Paying for clicks is all well and good, but you'll go broke before you get a qualified lead if you can't bring in traffic organically, too. These six tips will help you harness your blog to boost the organic appeal of your website.

1. How to Increase Organic Traffic:
6 Handy Blogging Tips
by inklyo.com

2. Whether a business creates a blog as part of
a marketing initiative or an individual uses
blogging to promote a personal brand,
having a blog that draws organic traffic is
important for creating a successful online
presence.
Organic traffic consists of individuals
searching specifically for you or your niche
service or product, which means these are
the individuals who are most likely to
convert into customers or clients.
Here are some blogging tips to help you
make the most of organic searches.

3. #1. Know your niche,
and find content
opportunities.

4. Figure out what is most important to you, and
write about that. Become an expert in your
niche, and provide quality content that appeals
to your specific readership by finding gaps in
the content that's already out there.
For example, the owner of that small dog
grooming business might find 2,341,748
articles describing the best shampoos for dogs
but little information on the best options for
dogs that have been sprayed by a skunk. A
detailed article reviewing the most common
shampoos in this category might draw more
readers and rank higher for this more specific
search topic than yet another generalized top 10
list.

5. #2. Determine who the
influencers are within your
niche, and then network and
promote your content.

6. Make a list of the top influential bloggers in
your niche by finding the blogs with the
highest readerships. Tools such as
BuzzStream can help you determine who
these influencers are, based on specific
keyword searches, and provide contact
information for them so they can contribute
valuable information to your blog.
You can also think on a bigger scale and
create a post that includes advice from
several influencers. Once your post goes live,
make sure you contact these bloggers to let
them know and share it on their social media
accounts, which can be a great way to
increase your own readership.

7. #3. Take advantage of content
distribution and social networks
to reach a wider audience.

8. The key is, once again, to know
your audience and at what times
they are most likely to see your
post. Utilize account
management applications to
schedule content and share that
content multiple times over
different networks to gain the
most exposure.

9. #4. Understand the
importance of different
types of link building.

10. Broken link building: This method of link
building involves finding broken links on other
sites that are relevant to your content or have
high authority value and then asking the site
administrator to switch out the broken link for
yours.
Implied links: Implied linking is a new process
Google has implemented that takes into
account brand mentions without a direct link.
This means search rankings benefit from your
brand or website name being mentioned on
other websites without them actually having
to link back to you. The more you are
mentioned, the higher your search ranking
(and organic traffic) will be.

11. Backlinking using images: Consider
all the photo- and image-sharing
social networks available. Some
high-authority content sharing sites
are also relevant to growing your
number of backlinks by sharing
quality images. This type of link
building works well for designers,
photographers, or others with
image-heavy sites.

12. #5. Focus on long-tail key
phrases rather than
generalized keywords to tap
into your niche audience.

13. Consider your niche audience and what they
are searching for specifically in relation to
your content, product, or service. Long-tail
key phrases are more rewarding for niche
content, which ranks higher when fewer, more
specific search results are returned.
Google also looks at whether content is able to
answer a long-tail keyword phrase in the form
of a question and ranks quality how-to content
higher in such search queries. Keep in mind
what exactly your audience may be searching
for, and include these key phrases in your
content to increase your organic traffic.

14. #6. Use schema markup in your
SEO practices to boost
organic traffic.

15. Schema markup is a more advanced SEO
option that helps search engines return
more information from your site in search
results. The difference between schema
markup and basic SEO is that schema tells
the search engine what different aspects of
your content mean by going beyond
indexing for keywords.
Websites that incorporate schema markup
into SEO rank higher in search engine
results, because the search engine actually
understands these relevant results. For
more information, visit Schema.org or the
Google Structured Data Markup Helper.

16. Want to learn more about blogging,
content marketing, and SEO?
Check out our blog at
inklyo.com for more great posts.
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social media pages for
more great content!