I have been on a quest to improve the seo (search engine optimization) of my site and I found out that there are a few simple things you can do to really make a difference in your traffic.
1) Sign up for Google analytics — it is free and it is really fun to track your progress.
2) For wordpress users, there are quite a few great SEO plugins out there. I used the all-in-one SEO Pack and SEO Title tag in conjunction with the Ultimate Tag Warrior . All of these require a little bit of manual work to add tags and keywords for each post and page.
3) Let the world know your content has changed. By pinging services when your content has been updated, you let them know it is time to crawl and index your site which increases your site’s popularity. I am using Pingoat
4) Get on the social bookmarking wagon. Make it easy for other to bookmark your site. I found many wordpress plugins out there to do this. I am using Sociable
5) Trade links with other sites that have like content. I haven’t exactly figured out an optimized way to do this yet, other than emailing people I know and asking them to link to my blog. I have found a few services out there that match up people who would be willing to exchange links, but I haven’t tried any myself. If anyone knows of a good service, please let me know.
6) Add rel=”nofollow” to all of your hrefs linking off your site to signal to Google that this is not comment spam. Check out the Google blog for more information on when and where it should be used.
7) Create a site map. I use a Wordpress plugin called Google Sitemap Generator. This will not necessarily increase your traffic, but will make it easier for Google to index your site which may result in a more complete index of your pages.
