Blogging these days has become a way to earn livelihood rather than just “out of interest” thing as it was earlier. We write posts, so that others will read, which will help them solve there problems or in any other way.

But we not only write, we also do many other things to get more traffic to our blog, which works for some and not at all for others. Even if your not doing anything fancy and you just keep writing unique and helpful content, eventually you will pick up some decent traffic, thanks to the search engines

But if some basic techniques can get you more traffic early, then why not give it a try??

Here are three basic blog strategies which every blogger must do :-

1. Link Love:

The most basic thing, develope links to your blog. And the most effective strategy (according to me) is quality link exchange. What you need to do is search for blogs related to your genre (Google Blog Search) and leave a request for link exchange in their contact form or in comment. Just try to be reasonable while doing this, obviously PR4 will not like link exchange with a PR0-1.

Other thin g you can do for links is commenting which was not that useful for me.

2. Submit All Your Blogging To Web 2.0:

The way you get fast rankings that stay for certain keywords is by submitting them to sites that the search engines love…Web 2.0 sites.

This includes the bookmarking sites, status sites and all the social sites…

One problem though… We all don’t have time to go one by one and post to all of them…

So you use a tool called OnlyWire.com and submit it all at once. Just go there and set up all the accounts and then with just a push of a button you can submit your link, instantly giving you high rankings.

3. RSS Feeds

Include a RSS subscribe box at the bottom of your posts, this will encourage people to visit your site regularly.

If you are doing a good job with your posts most people will want to read more of your stuff. Just make sure what your offering them is quality content, that is important to them.

Just follow these 3 steps and you will definitely see a decent rise in your blog traffic.

SEO has become very important to increase visitors and thus revenue from your blog. But SEO is not an easy thing that you do for 2-3 days and get results forever. You have to work on SEO frequently to rank high in Search Engine Ranking Pages.

Now if you are having a WordPress blog, the process of SEO can be made easy with the help of some “WordPress SEO Plugins”.

There are many SEO plugins available for WordPress, but the most popular of the list is – “All in One SEO Pack”. With this plugin, you can easily edit Title and description of your blog, also you can overwrite the existing title and description. The most useful feature is that you can edit the title of every post you want, and also add specific keywords for individual posts. Also with this plugin you can show the “posttitle” before”blogtitle”, thus improving your ranking at Search Engines. You can Download it Here.

Similar Plugin with additional features is – “Platinum SEO Pack”. The important feature is, you need not worry about permalink errors with this plugin. It can automatically issue 301 redirect to new location. You can get details and download it here.

Other SEO Plugins for WordPress are -

• SEO Title Tag
• SEO Slugs
• HeadSpace2 SEO
• SEO Friendly Images
• SEO Post Link
• SEO Smart Links

Backlinks are the links that are placed other websites pointing to your site. They are very important as search engines take number of backlinks as a criteria while placing your site’s page as a result for any keyword. Thus if you have good backlinks then you get placed high for competitive keywords and hence get more traffic.

Here are few ways which can help you build some quality backlinks for your site-

• Content- Quality content is the first and most important way of getting some quality backlinks for your sites. If you update your site frequently with some quality and unique content then other sites may link you ,thus giving you some backlinks.
• Article Writing - It is also one of the nice ways to get backlinks for you. You can write somegood article and submit to various sites like ezinearticles.com, etc… which in turn allow you to place link to your site.
• Blog Comments – This is quite controversial method of getting backlinks and does not work for all. You need to search for “do-follow” blogs and comment there.
• Forum Posting – This method is similar to blog comments, here you can place your link in your signature, and whenever you post at the forum, you will get backlink for your site.
• Twitter - This is one of the newer methods of eveloping backlinks. It requires you to have high followers in twitter.
• Directoey Sumission – It is also one of the controversial method. There are views that directory submission gives you deep backlinks, which adds nothing to your pagerank. But still if you want you can search Google for free directory submit,, and submit your site there.
• Link exchange – This is the most pouplar method which works for most of the people. Here you search for sites of your niche and place a link to them on your site and then request a backlink inexchange on their site.
• Social Bookmarking – This method also provides deep backlinks to your site, and can’t be of much help in developing backlinks. Instead this can get some easy traffic for you, which is highly non-targeted.

There are many other methods out there to develope backlinks, but the method which I think that really help is “Quality Content”.

The Organic traffic i.e. the traffic we get from search engines is very important and highly trageted. To get this organic traffic one of the important step is to add your sitemap to search engines, and the most common format is .xml.

Here we will discuss about adding sitemap to the biggest search engine “Google”.

The very first step will be to sign up for a free Google Webmaster’s Account. There you require to verify your site after adding it.

Now create your sitemap in XML format. You can create it for free,,,just search Google for “free sitemap generator”.

If you are using wordpress, then you should install this most importnat plugin – Arne Brachold’s Google XML Sitemaps plugin

Once you got your sitemap, upload it to your domain.(you need not worry about uploading sitemap with above plugin,it automatically does this for you.)

Next login to your Google Webmaster’s account, goto sitemaps, and place your sitemap’s link there and submit it.

That’s it you are done.Now just make posts regularly and start getting more and more traffic.

Now this a very common and important question before most of the bloggers after they start blogging.These days its really difficult to increase traffic to your blog because of increase in competition.

Some common things that everybody including myself will suggest are -

1. Unique and quality content.
2. Building backlinks for your blog.
3. Submitting blog to various search engines.
4. Advertising.

All the above options except the last one are free, but they will get you visitors in long term , i.e. they will not bring visitors to your blogs instantly. If you have some good budget you can try various ad networks to get quality visitors for your blog, though I’ll suggest Google Adwords.

You can also use traffic exchange or auto-surf methods to increase traffic to your blog.

One such site is BlogExplosion. Here you surf the members blogs for which you get credits which can be used to get traffic for your blog. But one controversy that surrounds BlogExplosion is it’s compatibility with Google Adsense. Adsense considers traffic referred from blogexplosion as invalid and may send you warnings or permanently terminate your account. So if you are using Google Adsense to monetize your blog I would suggest you to stay away from BlogExplosion.

Other such site is Entrecard. Here also you get credits for visiting other members sites which can be used to advertise on other members site. I don’t know whether Adsense accepts such traffic from Entrecard or not.

There may be other methods, which I may have missed, to increase traffic to your blog.

In the end I will suggest you Unique content and Link building as these will really help you in getting good traffic to your blog in long term.

Actually I tried this plugin earlier for one of my blogs. Though it was installed successfully,I was not able to build sitemaps with it. I don’t know what was the problem that time. Whenever I click on build sitemap link I use to get some fatal errors. I checked whats worng, but everything was ok,also I changed the permissions of files – ‘sitemap.xml’ and ‘sitemap.xml.gz’ successfully but still no use. But now on this blog everything is fine.

What does this plugin do ?

This plugin creates the sitemap for your blog and submits it to major search engines -  Google,Yahoo,MSN and ASK .This way helps getting more pages from your blog to get indexed in these search engines, thus more chances of getting traffic through these search engines.

Does this plugin improves your Search Engine Ranking ?

I don’t think it can help you get higher ranks in search engine results page.I only indexes more pages from your blog.

Where to get it ?

You can get this plugin from WordPress here.