SeaWaves Blog

This article is an entry to the Geeks Are Sexy ultimate “How To” contest. Geeks Are Sexy Technology News is about to have its two-year birthday, so they are running a contest to celebrate the occasion. If you’re a geek or want to be one, check out their site. It’s a great read.

With the recent PageRank (PR) update, I thought it would be a good idea to write about getting more Google traffic to your blog. First of all, don’t worry about PR, it’s a small part of Google’s algorithm. I write for a PR3 blog and it gets much more traffic than a PR7 site I know of.

Now that we got that out of the way, here are some practical tips for increasing your Google traffic.

My first principle is that getting a ton of Google traffic takes time. If you have a new site, be prepared to wait at least a couple months before you get a lot of Google traffic. If you’re in a competitive niche, it will take longer. Sure, Google will send you traffic in the meantime but the traffic for new sites will be much lower than older sites.

Search geeks like to use the term domain trust. This means Google takes its time evaluating new sites to see if they can trust them especially for competitive, high value keywords. If a new site can get enough quality links during that period and if it passes Google’s numerous spam filters, Google will increase that site’s domain trust and it will rank for a lot more keywords. Of course, this leads to higher Google traffic. This is why it’s a great idea to buy an older, trusted site.

How can you increase your domain trust more quickly? Here’s the number one rule: Get content-based links from quality sites. Content-based means in the body of the article, not the sidebar or the footer. And quality sites, well, these are the sites that are doing well on Google.

Here’s a tool that can help you figure out how much Google likes a site: SEO Digger. This tool tells you how many popular keywords a certain site ranks for in the top 20 of Google. The more keywords, the more Google likes the site. I like using this tool to compare the keyword counts of the sites in my niche.

A simpler method is just checking Alexa and Technorati rankings. Get links from the sites with higher rankings. Also, use Google search with the keywords you think your niche audience might use to find your site. Get links from the top 20 sites of those searches.

There are couple things you can do to get quality links. Here are some of my favorites ways:

• Write a great article (or get someone else to do it) and promote it to bloggers.
• Interview popular webmasters in your niche. You’ll often get a link back.
• Guest post.
• Leverage social media especially Digg. Create content that fits both Digg and your site and then get your friends to vote it up. If you hit the front page, you’ll oftentimes get a lot of quality links because of the massive exposure and traffic Digg sends.
• Build friendships with webmasters that have quality sites. Then, send them your best content without spamming. Also, make sure to link to them too. Networking is a two way street.

Notice I didn’t talk about keywords. Keywords are important. But if you know your niche well, you’ll be writing with relevant keywords.

So, don’t worry about keywords. Research your niche well. Know your audience well. And just write content that they would enjoy reading. Also, the bulk of the Google traffic you will receive will come from numerous long tail keywords, or keyword phrases that aren’t searched very often.

Let’s recap what we’ve learned. Be patient (or buy an older, trusted site), get a lot of content-based links from quality sites, and know your niche well. Good luck!