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The problem facing many bloggers, especially those just starting out, is not knowing how to get their articles noticed. Although having good articles will help get people reading, it's not important how good your articles are if no one reads them. A well known site with poor design and junk material will get far more traffic than an unheard of but perfectly designed site run by a literary genius.

It's been written before, and it will be written again. Despite that fact, I decided to compile a list of the 25 most suggested ways to boost traffic to your blog. To do this, I looked over every site from the first page of a Google search for "Increase blog traffic" and wrote down every tip one of them gave, in combination to a list of my own tips. I then placed the tips into categories, and noted how many tips fell into each category. Based on how many tips fell into each category, I then judged each tips importance based on that and compiled the list you see below. Some of the tips mentioned only once were dropped, to create an even and readable top 25 tips for a boost in traffic.


1. Participate in the Community - If you want to be noticed and get word out about your blog, it's vital to also be out in the community making yourself known. Read what others have written, and leave comments on their blogs. Whether you're at Yahoo Answers answering questions with content from your blog, reading other blog posts, or hanging around forums you'll find a definite return on your time and energy.

The greatest return on your time will come from browsing the sites of your fellow bloggers. People who write blogs, are also likely to read them.

2. Quality Content - As I mentioned in 10 Steps to Basic Blogging, quality content is essential in the success of a blog. Where other websites might attract users with an interesting setup or a useful tool, as a blog all you have is your content. It's what the people are coming to see, and if you can't deliver, your site is going to suffer.

To ensure that you have quality content, you should write your article, then go do something else for a few minutes to get your mind sufficiently distracted. Then, come back and revise the article. That should help you find any mistakes, or places you could have worded better. To achieve greater quality, you should try to write your articles several days ahead of time, then revise them heavily several times before you release them. If you have lots of money, you may even want to take the next step and hire an editor.

3. Social Bookmarking sites - It's generally agreed that social sites should be used as a tool by any serious blogger. It's not likely to effect your blog in the short term, that is you're unlikely to get a huge rush of visitors when you start using them, but in the long term social bookmarking sites are likely to turn into a steady income of visitors, and the sooner you sign up and start utilizing the social bookmarking sites, the sooner you'll see them start to return on the time you spent signing up. One of the older and better known social bookmarking sites is known as Technorati. If you haven't done it yet, you might want to head over and sign up. Once you've signed up, submit your blog, and favorite mine.

When using a social bookmarking site, it's important to remember to tag your content. Tags are how the users will find your content. There may be some users searching for your blog by name, but there's a good chance that many of the users who find your blog will be finding it by searching for what it's about through tags.

4. Make signing up for your RSS feed easy - Syndicating your blog is a great way to let lazy and rushed readers read your content. Most readers either don't have the time, or simply don't want to visit your site all the time, and RSS lets them automatically receive your articles when you write them.

RSS benefits the readers by saving them the time of checking whether your site has updated. They're automatically alerted when you update, and may often read it without even having to visit your site. The RSS benefits you, too though. If you simply don't offer RSS, the people who would otherwise have subscribed, will simply leave your site, and may never return. If they're subscribed to your RSS however, they'll be reminded of your site every time you update. Your site will embed into their memory as they see your articles on a day to day basis, vastly increasing the odds that they will return to your site again and again, even if they unsubscribe.

5. Link Intelligently - It's important not to be afraid of linking, but it's also important to link cautiously. If you don't link enough, you're likely to slow the growth of your blog, but if you link too much or to the wrong people, you'll find visitors fly off your page before absorbing your content, and you'll find your Google Page Rank between 0 and 1.

When you link, this will send visitors and page rank from your site, to another site. Using a no-follow saves your page rank, but your visitors may still slip away to the other site if it's more interesting than yours. If the sites are less interesting than yours though, you'll lose return visitors. You always want to provide the best possible links for your readers. For these reasons, some new bloggers hardly link at all, and no-follow every link they do make. While it seems like this is a good idea, it's actually likely to slow the growth of your blog.

When you link, you often get linked back. Sometimes this goes so far as arranged link exchanges, but more often bloggers simply notice visitors coming over from another site, and find a link as the cause. This sometimes leads them to return the favor, and link back. Also, having links to good sites can raise your visitor's opinions of the site. Other bloggers are likely to be offended if you no-follow links to their sites, but if you don't Google will associate your sites. Also, if you link to the wrong people, not only will your visitors think poorly of your site, but Google may actually penalize your Page Rank.

Based on that explanation, we can conclude that linking to some sites is important. It raises people's opinion of your site and can win you friends. You should generally use no-follow links only to direct the Page Rank of internal sites, or to provide links to big sites like Wikipedia or FaceBook. You should be careful what sites you provide links to though. If you link to sites which employ black hat SEO options, link farms, or other bad neighbors, you'll hurt your sites image and page rank. A good rule of thumb is to link to at most 2-3 other sites in any given post.

6. Images/Videos/Charts - This is fairly to the point, and very important. When a visitor comes to your site, they often decide whether or not they want to stay within the first two seconds. This means that they're likely to see three things on your site, the header, the post title, and any prominent images. The prominent images can make or break your site, because if you have nothing but a lot of text on your site, many visitors are likely to make the snap judgment that reading your site is too much work. To prevent this, provide images, videos, or charts to spice up the contents of your page. Even if the images are only loosely related to the text, they will still help your site make a good impression in those first two seconds.

7. Obvious Post Titles - Many beginning bloggers make the mistake of using clever, cryptic, or ironic titles for their posts. To see why this is a bad idea, you have only to refer back to the fact that most users don't have a lot of time. They come into your site and judge whether they want to stay within 2 seconds, and aren't likely to take the time to figure out what your article is about. They want to know what your article is about before they read it, because they don't have time to waste reading every article on the internet.

Furthermore, when someone sees a link to one of your articles, they're likely to judge whether or not to visit it based on the title. If your title is a clever reference to Dante's Inferno, most people will be unlikely to visit the link, because they won't bother figuring out what your title even means.

8. SEO - SEO is Search Engine Optimization, and it can mean the difference between three hits and two hundred and three hits. Search Engines can be your best friend as a blogger, and although it is possible to get along without them, you won't get nearly as many hits. You should make sure to construct your articles in a keyword aware manner.

Meta tags are important too. They're by no means the most important or only tip for Search Engine Optimization, but they will help you control how some search engines show your page to users. You can take the meta tags below and insert them into the appropriate location for meta tags in your blog. Different sites will need them in different places, and you may need to do some research to find out where the best place for meta tags on your site is.

9. Reply to Readers - If one of your readers sends you a message, message them back. Interacting with your readers in this way will help you better understand how readers see your site, and will encourage that person to continue reading by letting them get to know you. If you shrug off e-mails or IMs from readers, you may offend them, and you're likely to lose readers.

10. List Posts - I'm not saying that you should list all your posts, I'm saying you should create posts that contain lists. List posts are easy for readers to read and understand, and provide a wide range of information on a given subject. Although not every post needs to be a list, throwing them in may help you retain the attention of readers.

Readers who come to your site generally visit in four stages

1. Glance - This person has clicked into your site, and is deciding whether or not the site is worth their time. They're likely to spend about 2-4 seconds in this phase. During this phase they scan any words or pictures that jump out at them and either leave or proceed to stage two based on that.
2. Data Scan - If your visitor has decided to stay, they will typically begin a light scan of the text on the page. They're likely to scroll down the page looking for whatever information they were looking for. This stage is likely to last between 15-60 seconds. If the person finds what they were looking for, or likes your site for some other reason, they will likely move on to stage three. Otherwise, they'll leave the way they came in.
3. Reading - In this stage the person will read the article containing the information they were looking for, or interact with whatever it was about your site that provoked them to stay. They are likely to do this for between 1-15 minutes, before exhausting whatever resource they stayed for. After they have exhausted that resource, they will take a glance around to see if there is anything else on the site that they might be interested in. If they find something, they move on to stage four. If they see nothing else of interest, they will usually leave.
   
4. Browsing - After having found a second item or article to hold their interest, the visitor will begin to browse. They will move from item to item reading and browsing. They're now essentially "hanging out" on your site. This person is more likely to subscribe, comment, or revisit later.
   

The point of the above list is that when someone visits your site, you want to hold their attention as long as you can. Using a few list posts will help keep the person's attention, and increase the likely hood that they'll browse, read, and move on to more items.

I've found that using mostly lists works for me, but you may find that a different style is better in your case, every blog will be a little different.

11. Cover Topics that Need Attention - This is likely to boost your blog traffic to many times the level you would get otherwise. When something happens in your blog's field, write about it. You may think that it's not worth it, because everyone's writing about it, but you'll find that it will still flood you with visitors if you can write about something that a lot of people want to know about. Even better is if you can write about something big, before anyone else writes about it. Then, when everyone else writes about it they're more likely to link to you as a reference.

This doesn't only apply to big happenings. If you're a tech writer and you have a tough time solving a problem, write about how to fix it in your blog. There's a good chance you're not the only one ever to have the problem, and if you couldn't find a helpful article, then other people are likely to have a tough time finding one too. If you write a helpful article and make it easy to find, people who have your problem are very likely to visit in an effort to solve their problem.

Similarly any field will have things that people want to know about, but that no one has written about yet. If you write about them, the people who want to know are likely to find their way to your site.

12. Invite Guest Bloggers - I've yet to do it, but I've seen other people do it, and it's suggested by a lot of sites. Having somebody write a guest article creates a working relationship between the two of you, and generally cultivates good will. The writer is likely to visit, and the writer is likely to advertise his article a bit himself, perhaps with a link on his site, or by telling his friends. This will drive visitors to your site, and is likely to provide you with a link.

13. Link bait - Writing link bait articles is a good idea. Link bait is any article that just begs to be linked to. This is is in effect what you're doing when you write about current events, or about things that are becoming popular. For ideas on what sort of things you might be link bait, you can look at About.com. Link bait articles are a great way to direct traffic to your blog, but be careful not to overuse them. If you write about nothing but link bait, your site will have little lasting value, because when the popularity of the topic wears off, so will the pull of your site. The links will remain, but few people will be interested in the topics they pertain to and they will generate only a fraction of the traffic they once did.

14. Put your URL on everything you send out, online or otherwise - This will inform the people who receive your letters, business cards, or e-mails, about your site. This is a slow method of getting your site visitors. Sending out a letter or business card with your site's URL on it is likely to get you between 0 and 1 visits. If the person likes your site, they may visit again, but that's your only hope to see more than a 1:1 return. The point I'm trying to make here is that this is not a mass advertising venue. However, it's likely to get you a few extra visitors, which can mean a lot to a new blogger.

15. Eschew Advertising (Until You're Popular) - Advertising effects the impression your site makes on your fellow bloggers. Average visitors to your site are unlikely to care about your advertisement unless it intrudes upon their visit. A fellow blogger though may take it as a sign of corrupted morals, and many bloggers will refuse to interact with a site that seems to be run for money.

This is most important to bloggers who are just starting out. Once your site is already fairly popular and well known, putting up advertisements is unlikely to hurt you, because you won't rely on any particular source for your visitors. At this point, they're unlikely to frown on a few ads, because you've already proven yourself. Even if they decided to take offense, they're not linking to you is unlikely to do you any real harm.

16. Consistency - It's generally wise to be consistent in your posting habits. Don't post twice a day one week and only once the following week, because returning visitors are likely to see this as a sign that you're unstable. It would be better to just post once a week than to post twice a week sometimes and only once a week the rest of the time.

If you're like me, this one can be hard for you. My energy fluctuates and so I have a hard time writing consistently, but I'm obsessive, so when I do write I tend to write several articles every day. To balance this out, I use the scheduled posts feature on the Blogger Platform. It lets me write as many posts as I want now, and set them up to post later, when I'll have less energy. This helps me maintain consistent posting habits even when my desire to write slows to a crawl. As long as my energy picks back up before I run out of posts, I'll be able to post consistently.

17. Professional Looking Blog Design - Having a blog that looks professional may not be enough to draw in readers from Google, but it will play a key role in retaining readers through to step four, and it will help ensure that they revisit later. This is because even if your site's writing is phenomenal, if your layout and design is poor, people are not going to take what you have to say seriously.

A monkey in a suit isn't smarter than a genius in rags, but everyone's going to think it is. Unless they get to open their mouths, no one is going to know the difference. Before your site even gets the chance to speak, readers have started to decide whether your blog is credible simply by looking at it. If a hobo crawled out of the back alleys of 1910 New York City, and whispered Eisenstein's theory of relativity to passersby, no one would have taken him seriously, even though he would have been saying the same things Eisenstein, who was hailed as a genius, said.

18. Be patient - Write at a normal pace, even in the beginning, don't spam links all over the internet, and don't use black hat SEO methods. It's easy for a new blogger to get ahead of themselves and try to force their blog to grow faster than it's ready to do. Writing a whole lot more articles in the beginning than you need can lead to the site looking like it's in decline, because you won't be able to keep up the pace later. Spamming links is likely to give your blog a bad name, and make you personally unpopular as it's web master. Black hat SEO can similarly give you a bad reputation. More than that, if Google detects you, they may penalize your Page Rank or even remove you permanently from their index.

19. Credit where credit is due - When you get an idea or information from another blog, give credit where it's due. Provide a link to the site where you got the information or idea. If someone helped on a project, let it be known that they did so. Put their name, or a link to their site on it. This ties back into the community. There is a community of bloggers out there who are likely to take offense if you don't give them credit for their work. If you do give them credit though, not only are they unlikely to be offended, but they may actually provide links to the work they helped with, and this means more traffic for you.

20. Blog Memes (/miːm/)- Memes are said to be a good way to get traffic to your blog, and also a good way to get ideas on what to write about. Memes are a sort of social phenomenon in which something is transmitted from one person to another through some means. An example of real world memes would be the use of a double thumbs up to indicate that one is hip, as seen mostly in the 80's. I use such an early example because everyone will recognize it. Someone on TV gestured in that manner, and someone else saw them and imitated. Soon, it was part of the culture to gesture with a dual thumbs up if you were cool.

Similarly, a blog meme is a phenomenon of blogs imitating one another. This is sometimes done by the answering of a set of questions, or a certain style of article which imitates other articles of the same style, but from the writer's unique perspective. If you can start a blog meme, you will find that it drives traffic back to you as its originator. Furthermore, you can seek out these memes and write them yourself, drawing people who are interested to your blog to see how you responded to the latest meme.

21. Pay Attention to Your Analytics - This is fairly self explanatory. If you do something and your traffic surges, try doing it or something like it again. If you do something and your traffic drops, don't do it again unless you have reason to believe that wasn't what caused the drop. Analytics will help you know which efforts are more effective, and which things to avoid.

22. Google Web master Tools - Installing the Google web-master tools on your site will give you greater control over and insight into how your site is shown in Google. They can help you see who's linking to you, and where your site's code doesn't index well into the Google search.

The web-master tools are also important because they allow you to submit a site map to Google. This will ensure that every page of your site is included into the Google index, and that none of your content is overlooked.

23. Blog Carnivals - Submitting your articles to blog carnivals will help drive traffic to your blog like little else when you're a new blogger. Blog carnivals are typically hosted in blogs that are already well established, and the people reading them are already in the browsing mode. Many readers of such carnivals will read all the contents included in such carnivals. Finding blog carnivals can be tricky and time consuming though, so it's good to have a tool that will speed up the process.

24. Article Directories - Submitting your best articles to some of the Internet's article directories can help steer people towards your site. These directories are often picky about which articles they allow in, so only submit your best work. These help similarly to the way a blog carnival does, but with the added bonus that being published in an article directory confers a certain level of credibility.

25. Timeless Posts - While writing about current events will help get people to your site, it's important not to write only articles about present fads. A certain percent of your articles should also have a timeless quality. Articles that stand the test of time become increasingly popular over time, as they become older and better established in a field people still care about and search for. Other sites will link to your site as a referance as they write about the same topic again and again, because as time passes, interest in some topics does not.


There are hundreds of millions of people who browse the internet every day. Getting a portion of them to visit your site isn't an unreasonable goal to set. Even if you got millions of visits every day, you would still not even be getting close to 1% of internet browsers to visit your site.

Getting your blog to be popular is a game of skill as well as chance. It's a game of luck and patience. If you want to succeed it's important to put one foot in front of the other and make it happen. Never stop trying to learn new ways to drive people to your site though, because if you allow yourself to stagnate you'll find your site in decline.

If you'd like to read more about the tips suggested in this article, you should take a look at the articles on the websites I polled to compile this list: ProBlogger, SEOmoz, BigMoney Online, Seth Godin, About.com, Manish Pandey and Everything TypePad.