How to Increase Hits on the Blog?

Since I have been blogging, the most important question in my mind has been how to make my blog more popular or what should I do to get more number of hits/visits to my blog. It is at that time I attended the session on Search Engine Optimization. This session was basically for the people who own or have their separate websites. But some information that was shared was also applicable and quite helpful for blogs as well. In this post here I will be basically writing about the blog applicable contents discussed in that session.

To start with SEO one must know what exactly it is. I found a very good definition of SEO from Wikipedia, and I thought of putting that here rather than writing it on my own. “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) target paid listings. In general, the earlier (or higher on the page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a website web presence.”

Today I guess the best way to get your blog more popular is by getting it listed on the various search engines. Now to get the blog listed one must know how the listing is done. For blogs basically what can be done is the content should be written is that the keyword or the main idea of the content comes a few times in the content written. This will help increase the rank of the blog post for the search engines. Now a days a lot depends on the terms that are searched. If your blog post is something relevant to those key terms then it is necessary that those terms come in your post a few times so that the search engines will come to know that your blog post has relevant content related to that term. But one thing must be kept into consideration is that one cannot just include the key words in the content without the complete post being much relevant to that topic as this might, provoke the search engines to black list your site or blog. This is all about contents, I am not going to write how the Google rank works or how the search engine works at the moment because they are more helpful in sites rather than in blogs.

One can increase the number of visits by adding images on the blog as well. But one important thing has to be the naming of the images. The image must be named in such a way that they are hit by the search engines when the term is searched. For example, if I put an image of Sachin Tendulkar, it is important that I name the file as SachinTendulkar.jpg or something similar. If I name it as 1.jpg, the search engines will not come to this image when the term Sachin Tendulkar is searched on it. This is a good practice that needs to be followed while blogging (something I never followed or I can say was not aware of till this session).

Now coming to the contents part again, it is very important to write content relevant to the readers you are targeting. I used to follow a show that had become pretty popular, and I used to blog about its update very often. Since sometime my hits started increasing exponentially thanks to these posts and increasing popularity of the show. As my blog had quite a lot of relevant content for that show, my blog started receiving hits/visits for the terms searched related to that show. But this technique will take a lot of time to start getting big number of hits, and also it might not be long lasting. As now this show that I used t update about regularly has ended and my blog posts have reduced to almost 1/3rd or 1/4th since then. This again indicates that probably a post will not always give you regular visits; there can be changes and variations to it as well. Again it depends on what time it is written, if the post is about a recent event then it will definitely give high results initially and then fade out. So with all this, what I exactly want to say is, if you take up a topic then keep on updating on it a lot, so that the search engines will find a lot of relevant data for that on your blog.

Also initially I believed that more the number of hits the blog gets the more popular it becomes amongst the search engines. Well this is partially correct. As initially I used to visit my own blog post several times and try to increase the hits so that it starts to feature more on the search engines. But this does not help at all. The search engines take into account the number of unique visitors that come on to the blog to calculate the rankings, and then in the end it accounts for the number of hits per unique visitor. So with very few unique visitors it does not really help the blog get popular. So all I want to say with this is, that one must try and target the readers of different age group to try and get many unique visitors on the blog to make it more popular.

What all can help your blog get more visits. Does Twitter help? The answer to this would be yes. As Twitter is a micro blogging site it does help to get hits to your blog, not in the correct way but they do get a few hits. I came to know of this some months ago. Unfortunately, a few months back one of my old classmate had met with an accident, and had lost his life in that tragic event. I had tweeted on my site regarding this, by paying condolence to his family and also informing my other classmates about the incident. After a couple of days I saw that there were  quite a few hits on my blog with the search term containing my friends name and the place of the accident, or just my friends name. Initially I was confused to why this has actually happened. Then I realized that since my blog is linked to my Twitter profile, the blog takes my latest tweets from the Twitter account. Due to this since that tweet about the accident was amongst my latest tweets it got a lot of hits to my blog as well. In fact in such a scenario I realized that such a search term directs the person to most visited post of your blog, even if that post is completely irrelevant to the topic the person might have searched for. But this is only possible if you have linked your Twitter account to your blog.

At the end I would like to add is to make your blog popular one needs to be patient, it takes time. Some of my posts have started getting recognition almost after two years of having them posted. This may be because I guess the search engine rate the older posts more. Also all the ways i have mentioned here to increase the number of hits/visits to his blog are based on my personal experience. So all I can say that these are not the only ways you can increase the number of hits with. Probably there are many more ways as well of which I am not aware of, so if anyone has some other ideas on this, their thoughts are welcome here. It would be great if you all can add onto this information here, as these steps are very basic in nature, and I guess quite a lot will be following it as well. So I am  really hoping a few good comments here so that I can also get some help regarding this.