15 WordPress and SEO Tips to Get Tons of Google Traffic

On the web, quite simply, traffic equals money. Or, to put another way, traffic equals power. It is possible to get on the Google’s first page with a WordPress website and a reasonable amount of onsite and offsite SEO work.

Everyone wants more traffic and some would seemingly stop at nothing to get it. Here are a few pieces of advice to get the traffic of your dreams…

1. First select the right keywords

Keywords are the phrases users enter in Google to search. With keyword research you should look for keywords that are

• searched for often
• don’t have a lot of competition
• convert well

First of all you need to go to Google and type “keyword research tool” and click on the link. You can then enter the keyword you think you want and see how many times it is searched for in a month. This provides some fascinating information.

Once you’ve decided upon a few keywords with some decent traffic to them you need to check out the competition. So Google your keyword phrases and pick out the top 5 or so URLs that are returned and see if they are big, authoritative sites. Run them through Yahoo! Site Explorer and Open Site Explorer and see how many links your competition has to them. Lots and lots? Forget it. Try another keyword.

2. Insert your selected keywords in the right places

Make sure you include your keywords in the titles, headings, subtitles, alt text for images and first paragraphs. And add a smattering of them through the body text of the pages. But don’t over do it. Never more than 5%. And don’t repeat yourself in headings.

3. Create an SEO Friendly Website

A self-hosted WordPress site is well structured for SEO anyway. You may like to add an SEO-friendly theme like Genesis to it and/or Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin for extra control of the title and meta tags, etc.

4. Submit to directories

You’re going to have to get a few links coming in and the best way to start this off is to submit to directories.

5. Make sure search engines are crawling your site regularly

Create a sitemap using a WordPress sitemap plugin or Yoast’s above mentioned SEO plugin and submit it to Google via Google’s Webmaster Tools. Reference it in your robots.txt. A few hours after you create a new page, Google the title and if you don’t come up you’re doing something wrong!

6. If you really want to, use PPC advertising

Two PPC (pay per click) programs are offered by Google and Yahoo (called Adwords and Overture respectively). With these programs you can pay to appear high up in the search engine results in the allotted space for PPC above and to the right of the top organic results. Take care with this method. Test your ads thoroughly, assess competition and use the keyword research tool to research the popularity of keywords.

7. Give away awesome freebies

Of course, writing useful content is the best SEO and, as I’ve said, that almost goes without saying. But freebies are great and visitors will come to your site to see what you are giving away. So include a free eBook, a time-bound discount, a prize, etc., on your website. (Don’t forget to nab their addresses while you’re dishing out the freebies!)

8. Participate in forums, blogs, and discussion groups

Another great way to drive targeted traffic to your site is to participate in forums, blogs, and discussion groups. If you can offer advice or valuable suggestions in forum threads or blog comments people will follow your link back to your place. Of course, you have to remember to leave your website URL in the comment form of the blog or the signature of the forum. CommentLuv blogs are especially good.

9. Become an expert

Search the forums to find what people are having problems with. Write out the solution in the form of a blog post. If you’re not an expert, find out who is the expert and interview them and then you will become “guru by association”. If no experts want to waste 20-30 minutes of their time with you ask 10 of them for a 5 or 6 line quote on the subject and give them a link in return.

10. Submit articles to articles sites

This is where the work really starts! Up until recently, the most effective technique to getting targeted traffic to your website. Write 500 word pieces about your niche subject and put your website link in the biography at the bottom of the article. Sites line Ezine Articles, Go Articles and Article Dashboard still have good authority. Quality content will tempt the visitor to click on your site. These can provide valuable back links. Don’t forget to link to these articles as well – further juicing up the link to you.

11. Write a press release

Write a press release about your site or business. Don’t make it a shameless self promotion but try to find an angle that makes it interesting to the lay person. Check out PRweb.

12. Online networks

In addition to the “content for backlinks” idea – there are online networks such as Squidoo, Hub Pages, Ever.com, Xanga, Vox and WordPress.com blogs. These can be easy to set up but a bit of time needs to be taken to create original content for them. Once this is done and the backlinks created, don’t forget to publicise them through social bookmarking sites. Link to your links, thus increasing the link juice to you.

13. Social bookmarking sites

People submit links of content they like on the web to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, delicious, StumbleUpon and Technorati. With some of these sites, like Digg and StumbleUpon, try to follow as many people as possible, it is easy to do this fairly quickly if you search for people with certain keywords in their profile.

Use the free service OnlyWire to automate this otherwise, try a few until you settle on 3 or 4 that work for you and keep on the look out for more.

Team up with other bloggers to submit and “like” eachother’s links on social bookmarking sites. With StumbleUpon, only a few “likes” can lead to thousands of visitors if the title of the link is compelling enough for people to click on.

14. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and other video sites

Well, herein lies 5 or 6 blog posts… I don’t have to tell you about the immense amounts of traffic you can get from these sites. However, all of these sites require time investment in order to build your following so that the links, when you do post them, get traction. We all have our favorites. It’s important we don’t spend too much time on all of these sites and spread ourselves too thin.

15. Guest posting

Whoopse, nearly forgot! Write awesome articles for other blogs in your niche. But don’t just guest post for any old blog. Go for the best: Problogger, SmartPassiveIncome, Copyblogger, why not? The worse thing is that they could say no. Start at the top and work down. If you’ve been blogging a while don’t consider a blog with an Alexa rank of more than 120,000. If you’re just starting out look for blogs with Alexa rank of less than 240,000 in your niche

… and the last tip is …

Write great content! You guessed it! Don’t let any of the above activities divert you from creating useful, intelligent, thought-provoking content in your blog because that’s where it counts.

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