There are many many different blogs in cyberspace today. More and more pop up every single day only adding to the clutter and confusion. If you have been actively writing in your blog for a great deal of time and still see no traffic or interaction than you might want to take a look at something with your blog marketing. If you are not sure how to check to see if your blog is SEO friendly we are here to give you some pointers.

1. Keywords: Do you strategically use industry keywords and phrases when you write your blog posts? if not, you should. Keywords are how search engines find you and drop you into search results. This is important because many search and if your blog doesn’t appear than your just not going to be seen.

2. Custom URLs: Are you customizing your URL structure before you publish? Most updated versions of WordPress now offer a feature where you can customize what your URL looks like before you publish your post live. Search engines read words so if your URL structure has only the important keywords displayed in a nice clean shorter URL instead of just some random numbers you have a better chance of appearing in search results.

3. Enough Copy: Are your blog posts long enough? Remember search engines read words, that is how they find information so make your blog posts sort of meaty. Long enough where the search engines like them and short enough where a reader won’t leave because they are bored of reading. Usually 250-350 words for a blog post is sufficient.

If you are thinking about launching a blog and really pushing it out there to maybe further your career or your business or maybe you just want start a blog as a business you will need to do a bit more than just launch and write. It requires a deal of efforts and blog marketing tactics to get a blog visible. If you approach in the sense that is a business and you treat as a business it will eventually pick up traction in the community and start to gain visibility. One important ingredient you should have incorporated into your blog is some sort of tracking tool so you can see what is going on your blog. We recommend signing up to Google analytics. It is a free tool that allows you to see everything that is going on your site.

Here are some things you will get to see with your Google analytics software:

1. Unique Visitors: You will want to be able to see how many new visitors come to your site. You can also look at reports that allow you to see the trend of new visitors over a period of time to see if your new visitors are trending upwards or downwards.

2. Bounce Rate: You will also want to see how long people stay on your site when they land on it. This will allow you to make necessary tweaks to keep people on your site. If you notice that people leave your site within a few seconds than that is a problem and you can adjust it accordingly. It won’t tell you why they are leaving but just seeing this will allow you to make tweaks and changes to your website.

3. Links: You can also see what links people are using to find your site. This is important because as people link to your blog you will want to know where visitors are coming from.

4. Keywords: You can also see what keywords people type into the search engines to find your blog. This is very important because you can see which keywords are delivering traffic. This will allow you to alter your writing and use specific keywords to target a specific audience.

5. Popular Posts: You can also which posts or pages are the most popular and which get the most visits. This can also tell what kind of audience you have or what people are really interested in hearing about.

There are many different ways to get your blog to start to climb and grow in power. Getting guest bloggers will be a great way to get more traffic coming to your blog. This process is not always as easy as it sounds. Especially if you are in an industry that either doesn’t have enough experts in their field or has too many. Guest bloggers can really help boost your blog marketing efforts.

If you can track down a leader in your industry and get them to write a blog post and hopefully their following will catch wind of your blog and continue to read it once the blog gets archived. If it is someone that has a large following and generates a great deal of search for that person’s name than there is a good possibility that blog marketing post will get a great of traction and really generate some readers. Of course this all depends on how much traction your guest blogger also has your industry. Finding guest bloggers will also help if you start hitting writers block with your writing which happens to many writers and bloggers from time to time. Worst case scenario your guest blogger ads to your building content on your site.

When researching guest bloggers or responding to inquiries from others looking to gues write in your blog always do your research on that person. Do some searches for their name and see what comes up in the search results. The last thing you want is having someone write in your blog that might have performed some not so nice efforts and people are actively complaining. You can easily find yourself getting pulled into a reputation management nightmare. You don’t want to associate your new growing blog with any crooks in the industry.

With thousands of blogs being written in everyday what are you going to do to stand out from the crowd? Just simply writing a few times per week might not drive the traffic that you are looking for. if you are writing in a competitive space what will you write about to differentiate yourself from your competitors?

Writing everyday is great but in today’s market that is almost a requirement. Especially if you are just launching your blog and you need to establish yourself. If you have not educated yourself yet on how to make your blog stand out. There are many blog marketing things that could you hold you back from search engine traffic like performing black hat techniques that hold you back from climbing. That is a whole other blog post. Keywords are what will help people find you. First thing you have to do is really isolate what your blogs voice is. Are you writing about a specific industry? Regardless of what industry or space you are in there will be some certain keywords that people looking for you are writing about will use in the search engines to find info. Some blog owners want to use witty titles and posts but those don’t always gain traction unless the post is really good and it spreads like wildfire. There are ways you can track down keywords for your industry whether yourself or hiring a company to do the keyword research. You will want to structure blog posts tastefully around your targeted keywords to drive in as much traffic as possible. This is only scratching the surface but it will help drive in traffic to your blog and will help you get noticed as part of your blog marketing effort. Also when using and photos in your blog make sure to describe the photo tag using keywords so your blog pic will rank in the images section.