1. Invest In General Directories:
   Directory links are authority links, and can be foundational to a link building campaign. Submit to the following directories in order of importance: DMOZ, free; Yahoo Directory, $299 annually; Best of the Web, $99.95 annually; Business.com, $299 annually; GoGuides, $69.95; and JoeAnt, $39.99. Though many people have minimized the value of directories they are still solid links from authority sites.
2. Submit to Niche Directories:
   Niche directories are a source of authority links that are more tailored to your niche, and thus making them very valuable links. Try search “your keyword phrase directory” and see whats available in your niche.
3. Create Social Media Profiles:
   Social media profiles can quickly show up in SERPs for your keywords making them very valuable. While most social media site do not pass on page rank they are nevertheless valuable marketing tools to drive visitors to your site.
4. SERP Link Building:
   Pages that rank well for specific keywords are some of the most important links you can get. Search your keyword phrases and look for ways to get a link. Some things to consider do they have a submission process, can you guest blog for them, comment on their site, ask them for a link.
5. Write Authority Articles and Market Them:
   Using the Google Keyword Tool research what people are looking for in your area of expertise then write an authority article on that subject. Next look for places to submit the article to. Consider Squidoo, Ezinearticles.com, articlesbase.com, and helium.com. Don’t forget to broadcast the article to all your followers in the social media realm.
6. Submit Press Releases
   Submitting press releases remains one of the quickest ways to gain links quickly. Writing a successful press release requires some planning. Don’t just write about your product or service, but what about your product, or service, or you is newsworthy. Find a newsworthy angle make sure it is polished, spellchecked, etc, and submit it to services like: PRWeb, BusinessWire or PRleap.com.
7. Submit to Dofollow Social Bookmarking Sites
   There are still alot of social bookmarking sites that provide dofollow links. We at the Masters use http://socialmarker.com so sign up for all the services on it, and it allows you to submit your posts one after another.
8. Become a Guest Blogger:
   Looking for high PR links craft some well written post, and contact high traffic, high PR blogs in your niche, and pitch your post. This will do two things first it will gain you visibility on an authority site giving you street credit, and traffic. Secondly it will gain you links on high PR blogs in your niche.
9. Share Your Insights Through Commenting:
   Share insightful comments is useful on a variety of levels. First of all if its a dofollow comment you will get a good link from that site. In addition to that though a well worded comment can build relationships with other bloggers, and drive traffic to your site which will eventually lead to more links.
10. Contribute Something Useful
    Contribute something useful to the internet community, and they will bless you with links. Write a Joomla or WordPress plugin and submit it to the plugin directories. Write an extremely useful boilerplate template for instance a sample seo proposal and give it away to sites that have templates. Design a free template for WordPress or other platforms, and put your link in the footer.

While it is difficult to get multiple first page results for your organization you can give potential visitors multiple ways to find your site by leveraging these directories SEO abilities.

1. Search Engine Locals- Google, Yahoo, and Bing all have local services to help consumers find the regional xyz store, organization, etc. These results frequently show up first in SERP’s so register an information rich profile at each service, and dominate.

2. Yellowpages.com- Yellow page listings are as plentiful as those infamous yellow books themselves.

3. LinkedIn- Linked in is a social network for business networking and Linkedin profiles also frequently shows up in regional search results.

4. Merchant Circle- Merchant Circle is a directory of local businesses, and their profiles are quickly indexed, and often rank quite well.

5. Service Magic- Servicemagic.com is a paid directory of service industry professionals. While it does cost money they can get you ranked well in local searches.

6. Yelp.com- Yelp.com is a local business directory that allows local people to review area businesses. These pages do very well in regional SEO.

7. Superpages.com- Superpages.com is another yellowpages type services that ranks well particularly in Bing and Yahoo.

8. Kudzu.com- Kudzu.com is a directory for businesses that specializes in regional search their basic profile is free.

9. CitySearch.com- Citysearch is a city by city overview of businesses, events, etc. Does cost money but great SEO results.

10. Local.com- Local.com is a small business directory that ranks well in SERP’s.

Bonus- Localtype.com has an extensive listing of local directories check it out here.

While directories are not as beneficial as they used to be they are still a good foundation for link building campaigns. Below is list of the top 10 SEO friendly directories that pass on PageRank to your site, thereby increasing your PR.

1. Librarians’ Internet Index (PR9)- A very high-quality free link, but very difficult to get. Websites must go through a thorough review and must contain alot of informative content.

2. DMOZ (PR8)- The Open Directory Project is a great authority link and its free. Unfortunately it can take up to a year to be indexed depending on the editor for the category you are submitting to. Don’t keep resubmitting your site, it only puts you at the end of the line.

3. Yahoo Directory (PR8)- Another great authority link if your site is not commercial inclusion is free but can be slow. Commercial listings are $299 a year.

4. Business.com (PR7)- Great link for business sites submission cost $299 a year make sure to get the standard listing not the PPC which is a redirected link.

5. Best of the Web (PR7)- Free link for non-commercial sites. Otherwise its $69.95 a year or $199.95 for a permanent link. Many of BOTW’s category pages have high Google Page Rank without that many outgoing links making this a solid backlink.

6. JoeAnt.com (PR6)- $39.99 one-time fee, free for editors guaranteed review within two business days.

7. The Hot VS. Not Directory (PR6)- High Page rank directory $60 for a year $200 for a permanent link.

8. Directory World (PR5)- Professional web directory for 24.95 annually.

9. GoGuides (PR5)- Websites are instantly included $69.95 per site.

10. Rubber Stamped (PR4)- Solid link from an up and coming directory $29.95 one time review fee.

These are 10 of the top SEO tools the we use everyday on clients websites to get maximum results from our search engine marketing campaigns.

1. Compete Site Analytics- Compete gives you accurate data of monthly unique visitors to a website. This is extremely useful for competitive analysis of competitors, and also sizing up a prospective clients site for an SEO proposal. We have found it to be very accurate when we compare with Google analytics, or AWstats.

2. Google analytics- Every serious SEO or webmaster needs to be running Google free analytics software on their sites. The point of SEO is not rankings, or page rank its visitors! Stop guessing and start making statistically informed SEO decisions so that your effort can go into the things that are paying off.

3. SEOQuake Toolbar- This Firefox plugin is one of my favorite SEO tools at a glance I can see a site Page Rank, backlinks, Alexa ranking, domain age, and keyword density. The best part is it’s free.

4. Multiple Datacenter Search- Honestly Google does so much in the way of personalized search, geolocation, etc. that it can be hard to get the straight dope on where your ranking. The multiple datacenter search will show you search results for multiple google data centers so you can get a better feel for your rankings.

5. Wordtracker Firefox Plugin- If your like me you love Firefox for all the great extensions! One such extension is the Wordtracker Firefox Plugin you can see search volumes for search phrases on the fly without leaving your current page. Not as accurate as Google but great for naming Blog posts and making quick keyword decisions.

6. Google Keywords- The best overall free keyword research tool in my opinion. You can quickly be given hundreds of keyword suggesstions by entering keyword phrases, or by entering yours or competitors web address. This tool will show you monthly search volumes for each key word or phrase, and all suggested keywords can be exported to csv.

7. 301 Redirect Checker- 301 are useful for two reasons first so that search engines don’t see http://yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com as two sites. Also if a page moves the page rank can be reassigned to the new page through a 301 redirect. Make sure 301 redirects are set up correctly with this tool.

8. Yahoo Siteexplorer- Google notoriously under reports backlinks, and only gives you a sampling. With site explorer you can see what backlinks you have, and even better you can see competitors backlinks, and use those sites in your link building efforts. The best part is that it will export to a tab separated values file that can used in Excel.

9. XML Sitemap Generator- XML sitemaps are important to get your pages quickly indexed in a few minutes this tool will index your site up to 500 pages, and generate an xml sitemap. Be sure and sign up with Google Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Bing Webmaster Center to tell these services the location of your sitemap.

10. Google Position Checker- With this tool you can see what position you rank in Google for a particular keyword up to the first 1,000 results.

Bonus! Backlink Builder- This tool searches your submitted keywords for sites that accept links directories etc.

Many of us have found Joomla to be one of the best options for building websites quickly and easily for a variety of industries. This is because it’s ease of use, has many plugins, and its scalability has earned great applause. Unfortunately, Joomla is a little backward SEO wise, and makes it difficult for your content to rank well. Never fear, we have listed here 10 great plugins we have used on clients sites and seen great results. So make 2010 a year of SEO zen with your Joomla website. Please keep in mind that these plugins are somewhat exclusive, while some can be combined, others cannot. Proceed with caution.

1. RS SEO- This great component does a number of invaluable SEO tasks including: crawl your website and index all the pages, modify the Meta Keywords, Meta description and Title on the fly, grade each page for SEO effectiveness, create Google and Yahoo! sitemaps, constantly monitor your competitors and compare them to you, monitor important keyword positions, and set permanent redirects for old links.

2. iJoomla SEO- Another great full featured component with a plethora of SEO features including: position of keywords in Google, use of h1, h2, h3 tags instead of contentheading tag, individual metatag control per page, automatic linking based on keyword, 301 redirects, ability to add nofollows to links (or leave dofollow, if you prefer), and image seo optimization.

3. SEF Service Map 2 (with PingBack system)- This component creates a complete XML sitemap of your site which it then uses to actively report (ping) new or modified items to Google, Yahoo, and other services. (Pinging is one of the tools that makes WordPress so AWESOME for SEO!) Thanks to that, indexing robots (spiders) will visit your site much more often and the site can index itself without your further activity. Make sure to sign up with Google Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Bing Webmaster Center to tell these services the location of your sitemap.

4. sh404SEF This component adds search engine friendly url’s to Joomla but is much more robust than the built in SEF. sh404SEF lets you create unlimited short URLs for any page, remove duplicate URLs, customize the page title and page description, automatically emphasize all your article titles with “Heading tags,” spam and hacker management, and IP blocking. It also works with or without .htaccess support.

5. Joomla 1.5 SEO Patch- This patch solves the issues in regards of the settings within the html head section of your Joomla pages. The patch allows you to gain fully control over the META and title settings in the http header settings in Joomla 1.5 generated pages.

6. SEO Canonicalisation Plugin- SEO Canonicalisation is a system plugin for Joomla! 1.5 that enables site ‘canonicalisation’, which means that when a user hits your site from another domain than your preferred (for example, www.website.com instead of website.com), Joomla! will redirect the user to the appropriate hostname. Previously this would have to be accomplished by adding a .htaccess rewrite rule to handle the redirect.

7. SEOSimple- This simple Joomla 1.5 plugin takes the starting chunk of text from the page content and applies that as the value for the meta description tag in the page head. Search engines often use a Web page’s meta description in the SERPs, and as such it is important that these meta descriptions have relevant text related to the page content.

8. J!Redirect301- This extension works just as it sounds. The plugin 301 redirects your domains to one domain so that only one version of your site is indexed and also can be used to redirect individual pages to a new a page so search engine results are not lost.

9. Website Name- This Joomla 1.5 plugin displays the Website name in the page title. This is useful for SEO purposes, because it shows relationship between pages of your site. You can choose to display it before or after the Content Title.

10. GD SEO Verify- This nifty little plugin makes verifying your sites at Google Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Bing Webmaster Center much easier on the backend of Joomla.

Of course, there are others available, but as the title suggests, these are the top. What plugins do you use? Do you see some that we left off the list? Sound off below.

Please take note, some SEO plugins can conflict and give you duplicate information, which is not good. So please, pick your favorites and stick with them. (Those that WILL conflict will be noted in their description.)

We all know that “Content is King,” but if your content can’t be found, it won’t be a help to anyone. But be honest with yourself, do you really want to spend hours on end on SEO? Don’t worry – you won’t have to if just let these plugins go to work for you while you focus on the main thing, and that’s content.

1. The Thesis Theme- Yah, yah, yah I know it’s not a plugin, but if your serious about SEO you’ll look into the Thesis Theme. The Masters have run head to head testing against other WordPress themes, and Joomla sites in the several niches, and there is absolutely no comparison. All other factors being equal, Thesis will trounce a basic WordPress or Joomla installation when it comes to SEO. The secret is how it divides the code related to content, and design so search engines see clean, indexable code.

2. Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a XML sitemap for Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com which allows to index your posts faster my favorite part is the fact that it pings each service when new content is added. This is a definite must have for those serious about SEO make sure to sign up with Google Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Bing Webmaster Center to tell these services the location of your sitemap.

3. HeadSpace2 – This plugin allows you granular control over meta-data, such as tags, titles, descriptions, etc. You can also use this to add specific JavaScript and CSS to pages for various analytics software. Headspace automatically suggests tags for your posts and allows you to create custom titles and descriptions that can improve your page ranking and indexability. (This WILL conflict with All in One SEOd and Meta Robots.)

4. Redirection – For any number of reasons you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, but if not done correctly you risk losing that pages status in search results.  The Redirection plugin saves you time and headaches with 301 redirects, it captures a log of 404 errors so you can work on correcting them, and sets up an RSS feed for errors.

5. All in One SEO Pack – One of the most popular plugins of all time for WordPress, this plugin SEO swiss army knife from helping choose the best post title and keywords, to helping you avoid duplicate content and more. If your running Thesis this may be a little redundant as it handles alot of the same features. (This WILL conflict with Meta Robots and Headspace.)

6. Automatic SEO Links – Ever looked up from Wikipedia and realize you’ve been reading for like an hour that is because of their thorough interlinking between articles. Interlinking has two benefits it will spread link juice deeper into your site, and also it will make your site more sticky as users more easily can find key content. Automatic SEO Links allows you to choose a word or phrase for automatic linking, both internal and external, set anchor text, and choose if it should be “nofollow” or not.  One of the best features of this plugin is that it will only do this for the first occurrence of a word in a post so you don’t look like your just spamming.

7. SEO Slugs – Using your entire post title as the slug for an article can make web addresses to long and throw useless keywords into the mix .  The SEO Slugs plugin strips out all of the common, unnecessary words from the permalink to save you time.

8. Nofollow Case by Case – Because of the democratic nature of the web thanks to Google every vote (backlink) from other pages moves you up the ranks. Because of this system the Masters are big fans of DoFollow comments – it’s the blogospheres version of kissing babies. Take care of people and they will take care of you. This plugin removes the “nofollow” attribute from your comments, allowing you to share some linkluv which will encourage commenting. It can also nofollow specific comments on a case by case basis. (Hence the name.)

9. SEO friendly and HTML valid subheadings – Some themes for WordPress will confuse your sub-header tags based on the page they are to be displayed on, but this plugin will automatically reset them to make them more SEO friendly by moving them down one spot in the hierarchical tree.  In other words, h2 becomes h3, h3 becomes h4 and so on.

10. SEO Friendly Images – I have found many essential sites while using images search. Images can be an untapped source of traffic as people search for images on your niche, and this plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.

11. Meta Robots WordPress plugin – A quick, and easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page of your choice on your blog.  You can use it to make a variety of links nofollows such as: front page links, search pages, author and dated archives,  your login page. (This WILL conflict with AIO and Headspace.)

12. SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin – If you must have duplicate content on your site for some reason, SEO No Duplicate allows you to select which version of a post the search engines should index while ignoring the others.

13. SEO Blogroll – If you worry that the people you link to in your blogroll are feeding off of your PageRank?  With SEO Blogroll you can make separate sections for various groupings of links, with an unlimited number in each, and all of them will receive the “nofollow” attribute.

14. SEO for Paged Comments – With the introduction of paged comments in WordPress 2.7, there was a potential problem with search engines thinking you had duplicate content as the post would appear on each page.  This plugin aims to take care of this issue for you until the folks at WordPress change things up.

15. SEO Tag Cloud Widget – Tag clouds can be a unique way for website visitors to visualize your blogs theme unfortunately they are notoriously unreadable by search engines. The SEO tag cloud widget changes all that, your tag cloud will be converted to SEO friendly HTML markup that can be indexed.

Bonus! Permalinks Moved Permanently This plugin is great for if you ever change the permalink structure of your blog. If a 404 is detected, it will take the last part of the post slug, and search your current posts for that same slug. If it finds a match, it will do a 301 redirect from the old link to the new. We used to use a custom permalink structure, /%category%/%postname%/, for our blog here but decided to remove the %category% part. I found that we were getting more 404′s than before (using Redirection) and we needed a way to get this done more effectively. Permalinks moved Permanently did what we needed. (Don added this. I tried to get him to stick with just 15, but NOOOOO. So this ones for free. lol)

One more thing, this list was inspired by Nick over at SiteSketch101. Check him out if your looking for how to blog.

Title tags are one of the most important factors on your website for optimizing for your niche keywords. Some guidelines for title tags are: Use your organizations name; use descriptive keywords such as “Northern Illinois SEO;” use 10-12 words per title tag; use a different title tag on each page based on what keywords on that page you are optimizing for. Don’t use comma separated words with spaces. Instead use pipes and spaces to separate keywords or phrases. A pipe looks like this | on your keyboard. It is the key above the return key.

2. Research your keyword phrases extensively.

The phrases you think your target market is searching for might be wrong. I’m amused how often people get excited about getting ranked high for a certain term when they should be looking at the volume of searches that particular term gets. To find perfect keyword phrases, use research tools such as KeywordDiscovery, Wordtracker or Google’s Keyword Tool. Then, use Excel or a similar program to compile lists of the most relevant phrases for your site, and optimize for only a couple of keywords per page. Be sure to avoid general keywords such as “dentist” or “lawyer,” they are very competitive. Instead, use keywords like “Dallas Lawyer,” “Texas Dentist,” or better yet “Dallas, Texas Suburb Dentist.” Try to work in keywords 3 or more times per page without making the copy sound ridiculous.

3. Size up the competition

Your competitors are the organizations that rank well for the keywords you want to rank well for. Knowing what makes them competitive can give you a great edge. Search for you competitors using your researched keywords and determine the following:

• Competitor rank in the Search Engines
• Number of incoming links
• What keywords are in the title of linking page
• Percentage of links containing keywords in the link text
• The Google PageRank of linking pages

There are some great tools for analyzing competitors. For instance, there are two Firefox plugins that give detailed stats on sites you visit. One such plugin is SEOBook toolbar, and the other is the SEO Quake toolbar. Another great tool for comparative analysis of websites is Compete.com. Once you have determined the factors that make your competitors excel us those same strategies on your sites. i.e. Sites that link to your competition may be a great place to start when building links to your site.

4. Optimize your Meta Tags

META tags are code within the head section of your website that are only read by search engine spiders (and geeks that like to look at HTML code, lol). Meta tags summarize what your site is about, and despite their diminishing role, they still play an important part in your SEO strategy. The description Meta tag is the text that is displayed under your title on the search results page. This is a key place to summarize what your site offers to your prospective visitor so that they will click on your site instead of your competitors.

The description meta tag looks like this:
<meta name=”description” content=”concise statement of your mission” />

The second important meta tag is the keywords meta tag. Despite its fading importance to Google, it is still looked at by other search engines, such as Bing or Yahoo.

The keyword meta tag looks like this:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”lawyer, dallas, texas, flower mound, legal, attorney” />

5. Use Heading Tags

Heading tags are a very important element to consider when writing your site copy. Heading are great from a usability standpoint as well as SEO. Using heading tags helps users, web browsers and search engines determine what the important parts of your page are.

Your main page title should always use the <h1> tag — this tells what your page is about. Use of additional tags, such as <h2> and <h3> is also important because they help to break down your page. The search engines spiders will automatically know what your page topics are by looking at these tags.

6. Use ALT Tags on all your images

Images are a great way to communicate the topic of a page unfortunately search engines can read images. Enter ALT tags – they help the search engine determine the topic of a picture. This is important because the more relevant text on your page, the better chance you have of achieving higher search engine rankings.

7. Submit XML Sitemaps to Google and Yahoo

Google and Yahoo have created programs just for webmasters to help insure that your pages get cached in their index as quickly as possible. Google’s version is called Google Sitemaps and Yahoo’s program is called Site Explorer. Simply by placing a formatted xml file with site map on your webserver, you enable Search Engine crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly. Just create an account at both sites then visit http://www.xml-sitemaps.com and have it crawl your site, download the resulting files and put them onto your main folder of your website and tell Google and Yahoo where to find them. You’ll be surprised how fast even new domains can be indexed following this method.

8. Build Links in your Niche

Search engines especially Google determines your sites Page Rank by several factors including: how many sites link to you, the topic of those sites and the authority of those sites. So don’t just go out and try to get links from everybody because off topic or non-authority sites will not significantly increase your Page Rank. However there are many reputable sites in your niche that you can use to submit your web site to for inclusion.

Here are some examples:

• Niche Directories
• Niche Blog
• Your Current Vendor Sites
• Geographic Directories i.e. Google, Yahoo, and Bing Local
• Large Directories such as Yahoo and DMOZ.org

9. Become an Authority in Your Niche

Don’t be afraid to share a little of the secret sauce in your sites blog, or articles. That may sound counter intuitive but in this day and age people and people are skeptical, and want to know if your an authority. With great relevant content  you’ll be able to generate links from other web sites and blogs and people and search engines will see you as an authority. Also consider contributing to trade periodicals, and niche blogs which can also earn you links on their sites.

10. Use Social Networks

Social Media is such a major factor in building links, buzz, and relationships, and shouldn’t be ignored. Social media includes sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon. Social Networking takes a little time to build relationships, but is rewarding as you get to interact with customers, answer questions, and build traffic, and links from niche sites. As you build friends and followers you will increase customer loyalty, and they will become your online marketers.

“How to get traffic,” is probably the most asked question among serious bloggers. This is because traffic, is the way to make money from your blog, and the best way to make money online. With traffic you can get money lots of ways, through adsense, affilates, and selling adspace… But first you need to answer the million dollar question, how to get traffic.

There is an entire industry of blogs that have been devoted to it. There are literally tens of thousands of sites claiming to know the secret, saying they’ll tell it to you, but first you have to subscribe to their RSS feed, and stumble their posts, and link to their site. And the secret they claim is to keep reading their blog and over time you will learn it, say over the next two years or so. And meanwhile your reading their posts, and helping them out, Their Just Robbing You!

The #1 key to getting traffic to your blog, is this, to write, write, write, write, write, and then write some more… Writings new posts as much as you can will dramatically grow your site’s traffic. Although, depending on how much you’re used to writing, “a lot” could vary. Let me show you an example from John Chow’s site.

Those pictures you just saw were the dates of the blog posts on the first page of his blog. There were seven posts in three days. That’s the type of commitment you need to make it big. But most of can’t afford to write 7 posts in three days, unlike John Chow we aren’t making thousands every week from our blogs, yet. So your going to need to figure out for yourself how much you can write. But if you look at the popular sites in the blogging world, they’re writing generally, no less then once a day, usually more then once a day. I’m not saying you can’t be successfully writing only once a week, but if your getting lots of traffic from once a week writing, I guarantee if you move that up to every day writing, your traffic will grow dramatically.

I used to write on this blog once every two or three days. Since then I’ve moved it up to every day and the traffic has definitely grown.

However to get lot’s of traffic you can’t just write, though that is the most important, you also need to know what to write about, when to write, how often, in what way… I have created a list of 8 things explaining what I mean by write, write, write…

1.

            Find a Popular Niche to write in

I’m sorry but no matter how much you write, and work, and slave over your blog, your not going to get tons of people on a blog about “Raising Squirrel Awareness.”   And no I did not make that up, it’s a real blog, you can check out the link, his alexa ranking is around 21 million so your visit will probably make the old guy’s day.

But anyway, so you can’t write about just anything, it has to be something more and more people will be looking for daily. So find something to write about that people can, and will use. Don’t narrow in too much on one little topic. Because to make the big bucks, and large traffic amounts, you need to be writing on a popular topic.

2.

            Write so every person alive can understand

Unless your blog is technology for tech lovers who love really complicated things, write in simple English so you can appeal to every reader. And what I mean by “simple English,” is that don’t assume your readers understand all the terms you use. Try and use a little html, internet, blogging terms as you can. There’s been times when I read a post and go hmm… hmm…. hmm, nope I have no idea what he just said. I understood it was good for me, and it helps my site some how, but I don’t know how it helps, and most importantly How To Do It!? If your going to tell people how to do something, make it so that any person could follow your instructions. Because honestly there is a lot of people who have no clue about how to use the internet out there, and they will need very basic instructions.

            The entire point of this blog is to help people get traffic to their sites. I started it when I saw all the blogs claiming to show how to get traffic, but when I read their posts, I didn’t know what to do; or their suggestions just didn’t work as much as advertised. And often they didn’t even talk about how to really make money, or really get traffic.  So I was determined, when I’d learned enough, I’d make a blog to show people how to get traffic; but in a language beginners could understand.; And so that’s why I always include instructions for set up. Do not assume people know how to do it. And honestly, what do you have to lose? If people do know how to, they’ll skip over it, and If they don’t they’ll use it, what’s five more minutes out of your day, when it turns one hundred readers into fans of your site because you explained to them what to do. So write so that everyone can understand, and I guarantee this will help your blog. In addition, the word will get around that you are a beginner friendly site, and suddenly you will appeal to the largest group of bloggers out there. The new bloggers, and more and more of them are swarming the internet every day.

3.

            Write at the right times

Though it’s never bad to write an article, you can maximize the value of it, by posting it at the right times. Most of readers read during the workweek, so weekdays. So try to get a new blog post out on as many new week days as you can. The only way to get a large body of readers consistently is to get lots and lots of returning visitors. So keep giving out new content every day to appease them. Also, post as early as you can. I try to post every morning around 6 before I go to work. That way every day there’s new content up for my readers to read. So write often, write on week days over week ends if you have to choose, and write early as opposed to late.

4.

            Write Consistently

Be consistent! I say this over and over again. Don’t be a sporadic blogger, unless you want to commit blogging suicide. Find a time, and day, when you can post, and stick too it. After doing it long enough your readers will understand when you post and then will know when to visit for new content. However if you are posting weekly, letting people know you are only posting weekly may destroy your blog. So plan on writing every day or two days, and be consistent. It will keep your readers happy and you’ll see a lot more returning visitors.

Remember, you are a slave to your readers whims. If your readers don’t like you, that that equals 0 traffic. So if a readers comments saying your template is confusing, the listen to him. Do everything you can to fix the problem, he’s probably not the only one who thinks that way.

5.

            Write Often

I know I’ve already kind of said this already, but there’s another reason for why this is so essential. The more you post the more google likes  you, and the more all sites will like you. Being very active is a major bonus for your site. As simply put as possible, more posts=more traffic, assuming your following the right steps. Say for example, you write a post and it gets 3 visits a day from the search engines, which isn’t very much. Times that by 25 posts and that’s 75 visits a day from search engines. And honestly 3 a day isn’t very good, for a good search term you can get hundreds of visits a day. But so say you have 50 posts, that’s 150 visits and so on… That’s a lot, and with a little luck and some good page rank, maybe you’ll get a big fish and get more.

            The more posts you have, the more search terms in Google you’ll rank for, so the more traffic you’ll get. And the greater potential for links. If you have 25-50 articles on different things, people will find the ones they like and link to them, thus you’ll be able to please more readers, and get new ones, and also get links, which will improve your rankings for other search terms.

6.

            Write in lists and Write about people

First off, about lists. Everybody wants to see 100 reasons for so and so, and 50 top sites… The greater the number the more impressed people will be and you’ll get hits from people who don’t even care about the topic they just want to see what you could list 100 things about.

Second, write about people. The art of turning an interested commentator into an adoring fan is essential to creating a big blog. Never, Never! be rude with anyone. I don’t care if he only get’s five hits annually. Why make an enemy, when you can make a friend so easily. Whenever you get a comment, visit them back and comment on their blog. Compliment them for their lay out, their success, their most recent post, whatever… It doesn’t matter what, but find something to compliment them on, and Be Truthful. Don’t lie to them, that falls under the don’t being rude. But when you help a little blog out it’ll make them love you and your blog because you bent down to help them, and fans are essential. You need people who will subscribe to your blog, comment, and stumble/digg your posts, so always, Always! be polite.

Also, write about up and coming blogs in your niche. And then email them saying you like their blog and want to write a post about them, asking permission of course. They’ll be so excited just to get an email at all, and to have their blogs going to be talked about by a big blog, it will instantly turn them into a fan.

And also include lots of links in your posts, often they will return the favor in their posts.

7.

            Write good content

Work on your blog posts. Imagine them as papers for a teacher, except there’s hundreds of teachers all looking for different things, and your trying to get an, “A” from as many of them as you can. So spell check your posts, read them over for grammar. And don’t just write about random things. Every post should be insightful, enjoyable to read, and profitable to the reader. Unless you absolutely have to, make them short and to the point. Post every post, like it was your last post. As you finish it, think about if this post will continue to be getting traffic in a week or two weeks.

8.

            Write timeless posts

Now this I realize is not always possible, but whenever it is, do it! Make your posts relevant today, tomorrow, yesterday, and two years from now. Let them appeal to readers forever. And still be read even when their four pages back on your home page. Relevancy is key because every blogger is unique. Just like very blog is unique. They’re all looking for different things that are relevant to them, so make your posts relevant to your niche, and timeless so that they can always be read, and put into practice.

For those of you who like to see short bullet lists, I will change these strategies into check off points.

1. Write in a Popular Niche
2. Write Simply
3. Write at the Right Times
4. Write Consistently
5. Write Often
6. Write in lists/about People
7. Write Worthy Content
8. Write Timeless

Thank you for reading! And I hope this benefits your site with a lot of traffic growth in the near future.

 I made it into a Squidoo as well if you want to read it here.

I know that I spent the first couple weeks of my blogging experiance, learning these terms and how to use them. With this new page you can just click the term you don’t understand. And it will give you a simple explanation. So please comment below with these terms.

Thanks!