While many people may wish to create traditional websites in order to drive traffic to their products and services, blogs can be another great way to garner visitors and increase your conversions – assuming you have taken the proper steps to properly optimise the blog. We will be reviewing several tips that any new or existing blogger should be using to not only promote their site to search engines and visitors, but to also increase the likelihood that an individual will engage in the specific action you wish them to do.

Select Realistic Keywords

Keywords are certain words or phrases that are used repetitively throughout a blog post or blog posts and help search engines categorise and rank your site among various search queries. Many popular keywords and phrases are already dominated by well-established sites, so it is better for a newly established blog to seek out niche keywords – preferably ones that return less than 500,000 results in Google. The keywords should make sense when inserted into an article and should be sensible when it comes to what someone will use to search for your topic. Picking keywords can be one of the hardest parts of optimisation, but it is well worth it to establish quality keywords and phrases from the start.

Use Keywords Effectively

Selecting your keywords is half the battle: the other half is using them properly. With dozens of pieces of advice regarding this subject, it is quite difficult to summarise everything. The main points you want to consider include using keywords in a sensible fashion (in other words, they should make sense and fit seamlessly with the surrounding content) and limiting each of your keywords to no more than 2-3% of the total word count of the article. For example, a 500 word article with the keyword ‘fish food’ can feature said keyword 10-15 times before becoming redundant and negatively impacting your blog’s ranking with search engines. Using Pingler’s Keyword Density Checker, you can easily determine if you are within the necessary parameters.

Make Frequent Updates

Keeping your blog full of recent content is a sure fire way to make sure that visitors continue to return again and again. It also gives you more opportunities for your blog to appear in search results and if you are selling a product, service or conversion, more chances to make the sale. Search engine spiders will find this content shortly, crawling more and more of your pages. This – when consisting of quality content – leads to better search engine rankings. You don’t have to update every day once you get the ball rolling; search engine spiders will crawl your site several times per day even with weekly updates.

Use Site Feeds

Most blog software comes with site feeds built into them. Taking advantage of these tools can reap untold rewards for your blog and will drive traffic to your blog from other sites while simultaneously sending traffic from your blog to other sites. Using these feeds to promote your new blog will gain you one-way links over the long term, which increases your Google PageRank and Bing standings. You can also utilise keywords in the site feeds to gain links and keyword references at the same time, doubling your effectiveness.