Yesterday, I wrote a few blogging tips on how a blog can have both search engine optimization (SEO) elements and good readability within a blog post or a blog as a whole. The responses I received from my readers are basically on the need of search engine traffic.
A search engine is a large index which will present their users with a list of relevant sites and pages based on the users’ searches. Bloggers with the aim of presenting blog post with high quality contents and readability tends to ignore search engine optimization. However, blog traffic source polls still show that on majority, blogs are dependent on search engine traffic.
Why? Is it because their blog is hopeless in producing great and compelling contents?
Easy free source of traffic
Search engine traffic is free of charge, which is good, unless you plan to outsource the optimization to some companies that will charge you an expensive price. Search engine optimization needed to get those traffic is easy to learn as well.
One way to get a high index position easily with simple SEO techniques is to keep the following in mind:
- Acquire basic (really basic) SEO techniques.
- Target low competition keywords.
- Target a bunch of keyword with low search will have cumulative effect in traffic building in the long run.
"Backup" traffic
If you are to leave your blog alone for one month, without any new contents and marketing efforts, what do you think will be the major traffic source?
It will be the search engines because whether you update your blog or not, your pages will still be indexed as long as they exist on the web. This base will help you to easily revive your blog after coming back from a long hiatus due to an emergency.
Targeted and quality traffic
Before I get started with this point, I have to admit that some searches that are being led to your blog is irrelevant. However, for most of the time, it is! If you are not getting search terms that are relevant to the niche of your blog or your blog post consistently, you need to consider some alteration to that particular content.
Search engine traffic sends targeted traffic which the visitors are more likely to interact with you via comments and have interest in a product or subject that you are promoting on your blog. Also, traffic that comes into your blog via relevant search terms are of higher quality compared to traffic from sources like StumbleUpon and Entrecard.
Passive effort in finding new blog readers
As a blogger, we want to expand our blogs fast and this requires a lot of effort to be placed on both content creation and marketing to gain new readers and eventually turn them into loyal subscribers.
SEO techniques will only need implementation for once and it will have an enduring benefit for your blog’s search engine traffic building. The traffic will keep coming in as long as the keyword targeted is being searched continuously. This might also be the reason why long established blogs will require lesser time on marketing.
Dominating a saturated niche
A saturated niche, which most blogs are on in this booming era of the Internet, is all about grabbing the visitors to your blog once they are interested (the reason why they use search engines) in the topic you are blogging about.
With a lot of blogs getting to the par of having quality contents and readers nowadays are becoming lazier to scroll for more since they are presented with so many goodies, the chances of a visitor being turned into a loyal subscriber once they visit a site are high. Thus, it is important to make your blog the first to be visited by a search engine user.
Dangers of Search Engine Traffic Dependence
Search engine traffic although beneficial, should not be the main source of traffic for a blog because of the two reasons outlined below:
- Search engine algorithm change. No one actually knows what are the algorithms used by major search engines to determine their index rankings and the worst part is that they are always changing. Being totally dependent on search engine traffic would also mean a rob of traffic if Google or Yahoo decides to take your site off their index for reasons that they only know.
- Content readability. When a blog is dependent on search engine traffic, the blogger is likely to over-focus on optimizing blog posts for search engines, which might lead to excess seeding of keywords and improper sentence structure that will cause bad content readability. A blogger will also become too obsessed with the optimization, leaving out content creation and other marketing methods for the blog.
Your Stand on Search Engine Traffic
Before ending this article, I would like to highlight as a reminder that search engine optimization is not only about on-page optimization such as keyword seeding, optimizing title tags and meta tags. It is also about link building with relevant anchor keywords. Such links can be built naturally by applying the few techniques listed at 20 Ways to Get Constant Post Level Links [Part 1] and 20 Ways To Get Constant Post Level Links [Part 2].
What is the portion of search engine traffic of all the traffic of your blog is getting? Will you put in extra effort to increase the traffic that you are getting from search engines?
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March 11th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
Its always good to have a number of traffic streams even though SE traffic is always targeted and sweet
March 11th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
My reliance on search traffic is very small though it is slowly increasing. It started off accounting for only about 2% of all traffic but has grown to 15% in recent months. I believe this is because my site is now out of the sandbox and has decent PR.
Now that it has the ability to rank, I aim to put more effort into it which is not something I did in the past. I believe if your site is still small and has low PR your efforts are better spent link building. Now that I have reached that stage I pay far more attention to my keyword stats and mine them for future post ideas.
March 12th, 2008 at 12:26 am
WTF..!!! Your blog is nonsense..!, its a piece of ****..!
you better to stop putting and promoting your ****ing links to the others website…!
stop wasting our ****ing time..! and please stop grabbing and stealing pictures..!, use your own ****ing pictures!! you don’t have any originality…! ****!!!
March 12th, 2008 at 3:30 am
This information is very helpful. I know nothing about SEO, but I will take all this information in and apply it as best I can. We get swayed away from SEO to Entrecard and commenting, etc. But search engine traffic is vital to the survivability of a blog.
March 12th, 2008 at 10:55 am
A quick reply to Anonymous.
Yuga,
First of all, mind your launguage.
I don’t understand why my contents and markeing deserved all the hatred. My contents are all created myself and I swear that I did not copy for a bit.
The pictures are willingly shared by users of Flickr as long as a link is being attributed to the user profiles of those who own the picture.
You have a nice blog but your actions here confused me and I don’t think such move is required though.
March 12th, 2008 at 11:16 am
Hi Wayne,
Got your email. Let’s discuss it there and see how we can fix this. Surely, somebody is out to get you and have been using my name.
March 12th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
@ seo blogger
Yes. If everyone is thinking in such a way, there will be no more whines at those webmaster forums on the disappearance of their traffic overnight because of search engines algorithm change.
@ Caroline
Exactly, targeting a good search engine ranking with a domain that is still in the Google Sandbox is like spending time for nothing.
@ Flimjo
Entrecard is a new wave of traffic building and like MyBlogLog or BlogRush, I doubt it will be a permanent source of traffic compared to search engines.
As for commenting, it is more than just commenting for the sake of traffic. It can be a method to get a blogger’s attention, building your personality and even link building. If you asked me, commenting is a vital part of blogging as well, especially for new bloggers.
@ Yuga
The impostor’s comment has been edited. Case closed, perhaps?
March 13th, 2008 at 12:51 am
I’m grateful for my PR rise a few months ago. But when I got slapped, it didn’t hurt me too much. Google still sends 30% of my top 5 traffic sources and their bounce rate is only 20% (i think it’s quite a low number
)
I still try to do on page optimizations, but not as much as my effort in building a community based traffic
March 13th, 2008 at 4:09 am
Wayne, I agree about Entrecard. I have been using it. It does drive traffic to my site, but I find that people just go to my blog to click on my Entrecard button. Beyond that, the majority of them don’t stay to read anything or comment. Bad Entrecard etiquette, I guess, haha.
I do comment, too (as I am now doing). I think commenting has gotten me more significant (and lasting) traffic. I find that people come to my blog as a result, and they stay, read, and comment.
Anyway, SEO is what I want to master. I find your blog very helpful in that regard.
March 13th, 2008 at 10:08 am
If you get the SEO right for your blog, the search engine traffic possibilities are endless.
March 13th, 2008 at 10:52 am
Hi there Wayne! Long time didn’t check you up already. Lol. In fact, I just got home from the National Service two days ago. Really had a great time there. lol.
Good luck n all da best in 2oo8 k.. though it’s already March.. haha
March 13th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
I get more than 80% traffic through Search engines and yes “the dangers of search engine’” that you mentioned is most true and heart breaking.
My blog got as little as nothing traffic for 6 months after I shifted domain name and before Google again ranked it! So sole dependence on it can leave with no visitors at all.
March 13th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
@ Louis
Seriously, you should try to get your PR back if you want more search engine traffic. Anyway, do you mind disclosing what causes the Page Rank demotion? Is it because of some link trading or paid post activities?
Community based traffic is the new trend and of course social media traffic is making all the noise now and we as a blogger, should start tapping these sources.
@ Flimjo
I have to say that Wayne Liew Dot Com is proud to have a great participant like you because of the comments that is adding value to my blog post and I treasure all my commentators as well.
This week, I am more towards SEO, maybe due to the fact that I am reading more about them recently. However, I would like to recommend you to do a Google search for some great blogs covering on SEO out there because they are really the ones that get down to the nitty gritty bits of SEO. Of course, if those people are too busy to answer your queries or comments, you can send me a mail or what and I will try my best to help because I want to learn as well.
@ Technology Slice
The problem is - how to get it right?
@ Steven
Wow, how was the experience? I did not get to be chosen, am I lucky or unlucky?
@ Jalaj
I guess this is equivalent to what I have to gone through, after moving here from a PR5 blogspot blog. Anyway, get over it as every change will bring in more opportunities.
Good luck, mate!
March 13th, 2008 at 11:32 pm
Wayne, thanks for the tip on searching for other SEO blogs. I hadn’t thought about that. But before I get to the nitty gritty, I need to learn the broader, more generalized stuff. I am as dumb as it gets when it comes to SEO.
March 14th, 2008 at 12:48 am
@Wayne:
I think both paid review and link selling still concerns Google. So…
But this morning, I saw my PR rose again. Not as high as it used to be, but it isn’t fatty zero anymore.
.
Oh yeah, how did you get the “X” close button on the bottom of the page? And the edit comment feature. Is it a plugin?
@Flimjo:
Maybe you want to try placing your EC down below. I don’t know how it’ll affect your bounce rate, but I placed mine on the footer and my EC visitors bounce rate is only 14%
Speaking of comments above, have anyone heard of cocomment? I posted about it a few days ago. I think it’s very useful tracking our comments if we left tens of comments everyday.
March 17th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
SE traffic is great but this article really shows the need for backlinks.
March 18th, 2008 at 2:45 am
I actually did buy an advert from Wayne on this site, so that should be coming up in a few days. We’ll see how that works!
March 18th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
We also get most of our visitors through the SE’s but recently people have started to bookmark my site. Feels good the have a second source of traffic.
March 20th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
@ Flimjo
Everyone will have to start from nothing and along the way we learn nothing. You may be not as good in SEO but probably you are good in content writing, negotiations or even coding. I have my own weakness as well = coding and design.
@ Louis
Do you know what the “close” button is for? I am not sure about that either. The comment editing plugin is available at WP AJAX Edit Comments.
@ HomeBizSEO
Backlinks are important and I guess it will be the most important element of SEO if one site is competing for a great and keyword of high demand.
@ Fahad
Traffic from social bookmarking is a great source of traffic, after the web is moving into its 2.0 stage.
March 24th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
I want to boost my blog traffic too.
March 24th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
@Wayne: Thx 4 the plugin info