SEO Blog – Asia SEO Blog

How to Enhance your Blog’s SEO and Attract Relevant Traffic in One Easy Step
Posted by: Aaron Brazell
The constant war to optimize a blog for traffic and gain new visitors is one that any serious blogger understands. I’m about to tell you a trick that I’ve been experimenting with for the past month and have seen pretty good results from. So listen up.

One of the rules of SEO is to keep external links relevant. That means that if this site is about blogging and new media, links to sites discussing blogging and new media are better for me than links to sites about… cats. The other unwritten rule is that every blogger who uses WordPress looks at his dashboard for new inbound links. Of course, there’s the Google search or Technorati search that can do the same thing, but WordPress users have it easy and new inbound links are listed in the dashboard for easy reference.

So leveraging these two rules, we can take one step and improve traffic flow and enhance your blogs SEO – and it can be done on any blog.

First off, go to Technorati or Google Blog Search (I like the latter for speed) and do a search for a relevant search term or phrase. For the last month, I relied on Technorati for the search term WordPress 2.1. I used this term because I wanted to monitor discussion surrounding WordPress after 2.1 had been launched. Now, I use Google blog search to search for the phrase new media blogging. Much more relevant to a greater part of my blog.

Now, having made the search, you can grab the RSS feed for use on your blog. If you’re using WordPress widgets or WordPress.com, you’ll want to make sure you’re grabbing the RSS feed and not the Atom feed.

Now, using whichever sidebar RSS aggregator you wish (again, WordPress.com has widgets and you can find similar functionality for WordPress, TypePad, MovableType or Blogger), use the feed from the search to parse out headlines into your blog sidebar.

Now you might wonder if this is considered spamming and the answer is no. First off, only use headlines. Do NOT produce full content. Make sure that your implementation includes a link back to the source blog. Generally, this is done by making the headline a link. This link will be visible to the source blogs and may attract them to your site. In addition, because your search is a relevant search based on the topic of your blog, search engines will consider your links higher than non-relevant links.

In essence, this one step will not necessarily serve your current readers, but will attract new ones based on curiosity of “who’s linking to me?”. This has had positive results for me. My traffic continues to climb, feed subscribers continue to grow and my Technorati ranking is approaching 2000. Let me know how this trick fares for you.

Some might not help wondering about the heavy dependence of those that are doing business on the Internet on search engine optimizing (SEO) marketing. Especially some cannot help being miffed when they found out that there are business people that are trying to do business online by using SEO only. It is not only unfortunate, but from what is taking place there is something wrong with such an outlook, and if there is anyone who will pay the price it is the businesses that are letting business opportunities slip through their fingers.

If someone wants to open shop offline in a brick-and-mortar setup and does not want to pay rent, it is as good as joining a different batch of business people that are doing business using different methods. It is difficult to say which is right or wrong, because we all know that some had become successful by selling form their trunks, and except enduring the inconvenience, it is possible to make money. It is known that most startups are strapped for cash and they start doing what they are doing with a shoe string budget. If SEO is catering to such startup entrepreneurs, they are doing a lot of service to society.

However, if businesses with the money and sustainable sales turnover start contemplating to be dependent solely on what SEO could offer, they would be wasting their time. Because, the cost of paying for advertising like Pay Per Click (PPC) has become very affordable and if they are not taking advantage of it, they are definitely shooting themselves in the foot. Because SEO can never cut it for many businesses. It gets even more demeaning if business people start paying thousands of dollar to have their site optimized to get a good spot on the search results, in order to drive more traffic to their site. Because, SEO cannot do that, and even if it does it takes time. It is difficult to keep any good position attained on search results for the long haul, which means it will continue to be a drain on a budget.

Author: Bill Johnson,