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How to Increase Organic Traffic to Your Blog Posts For Free

Traffic plays the role of ‘oxygen’ for blogs (and websites too). Without web traffic, it gets pretty hard to survive in the long-run. Majority of the bloggers have one problem in common, how to increase organic traffic to their blogs. In fact, in most of the cases, it is just web traffic that bloggers need. Increase in traffic comes later.

Undoubtedly, there are several ways to get traffic to your blog including search engines, social media, paid traffic, viral traffic etc. Organic traffic is the type of traffic that you get from search engines, and this is supposed to be the hardest one to get. Even though getting organic traffic to your blog is not easy (and not cheap at all), still majority of the bloggers depend on organic traffic for several reasons.

So, how to get organic traffic or to be more precisely, how to increase organic traffic to your blog posts?

We recently gathered information from multiple sources regarding increase in organic traffic to blogs, we analyzed around 22 different authentic sources, companies, blogs and articles and compiled a list of most repeated and most talked about ways to increase organic traffic to any blog post.

Write and Post Frequently

To be honest, you must have heard about the importance of writing and posting new blog posts on your blog from several sources. We all know it. BUT there is more to it.increase organic traffic to your blog posts

Optimal Frequency

The optimal posting frequency is a single blog post every day. Yes, when you write a blog post every single day, you will get more impressions, better search engine visibility, you will get more clicks which will lead to increase in organic traffic to your blog.

It was August 2014 when I posted 29 posts throughout the month on my blog. Yes, I missed two days. On comparing the organic traffic of July and August 2014 in Google Analytics, I saw a hefty 51.53% increase in sessions. This is something that I have done with my own blog and have seen the results. It works.

Another View

Imagine two blogs both have same age, same tld, same hosting, same design etc. Only one thing differs and that’s the number of blog posts on each blog. Let’s assume, Blog A has 20 posts and Blog B has 70 posts. Since Blog B has more content than Blog A, we can assume that the Blog B will get more impressions and will have a higher CTR as compared to Blog A. The more content you put on your blog, you are somehow getting more content and keywords out there for search engines. It is not always the focus keyword. You never know what your potential visitor might search for.

The Problem

Writing and posting a single blog post every day is not a piece of cake. You have to be extremely creative and you must have lots and lots of interesting ideas. For tight niche blogs, it gets even hard.

Even if you have hundreds of ideas to write for, it still gets hard because it gets hectic especially if you have multiple blogs.

Interestingly the solution is easy. You can hire a ghost writer or a professional blogger, and can outsource all the writing stuff.

Alternately, you can choose to write 5 blog posts a week or you can write a blog post after every two days. Writing and posting a blog post every day is the best thing you can do to increase organic traffic to your blog posts but if you cannot do it, make sure you write at minimum a single post every week.

Blog Post Length

Different experts have different views about the optimal length of a blog post that will rank well in search results.

After in-depth analysis, I feel confident to conclude (rather suggest) two alternate school of thoughts about blog post length.

Lengthy Infrequent Blog Posts

The more words you have in your blog post, higher rankings will it get.

A blog post that has well over 2000 words will rank higher in search engines (even Google) without any backlinks. In fact, such blog posts get backlinks the natural way. You don’t have to do any backlinking for such a blog post that’s extremely detailed.

If you carefully choose your topic and generate an interesting blog post of more than 2000 words, it will bring in pure organic traffic at its own. And imagine having 50 or maybe 60 such blog posts on your blog.

When you are writing lengthy blog posts that will drive organic traffic to your blog, you don’t have to publish very often. It makes sense. When your aim is to write lengthy blog posts, you just have to write once or maybe twice a week, and that would be more than enough – trust me.

The optimal blog post length that will increase organic traffic to your blog posts is 1000 words (950 words to be specific). But you don’t have to stick to it rather you should cross 1500 words for better search engine placement.

Short Frequent Blog Posts

The other school of thought is to write frequently (a blog post every single day) but keep the word count of the blog post around 300 to 400 words. Shorter blog posts will not rank well in search results until and unless you build backlinks or you choose a very ignored or new topic. But since you will post daily, it will increase impressions and click through rate ultimately resulting in an increase in organic traffic to your blog.

Topic Selection

It is not the keyword, meta description or featured image that drive traffic to a web page rather it is the topic, the title, that drives traffic. While most of the experts say that you have to necessarily come up with new, unique and interesting topics for your blog posts, that’s true to some extent but not always.

In fact, I don’t agree to this theory.

Why?

You don’t always have to come up with new topics to increase organic traffic to your blog posts rather you can just refine, add and publish the already available content in a more presentable way. In most of the cases it will work.

Here is a simple overview of how you should choose topics for your blog post that will drive traffic like crazy.

Come up with any idea within your niche. Search relevant blog posts in Google. See which blog posts have been doing great with respect to:

  • Search engine ranking
  • Social sharing
  • Blog comments

Once you find such a top-notch blog post, read it thoroughly. Take notes while reading it. When you are reading the blog post, note down following things:

  • What’s missing in the post? Read comments (if any) and see what people are asking about? Else use your own judgment. Do a critical analysis of the blog post.
  • How you can make this blog post even better. What you can add into it and what you can remove from it.

Once done, now is the time to jot down your own blog post. Remember we are not copying rather rewriting the blog post rather we are making it better. Here is how you will do it.

  • Add more valuable content. If the original writer wrote about 30 ways to potty train your baby, you need to write about 50 ways to potty train your baby. You have to do intensive research, of course, to add 20 more ways to it.
  • Increase the word count. If you see that the original blog post has 700 words, you need to make yours 1000 words or even more. This will push your blog post high in SERPs.
  • Add what’s missing. If the original blog post missed a critical aspect of potty training, you must include that in your blog post.
  • Don’t hesitate to cite the original blog post.

Publish your blog post, share it and enjoy the traffic.

Keywords

Be smart with keywords that you choose for your individual blog posts. Every single blog post on your blog should increase organic traffic to your blog postsfocus on a specific keyword preferably a long tail keyword. For instance, if you have a blog in ‘weight loss’ niche, and you end up writing a killing 3000 word blog post around ‘weight loss’ keyword, you will not going to see it anywhere on first few pages of Google. Such a post with poor keyword selection will not drive any traffic to your blog post no matter it has 3K words or 5K words.

You have to be specific, as specific as you can. The more specific long tail keywords you choose to write upon, more organic traffic you get to your blog posts. Instead of writing a blog post about ‘weight loss’ you should write about ‘weight loss in summer at Chicago’ or similar. Such a long tail keyword will drive traffic to your post like anything.

Before you choose a topic and keyword for your blog post, make sure that you do intensive research. If you see that there are already quite a few blog posts written about ‘weight loss in summer at Chicago’, you need to read those posts, find the loopholes, add value and publish your blog post. If there are too many on the keyword, change the keyword.

Suggested Keyword ToolPower Suggest Pro

Use Google AdWords Keyword Planner Tool

Whether you use Google AdWords or not, you can always use their Keyword Planner Tool. It is a great tool for bloggers but unfortunately most of the bloggers don’t use it, and the ones who use it, they use it the wrong way.

There is no big deal!

Search for the keywords and lookup for their competitiveness in your target geographical area. You don’t have to necessarily choose keywords from the list of keywords. This is where most of the bloggers go wrong. Almost 50 percent of the bloggers (and webmasters) use Google keyword planner and the fact of the matter is even the keywords that have less than 30 searches a month with very low competition have quite a few blog posts already written on them. This means the keyword is already saturated (or the market is already saturated). This is not the way to it anymore.

What you should do is generate your own keywords for instance, if you see a keyword ‘how green color affect eyesight’ with low competition but you there are quite a few posts written on the keyword already. Your ultimate long tail (most logical) keyword should be ‘how green, red and yellow colors affect your eyesight’.

Play smart.

Internal Linking

Internal linking is very important but again bloggers don’t seem to focus on it. Only well-established blogs do internal linking or I should say internal linking makes them well-established.

increase organic traffic to your blog posts

Anyways, it is very important to link back to your previous posts while writing a new blog post. This is sure to increase organic traffic to your new blog posts. Search engines love internal linking within sites and blogs.

You don’t have to link to your old posts while publishing new blog posts rather you should link to new posts from old blog posts too. After publishing a new blog post, go to any older blog post (which is relevant to the new blog post) and insert a link to the newly published blog post.

You should create a mixture of internal links from new to old and old to new blog posts. This is a must if you want to increase organic traffic to your blog posts. Click here to find out how to do it the right way.

Search Engine Optimization for Your Blog Posts

I know this is the most interesting part of the game. For me, it is not as much important as it used to be a few years back but still we need to focus on on-page SEO of every single blog post. Although most of the factors have no effect on ranking anymore but still we stick to them. There is no reason to do something which has no value.

Here are the essential factors that you should look for while publishing a new blog post.

Title

Title is now the most important part of your entire blog post. It should include your target keyword or phrase. If the target keyword is in the title and has not appeared anywhere in the article body, your blog post will still show up for the target keyword. Alternately, if you don’t use your main keyword in the title and use it several times throughout article body, your blog post will not show up for your main keyword.

Simply put, its blog post’s title that drives the traffic via search engines. Whatever is in the title will be used as your keyword. Therefore it is advisable to use your keyword in the title.

Meta Description

Write meta description carefully and try to add your keyword in the meta description. Although meta description is written for search engines so that they know about your blog post but since it also shows up in the search results, therefore you should make it a bit catchy too. Write it in a way to compel readers to click on your link.

ALT Attribute

Don’t forget to fill in the alt attribute of images within your blog posts. You should add your keyword in the alt attribute of images. Alt is the text that is shown to the user in case if the image is not displayed, and it is the text that search engine spiders read to know about the image. Search engine spiders will only read the alt text of the image so make sure you have inserted the right keywords there.

SEO Plugin for WordPress

If you are really serious to increase organic traffic to your blog posts, you shouldn’t miss SEO plugin (for WordPress blogs). WordPress SEO by Yoast is the most famous and most authentic WordPress SEO plugin that comes for free. It has everything that you need to rank your blog posts in search engines. SEOPressor is a premium SEO plugin that has better features than Yoast. It is a more sort of an advanced SEO plugin for WordPress.

Blog post URL, headings, keyword density and use of keyword in the content are SEO factors THAT DON’T MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE on your blog posts ranking. If you want to use them, go ahead use them but be sure that it will not impact the search engine ranking of your blog posts.

Fetch as Google

While this is not an important factor that will necessarily increase organic traffic to your blog posts but it will index your new blog post pretty much quickly. If you ask me, it does make a difference. If your post is indexed instantly and is showed in the search results right after a few minutes of getting published, it gets impressions and clicks. The earlier a new blog post gets indexed, better it is, so why wait?

As soon as you publish a new blog post, go to Google Webmasters Tools, click on crawl, then click on Fetch as Google. Enter the URL of the newly published blog post and click on Fetch. Then click on submit to index. Select only this page in the window that opens. The other option (this page and all linked pages) should be used when you have done some major changes in your blog’s layout.

Once done, give Google a few minutes before it will index your post and will start showing it in search engine results.

Share Your Blog Posts

increase organic traffic to your blog posts

All the experts say that sharing your blog posts on social media networks work best and it drives a lot of traffic to your blog. Well that’s true but problem with majority of the bloggers is that they don’t have a huge list of followers and fans that will click on their links. Normally, bloggers don’t have huge followers and this seems to be a real issue.

Let me be very clear, sharing your blog post over social media platforms will not going to increase organic traffic to your blog post. Rather you will only get direct traffic from these sources. So there is nothing to worry for if you don’t have any visits from your social profiles. That’s absolutely OK.

But sharing doesn’t always mean to share your new blog post (and even old ones) on social media platforms. This is just one way of doing it.

Here is a better way to share your newly published blog post with target audience.

  1. When you search for the content for a blog post, note down all the blog posts in a Word file (their links). Once you have published your blog post, go back to every single blog post and leave a comment (not a spam) with a backlink to your newly published blog post. Your post will be shared with the target audience that’s already interested in the said topic. You need to make your comment and link very interesting so that people cannot resist clicking your link.
  2. Click here to read my marketing plan that I used to promote one of my affiliate blogs. It has all free marketing methods that you can use to promote your blog for free by spending no more than 60 minutes after publishing your new blog post.
  3. If you have an email list, send your new blog post to your subscribers. I’d recommend sharing your best blog post with your list and that too once a week only. Sending too much emails will not going to work as effectively as sending them a piece every week.

Edit and Upgrade

For an increase in organic traffic to your blog posts, you cannot publish and forget them. You should edit and upgrade your older blog posts (of course when needed). While you are internally linking your blog posts, have a look at them and see if things have changed. For instance, SEO techniques related blog posts have to be amended every now and then because of Google algorithm changes. If you will not update your older posts, you will lose all the traffic because readers will quit as soon as they will realize that the information is obsolete.

Make sure that you don’t make your blog posts obsolete. Never.

A good way is to write green content. Green content is something that always remains green and rarely changes for instance, weight loss tips. If you wrote 10 weight loss tips, you will not have to change them, right? The post will never get obsolete. Even if you don’t update it for years, readers will still like it.

That’s all from my side. These are the steps (if followed) will increase organic traffic to your blog posts without doing anything else. But let me remind you, things will not change overnight. You have to stick to the plan to see results. The good news is that if you will follow all the steps mentioned in this blog post, you don’t have to wait for too long because you will start seeing the results within a week or two.

 

Sources:

http://backlinko.com/white-hat-seo

http://weblogs.about.com/od/searchengineoptimization/tp/How-To-Increase-Organic-Google-Traffic-To-Your-Blog.htm

http://positionly.com/blog/seo/get-more-organic-traffic-to-website

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