How to boost traffic to your blog (aka how to write a better blog)

Sources of traffic and how to write blog that boost traffic?

Where does the traffic come from? Where my readers come from?

It's essential to know the sources of traffic. Then, you know where your effort should go to boost traffic to your blog.

The sources of traffic:

• Your blog itself
• Major search engines and Directory: Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL,...
• External links

First thing first. Whatever techniques or tips you hear about how to bring traffic to your blog, don't get lost the foremost important thing: your blog itself!


Your blog itself should be something people like to read and like to link.


People are not waiting for you. They even don't know you. But they'll start noticing you if your posts cater their interest and they'll spread your blog to their friends. The quality of your blog is superior to any other techniques such as search engine optimization (SEO). But it seems some blogger apt to forget this yet the majorities are providing good blog. This is common sense, right? Nothing new, huh?

OK, here are four tips how to make your blog attractive:

• Write something controversial,topical, and pithy. And make your blog title attractive but don't forget to include keyword in your title. The word "keyword" will appear several times in rest of post, meaning it's just important! 
• Write as frequently as possible.
  
  If you just started new blog, write everyday. If your blog already have decent traffic, just keep on writing as frequently as you can. Both readers and search engines look for new information. You provide new information and they will come.
  
• Write fresh content.
  
  Don't just copy from others. This not only troubles you in legal matter but also makes your readers leave you. If you find less traffic comes to your blog though you write every day, check whether you're posting fresh content.
  
  Fresh content doesn't mean that it should deal with brand new item. It does mean that new point of view, additional point of view, or even imitation of topic but filled with recreated content.
• Provide internal link within your blog.
  
  If you have related post to other post, link each other within your blog content. This helps your reader find more information out of your blog, stay with you longer and even come back to you again.
  Furthermore, it is one of SEO techniques. By doing inter link you can have more back links, though they are less valuable than external inbound links. More technically it can be used to improve the page rank of certain blog. For example, suppose you have 5 related post, 4 have page rank 4 and the other page rank 0. If you want to increase that page rank of 0, you link all the other 4 posts to that post. It'll surely improve the page rank of the lowest one. But be aware that when you link back the higher page rank post may not keep the original page rank. So do it under your plan and do it moderately. Don't abuse this technique because search engines may consider you as a search engine spammer.
  
  The bottom line is that moderate is always good.

In the second bullet, "You provide new information and they will come." Oops, it's WRONG! They don't come. They don't know whether you provided new information at all. You have to let them know you wrote new information. Get them to follow you and to add your blog to their feeds. Have links up for RSS syndication for blogs that don't feature a user registration system, that way they'll keep coming if you keep it fresh.


I'll be posting something for SEO, at a later date.