SEO Crunch

Everyone’s doing it these days; blogs are a dime a dozen …. or a thousand perhaps.

With visions of success and growing rich online, a lot of people go register a domain name, download Wordpress and begin adding a few posts.

But this is no get rich overnight scheme. Most people will give up after a few days or weeks, finding that after they’ve emailed their Blog domain name to friends and family, they get only a handful of visitors.

Read on to learn how you can create a blog that attracts attention, visitors and search engine results

Start a Blog with a Specific Topic and Reasons in Mind

You might start a blog from scratch with the vision of growing traffic and perhaps making money from pay per click, affiliate ads, etc.

But these days, if you have a company web site or operate an online E-Commerce storefront, then you have even better reason to consider adding a blog.

This gives both search engines and human visitors very little way to find your web site. Search Engines can only index HTML and text content, so the more pages and quality content, the more pages will be indexed and available for people to find your web site.

Many online retailers suffer from this issue substantially. They will put up hundreds of product pages with nothing but an image of their product with a brief description, giving search engines very little text content that can be indexed and made available for users to query.

Adding a blog to their site would give them a way to connect with potential buyers far more readily. By providing users with useful content that demonstrates you have domain expertise around your products and services, you create a useful online resource that can lead customers to your doorstep.

Know Your Topic

The first thing is to select a niche for your blog and to be sure it has a ready audience that wants and needs the content you intend to provide. Look around and do your homework.

Is the niche highly crowded already? If so, this could mean you have a large target audience, which is a good thing. On the other hand, it also means you will have substantial competitors, which means getting traffic could be a challenge unless you can find ways to build authority and traffic sources very quickly.

Also, you need to be very specific in the niche and topics you select, so you better either have substantive knowledge of the subject matter yourself or else have access to writers who do!

Too many blogs are already out there with average, generalized content. Most of them are rotting on the vine, neglected and hardly get any traffic.

Write Content Relevant to Your Audience

Largely, writing quality content means knowing who your audience is and what they want. So it better not be just like all your competitors. You need content that will stand out and get their attention.

Again, this is why it’s important to pick a topic you and/or your copyrighters know well. Interview experts on the topic and quote your sources. And don’t ever use duplicate content if you want to have any chance building a loyal audience. Not only is copyright infringement a serious legal matter, but search engines will penalize you as well for using duplicate content.

Get specific; give your readers as much specific information, ideas, and resources as you can. Also, you need to be prodigious. This means your content should exceed expectations and you need to publish often, providing a lot of high quality content. This keeps users coming back because they come to trust that you will continue to provide them will good ideas, humor, whatever it is that draws your audience in.

Edit, Edit, Edit

Now, some people will point to famous blogs out there like JohnChow.com or ShoeMoney.com and tell you that you should purposely use poor grammar, spelling and lots of slang on your blog. Depending on the audience, the style and tone you set, etc. that may be the right thing to do in some cases.

But for most audiences and niches, you’ll want content that is well written, without grammar or spelling errors. This means you want to edit your content thoroughly to be sure it follows a decent story line, with hooks to draw the reader in, logical progression and so forth.

Try following these tips if you are starting a blog or have one already and are trying to build your audience and site traffic! Also, if you have other useful ideas or thoughts please add your comments.