How to get more Google traffic to your site or blog for free-Part One
Search engine traffic is one of the most targeted traffic and is often free. Because of that, you should be continuously working to improve your search engine rankings and index penetration through various tactics that we’ll be discussing in this and the next post tomorrow.
Be a social net citizen
You can generate lots of backlinks by leaving useful posts and comments in dofollow blogs and forums. However don’t just say “Nice post†and leave your link on other blog communities. Add to the discussion with a question, responding to a feedback or question posted by another person or by adding your own opinion to the discussion. Useful comments get approved and will stick a permanent backlink to your website.
The comments you leave should most importantly show that you have read the article you are responding to and be unique to each blog post. There was this blog comment spammer that would leave the same comment about adding adbrite banners to your blog. The comment seemed legitimate to lots of blog posts related to blogging, but when I checked my blog posts for duplicate content with copyscape, the same comment appeared on a few dozen other blogs. Of course I deleted the comment. If you ever asked me, I would rather gain twenty permanent backlinks on a single day than one hundred backlinks that later get deleted for duplicate content
Syndicate articles
Writing articles and submitting them to article directories is an excellent way to amass backlinks to your website or blog.  Google and other search engines place more weight on a sites or pages with lots of backlinks. Any serious blogger or webmaster should therefore work on improving the number of backlinks pointing to his website from other sites on the internet. Again, use your keywords in the anchor text-the words used on the links pointing to your website or web page.
Guest blogging is also an excellent way to get free traffic to your blog or website while gaining backlinks to your site for better search engine rankings.
Sponsor WordPress themes
WordPress theme sponsoring is a smart viral marketing strategy that earns you free backlinks to your website. The idea is to stick the link to your site at the bottom of the theme you sponsor and every blog that uses the theme will have a link pointing to your own blog or site.
You can either build your own themes or sponsor themes already built by other WordPress experts. You can find themes to sponsor on forums such as the digital point forums
Don’t be afraid to be controversial
A little controversy is not bad and may be a powerful link building tactic. A good way to do it is to make some thought provoking comment or opinion to a subject related to your industry. This may be a good way to generate interest and discussion from other bloggers and at the end of it you may get lots of free backlinks. Jason Calacanis is known for this and I did mention about him in another post called How to Trigger the Power of Viral Marketing in Your Online Business
Don't be shy ;) Share your thoughts on this post by commenting below. Remember this is a DOFOLLOW blog! Also Subscribe to our rss to get future posts delivered to your inbox
Usually, What I do to get more traffic for my website is that I spend a fair amount of my time scanning both blog and news headlines and then popping onto other web blogs. It’s fun, rewarding, and helps me gain visibility.
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I agree that article marketing can get you a lot of visitors and a great increase in SERPS
About the part of blogs comments being useless: How many comments do you delete (in %)? Because I am considering to open up my blogs for comments & make it dofollow.
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Also similar to syndicating articles, I would suggest syndicating videos using services similar to tube mogul and the various other video aggrators (not sure of the spelling there lol). Since google bought youtube video is becoming an even greater part of websites traffic campaigns. This is also the second blog I have come across that has suggested sponsoring a wordpress theme, guess I’m going to have to look into that
By the way you should ad adbrite banners to your blog…..Just kidding lol.
Thanks for the post.
Yeas, article marketing is a great way to get backlinks.
Good article, all 4 techniques are to the point. I would only notice that some webmasters and site owners delete sponsored links in WP themes as footer and entire theme editing allows to do so, or a least assign nofollow value to that link. So it depends on the people who use your theme, but generally this is a fresh thought, I haven’t thought of it before.
Hi there! I do agree with you on your post. These techniques are a must read so that bloggers will know on what to do. Very informative indeed and thanks for sharing by the way!
Great article on getting more traffic to your site for free. My favorite is sending out articles to numerous article directories. You can also send your content on some high PR web 2.0 sites and get some good link juice from the site. The strategy about building or sponsoring wordpress themes is something I need to try. Thanks for sharing.
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Twitter: J_T_Ray
says:
I’ve never thought of sponsoring a wordpress theme, that’s an interesting idea. Although I get a little frustrated when I get a free theme and it’s full of links on the bottom that I can’t remove.
Kevin Njoroge
Twitter: kevoh99
Reply:
November 27th, 2010 at 2:19 am
Encryption of blog themes is usually done to stop their users from deleting the links in the footer. However, you shouldn’t use too many links there. Get a reasonable return from the bloggers using your theme. Don’t overdo it.
I’ve heard that “Scrapebox” is a good tool for finding dofollow blogs, although it is priced at $97. I suppose the trick to good commenting is not to overdo it and come inside Google’s radar.
Quality and original articles will help boost your web site’s traffic as well as it’s ranking on search engines. However, don’t spam websites or else your site will be penalize. Thanks for sharing your ideas.
Kevin Njoroge
Twitter: kevoh99
Reply:
November 27th, 2010 at 2:11 am
Yes Maggie, quality content is liked by both the search engines and human readers. You can submit it to top article directories or as guest posts on popular blogs related to your niche
Writing articles is one way of getting free traffic to your website although as we all know free isn’t really what it is. After all you have to write the articles and get them posted on a viable medium like Ezine Articles. I think the idea of anything being free is a little bit misleading in the circumstances. Would you agree with this?
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Kevin Njoroge
Twitter: kevoh99
Reply:
November 27th, 2010 at 1:37 pm
Joe, article marketing is free but requires time to write the articles and submit them to the article directories.
You may also incur a cost if you decide to outsource writing and/or submitting the articles.
Cheers
Thanks Kevin for sharing this with us. You just helped me solve a puzzle I had about the url of my blog posts. Seems you recommended just what I needed to do to change my permalinks. Keep up and congratulations on your graduation.
Kevin Njoroge
Twitter: kevoh99
Reply:
December 11th, 2010 at 6:07 pm
Thanks Hebergenment
Going along with being a Social Net Citizen is using a great social bookmarking service that offers do follow links. These links can usually contain keywords and then you add tags and/or descriptions to go with them.
I think sponsoring WP themes is a great idea as they can spread like wildfire particularly if they’re featured on CSS design galleries.
The last comment about controversy generating more responses is an interesting one. I can find it hard to get the balance between representing my company when commenting on blogs and therefore being professional but actually saying what I really think! Perhaps I should let the barriers down a little and try a less safe approach with my next comment and see how I go…
Twitter: rdgubaten
says:
This process is the most important factor in setting up a site of your own, without the traffic to your blog your efforts and time and investments were useless. My blog is just an experiment for me that someday after learning all the pros and cons, I will decide to set up my own site seriously. This article is a must read article that if you made a deal with it, your efforts will be fruitful. Thank you for this post that I even printed to this to add it up to my compilations. Thank you very much.
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Good article, all 4 techniques are to the point. I would only notice that some webmasters and site owners delete sponsored links in WP themes as footer and entire theme editing allows to do so, or a least assign nofollow value to that link
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Winworld exports
People first need to learn the importance of posting backlinks, and apart from that, they need to learn the importance of actually taking the pains to read another person’s post.
Although my blog is a dofollow one, I have it strictly moderated and you wouldn’t believe the number of ‘Hey good post’ comments I get everyday. I’m a firm believer when it comes to sharing link love, but this is downright spam.
Article directories are very useful when it comes to promoting online presence.. and all these factors need to be fulfilled to bring in traffic online.
Great blog my friend, Article writing is great for links. But I mostly use bloging as its easier for me and more interesting. I’m not that great a writer and writing full length articles an submitting is very tiresome.
If you want traffic to come to your site you need backlinks, so you gotta do what you gotta do!
Nice tips here. These are all effective ways to get more free traffic to your blog from other websites as well as google. I think the coolest part about trying to get traffic to your blog is that it’s literally all about how much you share. The more helpful content you spread around the more traffic you’re bound to get. Basically, the more you do the more you get.
I’ll offer one caution about article syndication: Google recently announced that they were going to dramatically reduce the page rankings of low-quality “content farm” sites. Be careful where you post! If a site seems low quality, it likely is.
Seems like a good solid strategy to rising up in Google’s SERP’s although I do find it kinda hard to write articles all the time about the same topic, its sends me round the twist a bit :/
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Twitter: DamonDay
says:
Hey Kevin,
You are dead on with the comments on blog posts. When I first started my blog, I was able to build it up to a PR3 by basically doing nothing but finding great sites with articles to comment on. However, there is a much bigger value to commenting on relevant sites, especially ones pertaining to SEO and Blogging. In addition to receiving great backlinks, I learned a ton of information to improve upon my blog and am still learning every time I look for new blogs to frequent.
Networking with other bloggers is what I think the key to ultimate success is. Thanks very much for the keyword and commentluv plugins. If you want to check out my blog it is do follow and I have the commentluv plugin enabled.
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