What is the best way to get free traffic to my blog?

 What is the best way to get free traffic to my blog?

Use keyword research to identify good topics

It’s really easy to sit down and write blog posts which cover, in considerable depth, topics that nobody is particularly interested in.

Similarly, it’s easy to write a blog post covering an area that people are really interested in, but to give it a title containing keywords that nobody ever searches for.

Keyword research is your friend here: you can use a wide range of keyword research tools such as Semrush or Ahrefs to discover the number of monthly searches for particular keywords, and find out how difficult it would be to rank for particular search phrases.

The trick is to identify phrases that you can use in your blog that generate a reasonable amount of traffic, but for which there isn’t massive competition.

Once you’ve done your keyword research, you should ensure that your keywords feature in all the right places in your post — its title, meta description, headers and body copy (more on all that in a moment).

 Focus on producing long-form content

Studies show that ‘long-form content’ performs better in search results than short or ‘thin’ posts.  Long-from content refers to posts with high word counts that go into HUGE depth on a particular topic.

There are a couple of reasons why long-form content helps to generate higher positions in search results.

First, longer posts will naturally be more keyword-rich and therefore more likely to crop up as results for ‘long tail’ keyword searches.

Second (and perhaps more importantly), the in-depth nature of a long post is more likely to satisfy readers who come across it — it will be more likely to answer your visitor’s query, or solve their problem. As a result, the post is more likely to get shared on social media or get linked to from other sites — with very positive implications for traffic.

Keep your content fresh by updating existing posts

If you do any online research into blogging or SEO, you’ll come across loads of articles which stress how important it is to create ‘fresh’ content in order to generate good search results and traffic to your site.

However, I’d caution against interpreting this as an instruction to constantly produce new posts.

With my own content, I’ve found it much more useful to focus on quality over quantity; and rather than blogging every day just for the sake of it, I prefer to invest my time in keeping my existing content as strong (and as in-depth) as possible.

I do this by continuously reviewing older posts and enhancing them with the most up-to-date information available.

Not only does this send the ‘freshness’ signals to Google that the search engine’s algorithms approve of, but it typically increases the length of posts and helps provide the ‘long-form’ content which tend to perform better in search results.

Accompany your blog with fabulous images

It’s REALLY important to use good images in any blog posts you publish.

There are four main reasons for this.

First, it helps readers get a sense of what you are writing about (this is particularly important if you are exploring difficult concepts – visual aids can really help simplify matters).

Second, the main picture accompanying your post will usually show up whenever your visitors share one of your posts on social media, and if it is a dull picture, it’s far less likely to generate clickthroughs to your site.

Third, as with text, images can be optimised to help your content appear in search results. By adding suitable keywords to a picture’s ‘alternative text‘, file name and caption, you can help search engines gain a better understanding of what your post is about (and by extension, help the post appear in relevant search results).

And finally, good images help to make your content look authoritative. If you use a beautiful piece of photography instead of a dodgy piece of clip art to accompany a blog post, it is far more likely to be taken seriously — i.e., read in the first place! — by people who come across it.

 Optimize your blog posts for search engines

There are a series of technical steps — known as ‘on-page SEO‘ that you should take to give your blog posts the best chance of performing well in search.

You should always:

·         create blog post titles which reflect your keyword research, and accurately describe what you are writing about

·         include keywords in each post’s URL that reflect the content

·         use keyword-rich headings (H1, H2, H3 etc.) to break up content

·         use keyword rich alt text and file names for your images.

For a few more tips on this area, check out our article on how to make your content visible in Google search results.

There are also a few ‘technical SEO’ steps you can take. Google prefers content that loads really quickly — a few things that can help in this area include:

·         ensuring all image files are as small as possible (without being pixelated)

·         avoiding use of unnecessary scripts on the page

·         using a CSS stylesheet rather than loads of inline CSS

·         registering your site with Google Search Console

Capture email addresses

Once you’ve attracted a visitor to your blog, you should always attempt to capture their email address. This allows you to notify visitors via e-newsletter of new blog posts, which can result in more traffic and shares.

To do this, you need to ensure that there is a data capture form on your blog post, not just on a ‘sign up to our mailing list’ page on your site. You can do this using a sidebar, pop-up box or a simple text call-to-action to encourage people to join your mailing list.* 

When creating this sign-up form, remember to spell out the benefits of joining the list — the value that your a site visitor will get out of becoming a subscriber.

For example, rather than using a boring ‘join our mailing list’ call to action, highlight the sort of resources a subscriber can expect to receive, the skills they’ll learn etc.

If you use an email marketing tool (like Getresponse, Aweber, Mailchimp or Mad Mimi) you can use your RSS feed to power your e-newsletters, meaning that every time you add a new blog post your subscribers will automatically receive an e-newsletter with a notification about the new content.

* Be careful with pop-ups (or ‘interstitials’ as Google likes to call them). They can dramatically increase the number of leads you generate, but they can also have a negative impact on search traffic, particularly if over-used on mobile versions of your site.

Encourage social sharing

Actively encourage your readers to share your blog posts — be explicit with your requests for people to post your content on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks.

If they follow these encouragements, not only should you see a rise in traffic to your posts, but you may also be sending subtle ‘signals’ to search engines regarding the popularity and quality of your posts (the jury is out on whether social sharing has a direct impact on search results, but there does seem to be a correlation of sorts).

 Encourage comments and user engagement

Encourage people (yes, even trolls!) to add their own views at the bottom of your posts. There are three reasons why this is beneficial:

1.      It creates more keyword-rich content on your website

2.      It can help encourage return visits to your blog, as discussions take hold on your comments section

3.      Some SEO experts believe that Google treats blog posts which generate a lot of community discussion preferentially to those without any comments — possibly because it increases ‘dwell time’ on the post.

Build backlinks to your posts

At the very simplest level, there are two key ingredients to ensuring a blog post ranks in search:

First, your post has to contain quality content.

Second, it has to have a lot of backlinks — links from other sites — pointing to it.

We’ve covered the ‘quality content’ bit earlier: you basically need to focus on producing long-form posts which cover the topic you’re writing about clearly, and in considerable depth. Always aim to satisfy a reader’s query; to solve their problem.

Getting backlinks is often a much harder task, as it involves reaching out to other bloggers / website owners, and asking them to include a link to your content on their posts. This is a time consuming affair, but it’s absolutely essential, and if you take a thorough approach to it, it can prove very fruitful.

Another option with regard to backlink generation is to hire an agency to build links for you — but you have to be careful here, as hiring an agency or consultant who then goes onto place or buy links on low-quality sites can actually do more harm than good.When building links,