Improving Blog Traffic – Report

I started this blog in February of 2006 and for the first few months my traffic was really low. It was because I was not blogging seriously.  I knew that the site was in the Google sandbox and so I was waiting for it to get out of the sandbox. I started little serious blogging only from mid-July after Google rewarded my blog with a Pagerank of 2. I then started making sincere efforts to get used to WordPress; my earlier commercial blogs were written using PluggedOut Blog Script, but it was getting outdated.

In the middle of September I tweaked this Wordpress blog little to optimize it for the search engines.

• The first change I made was to make the post permalinks search engine friendly – changing the cryptic PHP URLs to clean html URLs.
• I changed my wordpress theme and tweaked the PHP code to alter the way meta titles are assigned. 
• I also installed the Headspace plugin from Urbangiraffe.com; it helped me to have meta descriptions and keywords of my choice. That helped me to have unique title, description and keywords matching the content for each post.
• I learned little bit of XHTML and CSS to make my blog pass the validation for W3C compliance.  
• Finally I registered my blog in Technorati. I found a cool WordPress plugin called SimpleTags that made the job of tagging a whole lot easier.  I found that by tagging my post effectively they were getting a lot more attention then the untagged ones. Other bloggers started linking to my posts and as an added advantage I was getting focused, quality traffic to the site.

You can check how my Alexa figures and traffic improved in last three months. 

 

Now my next target will be to double the traffic by end of this year and also aim to achieve a pagerank of 5 by next PR update. And how I plan to achieve it? First I will make my top page as static html page; that will make it is easy for me to optimize the content for my target keywords. I will also interact more with other bloggers through forums and blogs. I will also experiment with social networks like Digg, Myspace and Reddit to get more traffic. If you have any ideas to improve blog traffic, please feel free to share in the comments.