for your visitors.

Extraordinary content is the key to extraordinary traffic.

So assuming you are starting from scratch or your funds are limited here is my Kick Start Strategy For Bloggers:

How To Get 1000 Visitors To You Blog Every Day

Step 1) Create Great Content For Your Blog

The number 1 thing you should focus on to get traffic is, great content. Why? because that’s what attracts people to your website.

When I’m writing an article, I have two things in mind. Firstly, I want to make it as simple for someone to understand as possible. Secondly, I want to make it as beneficial to the reader as possible.

So, with that in mind, how much great content do you need to get 1000 visitors a day.

10 articles getting 100 visitors a day.

20 articles getting 50 visitors a day.

100 articles getting 10 visitors a day.

Looking at these numbers, I would say you were best of focusing on less articles, that bring more traffic.

So how do you go about creating content so good that you can get 1000 visitors a day? Here is step by step what I would do:

Brainstorm and research high traffic keywords.

Great content gets linked to a lot, on both social media and blogs, but only if people can find it in the first place.

Links help you rank high in Google.

But none of this matters if you don’t target your blog post for something people are actually searching for in Google.

That’s where keyword research comes in.

Keyword research is all about finding keywords that get the most searches in Google.

To do this, we use Ahrefs. This has to be my favorite tool that I have found this year. It’s far better and more user friendly than any other tool similar to it.

Once you signup for an account (they have a free trial), go to their Keywords Explorer tool and type in the topic you want to write a blog post about. You want to find keywords that have a lot of searches but are not so competitive that you can’t rank for them.

Ahrefs will tell you how much traffic a search term is getting and how many backlinks you are likely to need to rank for this search term. It will also tell you who is already ranking for it, how much traffic they are getting and what other keywords they rank for on that page.

This is an important point to remember. Your blog posts won’t just rank for 1 keyword, but perhaps 100’s and in some cases, 1000’s of different keywords.

Write a headline to sell people on your article.

A headline is what attracts people to your blog post.

When we write headlines for our posts, we try to include what they will learn, the benefit from learning it and also why they should learn it from us.

A good example of this is: 10 Headlines Examples That Got Us 10 Million Readers

They will learn the best headlines, to get lots of traffic and they should listen to us because we have been successful at it.

Another example could be: 18 Website Optimization Tips For More Traffic and Higher Conversions

They learn website optimization tips, the benefit being more traffic and higher conversions.

Create a top list article around keywords.

Our readers seem to prefer top list articles much more than any other type of post. I think this is because you know exactly what you are going to get.

Not only do you know what you are going to get but you also know how the content is going to be laid out.

I think this is key to their success because people want to skim content. They don’t want to invest time into reading long posts if they don’t know it’s going to be worth it.

One recommendation I would make is, link out to other websites in your blog posts. When we write articles such as 50 Most Influential People In Blogging, we link to each blogger. When they see the post, they often share it and link to it somewhere on their blog.

As mentioned earlier in this post, the more links a website has pointing to it, the higher it ranks in Google.

Make Sure Your Blog Post Looks Amazing

Optimize readability and proof read your blog posts.

We like to write content in a way that people can come to our site and quickly skim an article and figure out if it’s an article they want to read. I think this is a big part of why so many people read our posts.

Think about it this way, if you go to one of our blog posts and it’s just 2000 words, no paragraphs, no headlines, no images, are you going to invest your time reading it? It’s unlikely you would.

When we create a blog post, we make sure we use images, not just to promote our posts, but to split up the content.

Here is an outline of how we display our blog posts on IncomeDiary:

Main Headline
Introduction
Headline 2 (h2 tag)
Headline 3 (h3 tag)
Text
Image
Headline 4 (h3 tag)
Text
Image

And so on…

Sometimes we include sub-headlines for sub-headlines. It’s important to break up content to make it easy to read.

Step 2) Search Engine Optimization

Now that you have found a good keyword and written a blog post, you need to optimize your post for that keyword.

Optimizing Your Blog Post For a Keyword

Go and download a free WordPress plugin called Yoast SEO. This plugin will ask you what search term you want your blog post to rank for. Then it will tell you everything you need to do to best rank for it.

Such as:

• Including keyword in headline
• Including keyword is meta description
• Including keyword in first paragraph of post
• Including internal and external links
• Including an image with the name of your keyword
• Add alt attributes with the focus keyword to your images
• Mentioning the keyword enough times

Once you have done this, you should be ready to publish your post.

Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines

A big part of how Google decides on where your blog post will rank in it’s search engine is based on how much it likes your website.

Google wants to link to websites that are up to date, user friendly, trustworthy and popular.

Here is a list of ways to achieve this:

• Have a contact page with address and phone number
• Get HTTPS in your website URL
• Add a sitemap to your website
• Always fix broken links
• Improve your page speed
• Make sure you have no duplicated content

Remember, you can optimize your blog posts as much as you like, but if the content isn’t amazing, it’s not going to get linked to, which means it’s not going to rank well in Google.

Step 3) Optimize Your Blog Marketing

Now that your blog post is published and it’s optimized for Google, the next important thing I recommend you do, is to make it easy for people to find your content.

You want as many people as possible, all coming to your website at the same time to view your new post. Not just because you want lot’s of traffic but because it gives you a better chance of getting even more traffic.

Think about it this way, if someone sees one person share your article, they often won’t look at it. But if they see 10 people sharing your article, they start to think, WOW, this must be good.

If you’re creating great content, you’re bound to eventually get some big spikes in traffic.

The only problem with spikes in traffic is that they can be gone as quickly as they come. The spike of a successful article goes down after two or three days.

But a good website is designed to turn one-time traffic into recurring traffic. After jumping from 400 visitors a day to 4,000 visitors a day, it goes back down to 600 or 700. That’s a big increase from where it was before.

We turn traffic spikes into long-term traffic by asking people to subscribe to our email list. You’ll notice we have a popup and an opt-in box in the footer of this web page which offer exclusive content for people who subscribe by email. Email is the most direct way to let people know that you’ve published a great new article.

Another way to get first-time visitors to come back to your site is through social media. These communities bring a consistent social buzz to each new post.

Here are my top tips for getting lots of traffic to a brand new blog post:

Email Your Subscribers

Like I just mentioned, one of the best way to instantly get a lot of people to visit your website is to email subscribers.

Every time we email our list about a new post, 1000’s of people visit our site. Some of them share it on social media, some link to it on their blog.

This gets us backlinks to our blog post and gives our search engine optimization a good boost.

This is an important part to the success of any post.

But how do you get email subscribers if your blog is new? Read this post about 10 ways to get email subscribers.

Mention It On Social Media

Similar to having an email list, you can Tweet/Facebook your article and a whole load of people will visit it. If the article is amazing, people will share it.

We don’t put a lot of effort into building our social media accounts because we know if we write great posts, our readers will do the sharing for us. Having said this, social media has been one of our best traffic sources. One of the reasons for our success with social media is we signed up and started using it way earlier then the majority of other people.

When I launched IncomeSup, something that was going really well right then was Twitter. Twitter was the in-thing. Everyone was jumping on board.

Since Twitter was new, the make money online niche wasn’t yet saturated.

I was getting huge amounts of traffic — literally 100,000 visitors in a month from Twitter. And I could take advantage of it so easily by just following thousands of Twitter users a day. Thousands of people would come to my profile to see who has followed them and follow me back, click my profile link, my updates, and so on.

Then when Pinterest launched, we were able to do the same thing.

We have found that often in business, we are able to achieve huge amounts of success by acting quickly and not waiting to see how things work out. Some bloggers may of looked at Twitter and thought it won’t last and decided not to join until a lot later.

Getting People On Your Blog To Read Your New Posts

This is also an important step in your blog promotion. One of the easiest way to keep website traffic high, is to keep people visiting page after page and coming back to your website. A few ways you can do this:

• Add a link to your top navigation bar. If people enjoy your content, they will want to look for more.
• Add a link to the top of your sidebar.
• Make sure the post is featured on the home and category pages.
• Make sure the post is featured in related/popular posts.

Ask Friends to Comment and Share (read why)

When I first started blogging, I would often ask friends in the industry to comment and share my posts. Most of them didn’t have any traffic, but that wasn’t important.

What was important, was if I was getting lots of comments and shares, other people coming to the site would be a lot more likely to comment and share.

Remember, it’s about momentum.

The Last Word:

Traffic is a Marathon, Not a Sprint.

Even if you’re doing everything right, it’s unrealistic to expect to have a ton of traffic and income right away. These things need time.

My brother didn’t make any money with Expert Photography the first few months. But he kept at it because he’d seen exactly how long it had taken me to grow my websites in the past. Eventually, he was making $100 per month, then $1000 per month, now he makes $1000’s a day.

Read more: ‘10 Best WordPress Plugins For Getting More Traffic To Your Website’

The post How To Promote Your Blog – The Fastest Way To 1000 Visitors Per Day appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

It’s really quite straight forward. Create the best content possible. That’s what people want.

People go to websites because they want something. It could be to buy something, to learn something, to be entertained by something, or any number of things. The better you are at giving people what they want, the more traffic you will get.

I don’t spend much time working on getting Facebook likes and getting top search engine rankings because it’s quite often the bi-product of great content.

Below I have outlined what you can learn from the 50 articles that send IncomeDiary the most traffic.

1. The articles that get the most traffic are lists… Shock!

Out of my 50 top articles, 35 start with a number. When I write, I write in a way, I would like to read. Being dyslexic, I like to summarize things, make it easy on myself to consume information. That’s why I think I do such a good job with lists.

Here’s 4 examples of top lists:

1. 30 Most Influential People In Blogger
2. 10 Christmas Gifts For Photographers
3. 20 Health Experts To Follow on Facebook
4. 10 Reasons Why It Rocks To Be a Young Entrepreneur

Here’s some examples of my favorite top list titles.

2. Mentioning famous people gets you traffic

9 out of 10 of our top articles mention people in some way.

Think about it this way:

If I wrote an article called: 10 Things Usain Bolt Does To Run Faster

I don’t need Bolt’s permission to write about him, but I get all of the benefits of having his name associated with mine and what it represents about what is written.

Usain is the fastest runner in the world. That means these tips must be the best tips in the world.

If I write about how to run faster, no one will want to listen.

3. Linking out can increase the time someone spends on your website

4 out of the top 5 articles on this website link out to over a dozen other websites. These articles also had noticeably longer visitor times.

Don’t be scared to link out and show some love. If you recommend something or someone and your reader likes where you sent them, then they will end up trusting you more.

4. The title can make or break an article

Something that is made really obvious when I look at my top 50 blog posts is… the title can really make or break an article.

If you are stuck trying to come up with a title of a post, go to the supermarket and look at the magazines. Modify titles of articles to make them relevant to something you want to write about.

5. Motivation beats inspiration and instruction

8 out of the top 10 articles on IncomeDiary are motivational. Here’s the breakdown for the top 50 articles:

• Motivational: 24
• Tutorials: 17
• Inspirational: 9
• Reviews: 0
• News: 0
• Interviews: 0

Motivational, is the type of posts that make you take action and start working.

Tutorials, are articles showing you how to do something. These can often be monetized well by recommending products required to do what you instruct in the tutorial.

Inspirational, is the type of post that gives you ideas.

Reviews, we review products and mention them in our customer autoresponders.

News, often something I would shy away from because it’s not evergreen (always relevant) content. If it gives me a positive ROI, then I will publish them.

It seems people value motivation higher than anything else. It’s not often lacking the skills that holds us back, it’s our work rate. Motivational posts help us focus more on our goals.

Although Reviews and News are not featured in the top 50 posts, they are still a relevant part of my blogging strategy. I just prioritize.

6. Have a content plan

I’m a systems guy. I like to follow a blueprint when I’m doing something because it’s tried and tested, proven to give the best results. I have a doc called Contest Strategy which I send to writers to make sure they have every required to do the best job possible. The better job they can do, the more traffic I get, the more traffic I get, the more money I make. This is some of the information I provide for everyone who writes for us:

• Image sizes
• About the author
• Blog post template
• Post publish time & date
• Post title review
• Post titles swipe copy
• How to optimize post for search engines
• PSD graphic files which writers can edit

7. Articles are worth paying for

A large percent of articles published on IncomeDiary are paid for.

One of the highest performing posts on IncomeDiary was published last year and has so far received 9,883 visitors in the last 30 days & 106,338 visitors in the last year. I paid $120 for that article.

I published a post in 2011 that cost me $100. In 2017 it makes me over $1000 a month.

The easiest way in my experience to get people to write for you is to ask. If asking fails, offer them money. We put together a training video on how we pay people to write our posts.

In this screen shot, you can see that the article is now getting more traffic weekly then it did in it’s first week. I have done nothing to it since the day it was published. None of us are SEO experts. All we focus on is great content and let the universe do the rest of the work

To Conclude:

To write posts that drive lots of traffic, make sure to:

• Write it in a list form and number it.
• Mention people your readers will know, it will draw them in.
• Link out to other websites.
• Write the perfect name for your article. This should be thought about.
• Motivate your reader.
• Keep to a plan & implement.

What type of blog posts are sending you the most traffic right now?

Read next: ‘How To Promote Your Blog – The Fastest Way To 1000 Visitors Per Day’

The post 7 Lessons From 50 Blog Posts That Send Me The Most Traffic appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

As people get started with blogging, they think it’s as simple as clicking, “Add New Post,” typing up a few paragraphs, and clicking, “Publish.”

Then they hopelessly wait for views, comments, and tweets. No one comes. No one comments. No one tweets.

They do this three or four times and eventually write off blogging as, “not it’s all hyped up to be.”

After writing for IncomeDiary for a few months now, I can tell you that there are dozens of small blogging nuances that we work into nearly every post.

Here are 10 of the most popular SEO blog post publishing steps that bloggers tend to forget.

1. Keyword Research

Before I write a single word, I figure out if it’s something that people are asking about. And if they are, I want to know if the internet is already saturated with that type of content.

To figure this out, I use Ahrefs Keywords Explorer – I look up the words I believe people would search for to find the post I plan on writing. Using this tool I can see how much traffic a search term gets and what the competition looks like.

I want this post to rank for “seo blog post publishing steps” (click to see how it’s doing).

For more clarification on this tip, read this comment below.

2. Fine-Tuning the Headline

Here’s my formula for crafting headlines for list posts:

[#][keyword][ curiosity-capturing phrase]

For title tag SEO, your goal is to place the keyword as near to the front of the headline as possible:

• Top 10 Motivational YouTube Videos for Entrepreneurs
• 20 Great Google Chrome Extensions for Online Entrepreneurs
• 20 Best Designed Pricing Comparison Tables

For that last one, I switched the keyword with the curiosity phrase because “Best Designed” was another phrase that people tack on to the base keyword.

3. Post Slug

The post slug is what shows up after the domain for every post or page.

When you type a headline, WordPress generates the post slug by placing every word in the headline into the slug. This clutters it up with lots of small words.

Instead, change your post slug to your primary keyword.

Default: IncomeDiary.com/10-seo-blog-post-publishing-steps-that-most-bloggers-forget/

Ideal: IncomeDiary.com/seo-blog-post-publishing-steps/

4. Images

We all know that images grab your attention, break up the content, and supplement your ideas. But they also add great SEO benefits, as long as you follow these steps:

1. Save your images as [keyword-phrase.png] before you upload them to your site.
2. Add alt text as [keyword phrase].
3. Add title tag as [keyword phrase].

These rules apply to your featured image and the images within your posts. For the images within the content, however, use other similar and relevant keywords.

5. Relevant Videos

Google understands that adding a video to a blog post makes it a more complete resource. If they haven’t already boosting blog posts with videos, they will eventually.

If blogging is a big portion of your business, start making videos for your posts, upload them to your channel, and embed them in the actual post.

If you’re still dabbling in blogging, consider embedding other peoples’ videos in your posts.

6. Subheads

Similar to images, subheadings break up the content and make blog posts easier to read. They also have big-time SEO benefits.

When a search engine robot hits a page, it reads the headline/title tag first. Then it reads the H2, H3, and H4 tags.

When you add subheadings to your content, proper HTML is:

<h2>Subhead Level 1</h2>

<h3>Subhead Level 2</h3>

<h4>Subhead Level 3</h3>

Note: The headline/title tag should be automatically wrapped in <h1></h1>.

So… Stop simply bolding and italicizing your subheads.

7. Interlinking

Another important step that most people forget is interlinking between posts.

Before you publish a new post, read through it and try to find two-three opportunities to naturally link back to relevant posts on your blog.

This keeps both readers and search spiders on your site longer.

8. External Linking

Also, look for opportunities to link to other bloggers. The SEO benefits of external linking are unclear, but Neil Patel says:

“Did you know that an external links going out to these high authority sites can boost your SEO? When search engines crawl your site and see a link and follow it to CNN or Huffington Post, they weight it as a positive. The trick is to find organic ways to link to these sites, like I did in this post.”

Linking to other sites is also a good way to build relationships with other bloggers.

I’ve received two “thank you” emails from important people because I chose to link to their sites on IncomeDiary posts.

I linked to Pat’s site on: 10 Blog Posts that Made an Everlasting Impact on Me

I linked to Giancarlo’s site on: 10 Weird Ways Big Companies Make Money Online

Bloggers notice and appreciate backlinks.

9. Meta Data

Whether or not Google still looks at meta keywords is up for debate, but the meta description is definitely still used.

In a search result, your meta description often shows up as the little blurb beneath the blue link. In writing your meta description, you need to keep three things in mind:

1. It needs to be fewer than 155 characters so Google will display the whole description.
2. It needs to include your keywords because Google bolds them in search results.
3. It should be an actual sentence from the post because people look for that sentence once they arrive.

I always summarize the post with the keywords in the last sentence of the introduction and use that as the meta description.

10. Call to Action

The final step is the call-to-action. As with any piece of marketing material, a blog post should be designed to get someone to do something.

Here are a few popular calls to action:

1. Comment – You can encourage people to comment by ending the post with a thought-provoking question or simply asking them to let you know what they think.
2. Share – “If you liked this post, tweet it out.”
3. Implement – I believe the best result of any blog post is for a reader to take your advice and implement it.

The main reason I’ve been following IncomeDiary for so long is because I constantly find myself implementing the advice I read here. When I see the benefits to following the advice, it makes me want to come back for more.

Now you have a choice. You can comment, share, or implement. I prefer if you implement, but I’ll appreciate all three.

Read more: ‘9 Reasons Why You’re Not Getting Search Engine Traffic’

The post 10 SEO Blog Post Publishing Steps that Most Bloggers Forget appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Well, I have 8,350 Facebook fans, 10,200 Twitter followers and 1,550 unique Pinterest followers. Last week, I saw five times more traffic from Pinterest, than from Facebook and Twitter combined.

So yes, it’s amazing. Here, have some proof:

If that doesn’t convince you to listen up, then I don’t know what will.

This post is a BS-free zone. I’m not going to leave you snipets of information, or little tips that you can quickly forget, I’m going to provide you with the process I’ve gone through to see the traffic I’m seeing. If you want to master Pinterest, then this is the post for you, so stop making excuses.

A little heads up here, this is a long post, and it will take time to take it all in, but this is only part 1 of 2. My advanced strategies will be with you soon (see bottom of post for more details).

Pinterest

Imagine a website sort of like Facebook, only instead of people liking a post, they shared it instead. And then their friends shared it too if they liked it, and so on. Can you start to imagine the sort of traffic you might see from this?

Ok, so we’ve already established that you need to be on Pinterst, but I’d imagine that most of you already knew this. You were probably like me, knowing that you should be on it, but couldn’t really be bothered to divide your time over another social network (hello Google+), and kind of just hoped that you wouldn’t have to.

When I first got started, I felt like I had missed out on being an early adopter (I saw my first Pinterest traffic about a year ago), but after a few months of using it, I don’t feel that way at all, because it’s not that hard to catch up.

I’m going to show you exactly what I do to see so much traffic, but first, lets start with the basics.

How does Pinterest Work? (Read this)

From a marketing point of view, it can be hard to get your head around how pins are counted, and how it converts into traffic, so let me give you a little run down.

You post an image to a board, where other people can browse, see what they like, and either like it, or pin it to their own board. This image links back to the webpage that you pinned it from, and most people will click through and read the post. If the image is an infographic, and all the information they need is on Pinterest, then they probably won’t bother so much. Hold a little something back (although Pinterest does make long images very narrow when you click on them).

So lets say I pin something to my board, and it gets repinned 10 times. That counts as 10 repins for my pin. If someone takes one of those repins and repins it again, that does not add towards my total number of repins, because it was pinned from another source.

I’ll give you an example.

Choosing a board at random, I can find a pin with 7 repins. If I have a look at who’s repinned my pin, I can see that the majority of them receive just a couple likes and repins. Except for one. One of them has 26 likes, and 103 repins. And I could go on further, and look at how many times it’s been repinned from there, but I think you get the picture. It can start to spread like wildfire.

The point is, just because you can’t see how many repins you’ve received, that doesn’t mean you’re not seeing big traffic. Use Google Analytics to have a better look.

Setting Up

This is pretty basic, so I’m going to speed through it, but it’s worth reading.

When it comes to choosing a name, I suggest something along the lines either the name of your website, or whatever other name you use in social media. I like to associate myself with my website, so I go for PhotoJosh (which I use as my twitter name), which is good, just don’t call yourself something that doesn’t have anything to do with your website or brand (such as SamSmith).

Looking for a bio? You should already have a pretty solid one with your Facebook/Twitter so use that. If you don’t, then just make sure that you use your keywords so that they come up in searches.

Connect your Facebook and Twitter too, that will help you to see some more traffic.

When it comes to your profile image, use a photo of yourself, not your website logo. It allows people to feel that they’re connecting with a person, rather than a brand. It’s my experience that I find better interactivity this way.

Your Boards

Start of with one main board, the one that’s going to be followed more than your others. For me, this is ‘Photography Tips, Tricks, & Tutorials‘. This is where you’re going to pin your very best content, with diverse sources, not just yourself.

Now it’s time to learn from my first mistake.

Pinterest can be a lot of fun (and I say this as a young, heterosexual male), and you might find the urge to pin other interests that you may have, which for me were male fashion, food, and architecture.

This is a big no no. Rather than people clicking on the ‘follow all’ button, they chose to follow individual boards instead. The problem with this is that when you add new boards, only the people who are following all of your boards will be following your new boards automatically too.

Stay within your niche, and keep the titles short. They can all be searched for.

To start with, I would suggest building perhaps 4-5 boards to begin with, before we look at more advanced techniques in the next post. Here’s how I started in my photography niche.

1. My main board, where I pin mixture of content, related to photography.
2. A gear board. This links to a bunch of Amazon Associates posts on my website (you can’t earn commission straight through Pinterest any more, it has to link to your own site).
3. 30 Day Photography challenge. This was a niche within my niche, where people could find all the relevant links to a challenge I had set.
4. A group board. This is powerful for finding traffic, and followers.

If you look at my boards now, you’ll notice that there’s currently 15, but I will get to the rest of those boards in the next post.

The Group Board

This is my first little trick for you to start seeing more followers and traffic. On Pinterest, you can allow multiple people to pin to a board at once, so why not allow your fans to pin with you?

Create a board, invite all of your fans and followers to come and pin with you. You have to follow them to add them to the board, but that’s fine, and you’ll undoubtedly get a follow in return. Then you have a board that gets lots of followers, and all the pinning is done for you. You can occasionally take links and pin them to your other boards, and promote your own stuff there too.

It’s easy to do, a great way to find followers, and in my experience, the great content that gets pinned on there sees a lot of repins too. Check mine out.

Follow Pinterest Etiquette and Find Pinterest Love

Ok, time to bare with me as we have a look at the house rules of Pinterest, or rather, the etiquette.

This is hugely important, because you don’t want to scare off potential followers.

You don’t want to stand out as a bad pinner, and it’s really not hard to use Pinterest effectively, so adhere to the following rules.

1. Don’t solely pin yourself. Ease off the constant self promotion (spam?), and try to pin 50/50 on your main board, of your content, and someone else’s. Your followers will appreciate this, and you’ll actually see more of them.
2. Credit your sources. This means don’t take a nice looking infographic, host it on your website, link back to the source (on your webpage), but pin your webpage. This isn’t playing fair, and people actually want to see the source.
3. Pin to the correct board. Don’t go posting graphic design on a photography board. Similar? Yes. Right place for the pin? No.
4. Write a description. Sometimes the image doesn’t tell us much, and a few words will help people to click on those links!
5. Don’t go too mad with the pinning all at once. If you’re brand new, then this is fine, but you don’t want to spam followers. I pin 1-5 times a day at the moment.
6. When you see something you like, like it.

How to Pin Effectively

As I’m sure you’ve worked out by now, Pinterest is very image heavy. You may think that you don’t really work with images, so it’s not relevant to you, but it is. Even if it’s just an image of some fancy text, including your post title, that’s enough to get pinning.

But how can you best use images to your advantage?

Images

There’s a few things you need to remember. Firstly, when we talk about visual weight in photography (as in, what do we look at first and longest), writing come pretty high in the rankings, because we’re so used to looking at it. Add text to all of your images to let your followers know what they’re about.

You will also notice that on Pinterest, there is a maximum width for images, but no apparent maximum length. This means that you can add some serious Pinterest real estate by making long images, and pinning those. Check out the image to the right that I used.

Rather than pinning a single image, I took five minutes, added all of the photos to a single image, and pinned that instead. Trust me, this works wayyy better.

You will also want to consider watermarking your images. Perhaps with your website URL or your Pinterest name; it’s a good idea to brand your images.

Descriptions & Prices

Your description is important too, even if you have your text on the image. People can search for pins and you want your pins to show up in the results too. Cover all of your bases.

If you’re marketing products on Pinterest, then it’s a great idea to include a price in your description. Why? Not only is this important for your description, but Pinterest will very kindly add a price banner on pin for you, so everyone can easily see how much an item costs.

Become the go-to Board

If you post only your own content, then people are going to see this as advertising. If you post a wide variety of content, from the best on the internet, you’re going to find a lot more followers, because people see that you hold the board to a high standard. You can then include your own content, and more people are going to see it.

How to Find Followers

I’m going to start with the obvious here, as it’s all too often ignored. Promote your page through your other social media accounts. Post on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ and let people know that you want to see their boards, while telling them about yours at the same time. Promoting a social account is not too dissimilar to promoting a website.

Cool, now that’s out of the way, lets look at Pinterest specific ways of promoting yourself. This is similar to Twitter marketing if you’re familiar with that.

Firstly, make sure you have at least two boards made, and then you want to go looking for other people posting similar content to you. Use the search bar, and type in your niche (for me, it was photography tutorials). Then in the top left-hand corner of the page, you will see the option to choose between pins, boards, and people. Choose boards.

Without even clicking on the boards, I can see nine of my tutorials pinned to three of the first 10 boards. Perhaps I’m doing something right here?

Start by following up to about 100 of these boards straight away. This will get you noticed, but there’s more that you can do. Go back to all of these boards, and like 3-5 of their posts. Quickly browse for what looks like the best content, and click like. I do this with all the boards that I follow, because you take up lots of room in their notifications, so they’re more likely to check out your profile.

Finding your first set of followers is really important, so don’t skip this step.

For example, if I click on the very first board that pops up, they’ve pinned 36 of my posts, and those pins have had a total of 498 repins. From one board.

Plugins I Use

You should be using some sort of social sharing plugin on your WordPress site, and I strongly recommend that you add the Pinterest button. The majority of Pinterest users will have a browser plugin or bookmark, but this does help to remind them. It’s also a nice way to see a count.

I also use a plugin called Pinterest Pin It Button For Images which isn’t the most popular Pinterest plugin, but I think I’ve probably tried them all by now, and this is my favorite for images. When you install it, you need to input the maximum width for your images in the settings, but after that you’re ready to go.

The reason I like this plugin is because the ‘Pin it’ button appears above every image in your post (except featured image), and then when you highlight the button, the image brightens, which makes it stand out. Very useful. It also skips the step that a lot of these plugins make you go through. When you click on the button, you don’t then have to choose an image, and it will also take your title text as the description. Perfect.

Always post your featured image at the bottom of the page too, to remind people to pin the post.

Another plugin you might like to consider when starting out, is called Pinterest RSS Widget and it will take your latest posts and display them anywhere on your website, in a size that you specify. I used to have mine set up in my footer because it would show people that I was on Pinterest, and allow them to follow me. I’ve found a good standing on Pinterest now so I don’t really need it taking up more page space (but I would recommend it for you).

So you should have your website optimized, as well as your other social networks. Whenever you post something to your main board, click on ‘Post to Twitter’ too, because this will tweet the pin, rather than the link.

Things I Don’t Do

I don’t comment.

This goes against what a lot of Pinterest marketers will tell you, but I have my reasons. Firstly, most people don’t comment. Secondly, have you seen the notification system? It’s pretty poor, you can’t look at all of them, so when people comment on my pins, I tend to miss them. I’m not looking for comments, I’m looking for repins and likes. If I want to give someone a nod for a good post, or to thank them for pinning my content, I like their pin.

What you Need to do Before Part 2

You need to get setup with an analytic service like Pinfluencer, as they have a 60 day free trial, and you can use that time to track your pins, see who follows you, who’s the most influential, which are your most popular pins, what your competitors are doing, and much more. Like Google Analytics, you can only track your progress after you set this up, you can’t look into the past, so the sooner you get started, the better.

I will see you in part 2, where I show you how I converted my Pinterest boards into a mini version of my own website, and I start to see the best traffic I’ve seen in a very long time.

Read more: ‘Advanced Pinterest Marketing Strategies for Dominating Web Traffic’

The post The Beginner’s Guide to Seeing Massive Pinterest Traffic appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Irina Weber from SERanking.com is here today, to enlighten us as to which tools are the most productive and best organized to help you succeed as a blogger.

Irina and her team have tested many tools of top productivity and blogging experts and have a good idea of what top performers in the blogging world are using to get through the day in a highly productive manner.

Here’s an awesome list of SEO tools that can simplify and supercharge your blogging efforts…

25 SEO Tools For Better Search Engine Rankings

#25. BuzzSumo

Content Curator

BuzzSumo is a fantastic tool that allows you to search widely shared content through social networks, gather all data about the content, define top influential content curators in your niche and collect statistics about all of them into Excel spreadsheets. It’s easy to use: just type a word and it will show you all the most popular posts on the web based on that particular keyword.

buzzsumo.com

#24. SEMRush

SERP Tracking

SEMRush is a great tool that tells you a lot about not only your own website but your competitors search engine rankings too. The most interesting information they share is what keywords a website ranks for. This information is useful because, you can see what posts don’t rank at all and which rank well but could be improved.

Semrush.com

#23. SE Ranking

Website Rank Checker

SE Ranking allows you to monitor website rank in search engines and any target regions. It provides advanced keyword analysis, website audits, competitors’ website checking, online marketing plans with an easy way to get White Label reports.

seranking.com

#22. Portent

Content Idea Generator

If you’re looking for good ideas and titles to write epic content, just enter a keyword and you’ll get a list of catchy potential titles for your next article.

portent.com

#21. Google Docs

Content Creation & Editing

This is a great tool where you can write and store content and check for any grammar and spelling mistakes. For more advanced features, you can easily change the HTML or CSS of the document and even collaborate with other people, in case you need some help.

docs.google.com

#20. Piktochart

Infographic Design App

Nowadays infographics are the best way to cover visual and interesting information on your site and attract your target audience. It is quite expensive to order infographics, but Piktochart will help you to create your own for free. Pie charts and graphs can also be pretty to attract user’s attention.

We’ve found it to be a great addition to the professional looking landing pages that you can create with OptimizePress.

piktochart.com

#19. ScreenPresso

Screen Capture Tool

Screenpresso can improve your screen capture experience. Right now with ScreenPresso, screenshots can look natural and eye-catching. Their powerful built-in editor allows you to grab an image or video of what you see on your computer screen, add effects, and share with anyone.

screenpresso.com

#18. Doodle

Task Scheduler

Doodle makes your blogging simple and more organized. Using a content calendar will help you to figure out how often and when you should schedule your blog posts. The tool facilitates the content process and gets rid of excess distractions.

doodle.com

#17. Dropbox

Filesharing

It is one of the most popular tools to store things like images, pdf files, and Word Docs between mobile devices and computers. You can keep your files secure wherever you go. Dropbox is easy to use; Simply save your files, add them to the tool and sync them with a supported app.

dropbox.com

#16. Windows Live Writer

Blog Editor

The tool simplifies the writing and editing of all blog posts. It is one of the most famous blog editors on the Windows platform. You can easily edit blog posts, images, videos, etc. You can also add additional features with lots of useful plugins.

windows.microsoft.com/ru-ru/windows-live

#15. Ping-O-Matic

Pinging Service

It is one of the best pinging services to let search engines know about your new posts. You can choose different services that you want to ping. All services are regularly updated, so make sure you take advantage of the most useful ones.

pingomatic.com

#14. Keyword Planner

Keyword Research

Keyword Planner is the best tool to find and discover keywords in order to optimize your content, build up successful marketing campaigns, gather metrics about websites and get an estimate of search queries for target keywords. You can monitor and export your competitor’s keywords for better website performance. A lot of useful tools are built-in so the Keyword Planner can help you to create paid Ad words campaigns easily.

adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner

#13. Toggl

Time Tracking Tool

A super simple time tracking tool, that helps you stay on track. It lets you create tasks, click the Start/Stop button, check out how the task is going and how much time you spent on it. It works online and offline and easily syncs to the cloud when you’ve reached the internet. It is quite an indispensible tool for bloggers who need to keep track of writing, editing and researching tasks.

toggl.com

#12. Grammarly

Grammar Checker

The tool makes your writing better by finding and fixing grammar mistakes. It checks different mistakes for sentence structure, style, grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc. It is a perfect match for a newbie and you don’t need to have any special editing skills.

grammarly.com

#11. Canva

Simple Graphic Design

It is the most-used image software and it’s because Canva allows you to create fancy and awesome images with a wide range of different templates for social media, website interface, fonts and more.

canva.com

#10. Mention

Media Monitor

It is a great real-time media monitoring tool. Mention is a great alternative to Google Alerts. It lets you track the keywords and mentions about your website, whether it’s positive, negative or neutral content. Using Mention you can also collaborate with your employees; share alerts, assign tasks, get them involved in the discussion and keep track of your competitor’s actions.

en.mention.com

#9. MailChimp

Email Marketing Solution

MailChimp is a great email marketing tool that helps send emails to a list of your users, create great email campaigns, manage all of your subscribers, share them on social media and integrate with any web services you use. It is easy to get automated campaigns every day that deliver all new posts you write. It is integrated with Google Analytics for better business insight.

mailchimp.com

#8. Buffer

Social Media Manager

When you publish a blog post, you can easily set up a schedule with Buffer. It will help you share different posts via social networks with custom images and titles. This is the greatest social media app, and it really makes it easy to update all of your social statuses.

bufferapp.com

#7. KeePass

Password Management

KeePass is a free and easy-to use password management tool. All passwords are stored in your own database with a master password to lock/unlock the database. The tool is available for iOS, Android, Mac OS X and Linux.

keepass.info

#6. Moz Toolbar

On Page SEO Metrics

Moz Toolbar is a great and powerful tool that provides access to all important SEO metrics, allows you to explore page elements, displays PR and domain rank, shows social metrics, and analyzes page overplay.

moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar

#5. Screaming Frog

SEO Spider Tool & Crawler Software

Screaming Frog allows you to explore all onsite SEO. It is a good tool to use when reviewing medium and large websites. All key on page SEO elements (headline, meta tags, URL, interlinking, duplicate pages, redirect, etc) are exported to Excel. It is useful to check out all SEO recommendations that you use for better onsite SEO optimization.

screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider

#4. Rapportive

Displays Email Contact Information

Rapportive is a free Gmail add-on that displays everything about your contact’s (Twitter, FB, LinkedIn) on your inbox. It is easy to contact them without leaving gmail. You can follow them on Twitter and even friend them on Facebook. You can stay in one place, grow your social network and establish good relationships with people all the while, staying on top of emails.

rapportive.com

#3. Copyscape

Plagiarism Detection

Copyscape is the best plagiarism detection software that lets you find out who used your content and create an auto RSS blog with an RSS feed. You can try it free or use the premium version of this service.

copyscape.com

#2. WorkExaminer

Online Employee Monitoring

If you run a lot of projects, you probably need to hire workers to complete certain tasks. In order to increase employees’ productivity, you should always control their daily activities, working hours, etc. WorkExaminer is an excellent employee monitoring tool for effective website performance.

workexaminer.com

#1. Ahrefs

Site Explorer & Backlink Checker

Ahrefs is a powerful online backlink checker and site explorer tool that is very easy to understand at a glance. Ahrefs has a suite of useful tools like keyword analysis, domain comparison, batch analysis and competition analysis. It is perfectly designed for web masters and website owners that want to save money and get the most out of their business. Due to its rich functionality and a wide range of toolsets, it is poised to be a large player on the market.

ahrefs.com

We’ve had the privilege to check out many of these tools. As you’ve already figured out, blogging is a hard world to break in. With the right tools, you are sure to improve your chances of success on your blogging journey.

As of now, you’ve got a good arsenal of tools to make your blog ready for best of times.

Now it’s your turn to share your favorite blogging tools. We’re always happy to discover more about the tools that are out of there and currently working for you!

Read more: ‘9 Reasons Why You’re Not Getting Search Engine Traffic’

The post 25 Best SEO Tools For Successful Blogging appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

If every one of your posts isn’t getting anywhere from a few to a couple thousand search visits per month, then you’re doing something wrong.

Here are nine reasons why you’re not getting as much search engine traffic as you deserve.

1. Your Site Isn’t Indexed

If your site isn’t indexed, they can’t send you traffic. So, how do you get indexed?

Google (and other search engines) will index your site automatically, but here are a few steps to speed up the process:

1. Create an XML sitemap with the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.
2. Submit your sitemap to Google through Google Webmaster Tools.

As your site becomes more popular, Google’s spiders will visit more frequently and index your content more rapidly.

2. You’re Not Writing Something that People are Searching For

The first step in writing a blog post is figuring out what people want to know about. Ignoring this step is like starting a business without researching what people want to buy.

If you want search traffic, you need to conduct keyword research. I know I’ve said this before here and here, but being honest with yourself, how often do you actually do it?

It’s your job to create content around the keywords that people are actually searching. To help you figure out which keywords people are searching for, take a look at Ahrefs or SEMRush.

3. You’re Not Creating Keyword-Focused Posts

Along the same lines, once you know exactly which keywords that people use, you need to create content specifically for those keywords.

During your keyword research, create a list of keywords that are relevant to your audience and that are searched more than 500 times per month. Then write one blog post for every keyword.

If you need help coming up with good headlines, portent has a free tool to help.

4. You’re Not Putting Keywords in Your Headlines

Your headline is the most important part of your post for getting search traffic.

When you Google something, the keyword that you search is always in the headline, usually in its entirety and near the front of the headline.

So, if you want to start ranking for specific keywords, they need to be in your headline and near the front.

5. Your Posts Aren’t Thorough

Remember, it’s Google’s job to give relevant, high-quality search results. Ideally, the best, most thorough web page for each keyword will always hold the top spot.

For example, if you wrote a 100-word post on the “how to get search engine traffic” while someone else wrote a 3,000-word post that covers every nook and cranny of the topic with authority, Google is going to find a way to put the 3,000-word post at the top and drop yours to the wayside.

Your goal with each and every blog post is to create the ultimate resource for that particular keyword. 2,000-words per blog post is a good rule of thumb.

6. You’re Not Creating Sharable Content

A study by Branded3 confirmed that Google’s search results are at least somewhat based on the number of Tweets.

In the study they found a direct correlation between number of tweets and search result rankings. URLs with more than 7,500 tweets, on average, held the 5^th spot for their keyword.

This makes sense too. If people are sharing your blog post, that’s a good sign that it’s worth a bump up in the search results.

7. You’re Not Linking Externally and Internally

One way to create an ultimate resource for a particular keyword is to link to other resources within your blog post, both externally and internally.

This does three things:

1. It makes your blog post more valuable.
2. It makes other content on the subject easier for Google to find.
3. I’ve found that one of the best ways to get backlinks is to start by linking to other bloggers.

8. You’re Not Using WordPress

One of the benefits of using WordPress is that it generates easy-to-index pages. If your website is easy to index, then Google will rank it higher.

WordPress is widely considered the best website building platform partly because that’s what all the top online resources are built with. And the people who use it recommend that other people use it.

The key here is to have a well-coded website and WordPress takes care of that for you.

9. You’re Not Optimizing Your Images

Optimizing your images will help your search engine rankings in two ways:

1. You’ll likely get traffic through Google’s image search.
2. It’s another way to tell Google what your primary keyword is.

Here are the only three ways to optimize your images:

1. Save your images as [keyword-phrase.png] before you upload them to your site.
2. Add alt text as [keyword phrase].
3. Add title tag as [keyword phrase].

If you have any questions with optimizing your images, let me know and I’ll try to help you out.

The Last Word

Once you fall into the routine of conducting keyword research, choosing a keyword, and pumping out content it’s easy to put too much emphasis on writing for search engines.

Your writing becomes robotic. Just because someone can find it doesn’t mean that they’ll read it and love it.

The reason you need to go through these steps is because it’s the most efficient way to find out what people want to read and to serve it up on an easy-to-find platter.

Read more: ‘10 Article Headline Examples That Got Us 10 Million Readers’

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