7 No-Fail Strategies to Increase Traffic to Your WordPress Blog

Now that I’ve become a devout WordPress fan after years of being a naysayer, I’m trying to quickly get up-to-speed about strategies and tactics I can use the make my WordPress blogs work hard for me to bring more traffic to my sites. Some of the strategies I’ve learned about have to do with how I create posts, while others incorporate the use of specific plug-ins to help me better optimize my blog for traffic.

What you want to drive to your blog is targeted traffic, not any old traffic.  Lots of traffic does you no good if it doesn’t fit your target market profile.  How many times have you visited a site and realized within seconds that it wasn’t what you were seeking?  Make sure that any optimization strategies you undertake drive the right kind of traffic to your site — the kind of traffic that wants the information, resources, services and products you provide.

Here are 7 strategies you can use to increase traffic to your WordPress blog:

1.  Create keyword-rich categories. Keywords aren’t just for use in content.  When used in categories, the category name can also play an important role in driving traffic to your blog.  Use the Google external keyword tool to help you determine the best category names for your niche or your target market.

2.  Optimize each post with the All in One SEO Pack.  This plug-in asks you to complete a title tag, meta description, and meta keywords for each blog post.  You’ll want to incorporate your major keywords into each section. One way to do this is in the title, where you use the pipe character (|) to separate your keyword phrases.  In the title, use no more than 3 keyword phrases.

3.  Set permalinks.  The default WordPress setting designates a page number to each new post.  This does you no good at all in terms of SEO for your blog.  Instead, in the Settings menu, go to the Permalinks option, and set your postname to %/postname/% in order to have your keyword-rich post titles appear in the post page name, or permalink.

4.  Optimize permalinks with the SEO Slugs plugin.  This plug-in removes unneeded words like “a”, “an,” “and” and “the” from post titles when WordPress creates a permalink from your post title and leaves only your keywords in the permalink.

5. Optimize images with keywords.  Titles and alt image tags also play an important role in SEO an driving traffic to any web site. Use the SEO Friendly Images plugin to give your inserted images keyword-rich alt image text and titles.

6.  Create sitemaps on your site.  Sitemaps helps both your visitor and the search engines better navigate your site. For the search engines use, the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.  The CoreTweaks plugin lets you create a static sitemap on your blog for your visitors.  This plugin provides many more functions as well, so explore it thoroughly when you add it.

7.  Optimize post titles and post content.  Incorporate a primary keyword phrase into the title of each of your posts.  Then as you write the post, begin the first sentence with keyword-rich phrase.  Optimally, each post should be between 250-400 words long.

Take Action Strategy

Try to incorporate each of these 7 strategies into your WordPress blog, and watch your traffic dramatically increase!