Blogging Case Study: How I Increased Website Blog Traffic by 20.95% within 28 days

Yes, I was able to increase blog traffic by 20.95% within 4 weeks. Do you think, you can also increase your blog traffic fast less or more than 20.95%?

Well, it depends on your works, actually hard + smart works.

Earlier increasing blog traffic, my traffic was low-quality and not converting. But, after I used special techniques to increase website traffic, I was able to increase website traffic within short span of time.

But here is one important thing…

NO manual link building.

Yes, you heard it correctly. I improved my blog traffic without using any manual link building technique.

Hey Chamal, how did you increase website traffic fast without any link building technique?

Well, I just followed these tips and trick to increase traffic quickly to my post pages, so increased overall website traffic by 20.95% within four weeks.

How I increased Blog Traffic: 12 traffic building techniques that helped me drive more blog traffic

I didn't use any black-hat SEO method to force my blog post rankings. I didn't hire someone on Fiverr or SEOclerks to boost blog traffic within 24 hours. I didn't pay someone to build thousands of low quality backlinks to posts. I didn't use old-school traffic building techniques such as link exchanges to increase traffic to blog.

So chamal, how did you increase your website traffic? I want to learn How to increase website traffic fast.

Well, here are what I did to increase web traffic. Just follow one by one and check your analytics to see how your blog traffic increases in day by day.

Blogging strategy #1: I deleted lots of low-quality, non-evergreen, not-converting and not-satisfying blog posts.

How did I increase my blog traffic by deleting posts? Is it possible increasing blog traffic just by deleting posts?

Even though, more posts add up more doorways to your blog, it doesn't really mean that you must have thousands of posts to drive high quality traffic. Just look at backlinko.com. Brian post once or twice (rarely) a month. But, still Backlinko gets thousands of targeted web traffic from Google and social media daily.

What’s the correlation between low number of posts and receiving more web traffic?

Actually, there’s no any correction. What actually cause on driving a lot of traffic to a blog/blog post is the quality, informativeness, usefulness and authority.

Blog Post Statistics to the date of writing this post

To date, Pro Blog Tricks have 72 published posts without this one. Recently, I sent 300+ blog posts to draft in order to maintain the quality of the blog. Here’s how removing blog posts can improve your website traffic.

• Improve website quality: Google likes quality blog posts, loves high-quality posts.  If you don’t add visual content, link-out to other resources and improve on-page SEO, so Google might not rank your blog posts higher on SERPs. Check out this post on Fiverr Quick Money Making Ideas to Make Money Online Fast. It has 2000+ words, lots of images and a few outbound links to authoritative websites. And this post on Video Game Tester Jobs at Home: Get Paid for Playing/Testing Video Games. It also exceeds the benchmark of average word-count of top 10 posts on SERPs (more on that later...) and has a few SlideShare presentations which retain readers more on the webpage.
• Increase overall keyword density: How do Google and other search engines determine what your blog is about? Yes, analyzing keywords and through outbound links, right? If your blog has lots of mixing articles on health, technology, finance, stock market, wedding, fishing, camping and cooking niches, how can Google determine what is your blog niche? Even a person? It’s difficult, right? By removing articles on Games and some low quality how to tutorials, I was able to increase my overall keyword density.
• Increase returning visitors: By increasing the website quality, I was able to increase the number of returning visitors easily. Remember, returning visitors is a strong signal that how much your website is popular and quality. At Pro Blog Tricks, we can easily convert returning visitors into email subscribers. And many of them share posts on social media too.

Removing blog posts not only helped to increase blog traffic, but also social mentions and backlinks too. Here’s how to find low quality blog posts that dilute the quality and decrease the website traffic that used to be coming to your site right now.

Step #1: Go to your analysis page and filter last month’s (or three month’s) post stats. Order posts by high traffic volume to low traffic volume. Scroll down the page to find posts less than 10 impressions past 30 days. They are posts that Google don’t want to send traffic. Eventually influence to other high quality posts too.

Step #2: To find search influence, go to Google webmaster tools and find the top pages that Google sent traffic in past 30 days.

If you found the similar stats on your analytics page on the Google webmaster tools top pages (less than 10 impressions and no clicks), they are the blog posts that prevent your blog becoming successful.

Step #3: Now open those posts (in editor) and find how can you improve the quality of posts. Read this Neil’s article on how to write a quality post within 2 hours to edit your blog post.

If you found it is difficult to increase the quality of a blog post, simply sent the blog post to draft or delete it. No worries, No problem.

Not only me, some professional bloggers such as Harsh Agrawal also saw a similar improvement of organic traffic after trashing low quality posts to basket.

Blogging strategy #2: Paid close attention to Keyword Research a lot

One of the biggest mistakes I made earlier is not research keywords prominent. If you don’t keyword research, so you don’t know who your target audience is and who will read the posts.

Keyword research not only helps in driving more blog traffic, but also targeted, quality traffic.

In a previous article on The Importance of keyword research, I explained you a few keyword types and what should you choose for your next blog article. If you didn't check it out, read it now. It has a lot of useful information on keyword research.

When I audited my website, I found a few important information regarding keyword selection.

• How to articles are good at driving more web traffic, but not converting easily. Ex: How to install WordPress on BlueHost (They'd probably have bought Bluehost)
• Buyer keywords are what you should pay your close attention, if you want to get buyers read your posts and purchasing products. These traffic is very easy to convert into email subscribers and social followers. Ex: product + review, cheap web hosting packages, premium WordPress themes.
• Free + keyword traffic is the hardest traffic type to convert into buyers. Do you think people who want to play free games (keyword is play free games) will buy a product from you easily?
• Long Tail Keywords are what I should use on posts. Long Tail Keywords is really easy to rank on #1 page (and #1 spot). I used long tail keyword research tools such as Long Tail Pro, Ubersuggest and also Google autosuggest to find profitable long tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are lesser targeted. So it’s guaranteed that you can convert website traffic into buyers easily. You can get long tail pro discount over this post or directly from this special link.
• LSI keywords are what’s next keyword generation. Latent Semantic Indexing keywords or LSI keywords are that many people use on search engines to find information. Ex:what’s the capital of Australia?, can you make money with logo design on Elance in 2014? etc. It’s hard to use these keywords in blog posts, but by changing words, using synonym words and phrases, you can optimize your blog posts for semantic search.
• Just like keyword selection is very important, keyword placements also important when it comes to blog search engine optimization. Add your primary keyword in the first 100-150 words to get the most from your SEO content. Follow the steps in this infographic to learn how to structure an SEO optimized blog post.

When it comes to keyword research for blogging, there are lots of keyword research tools. Here are a few of best keyword research tools every blogger must know about.

One of the best ways to increase blog traffic is by utilizing search engines. And one of the best ways to find SEO keywords is spying on competitors traffic reports and stealing their content SEO keywords.

Here is how to find competitors keywords to increase site traffic.

Note: I have explained this method in more detailed in this post: Competitor keyword research: How to find competitors SEO Keywords that’ll drive more traffic, sales and authority. You may read this post to find other 3 ways to steal your competitors website traffic.

Traffic Strategy Step #1: Go to SEMrush and put your competitors website address or target web page's permalink in the search box. If you want to learn more about this SEO tool, read this search engine marketing tool SEMrush review over here.

Traffic Strategy Step #2: Under Live Organic Keywords in the overview dashboard, click on the full report link to find other keywords which drive targeted blog traffic to a competitor’s web page.

Traffic Strategy Step #3: Exports competitor’s keywords and sprinkle those keywords in your blog posts and optimize it for search engines.

I have compiled two great guides on On-page SEO. Read those SEO guides to optimize your blog posts for search engines.

1. How to increase blog traffic on Blogger – Effective BlogSpot SEO Techniques that works
2. How to increase Tumblr blog traffic – Tumblr SEO Optimization Guide 1st time on the Internet

BY engaging in keyword research and competitor analysis I was able to add up more buyer keywords which convert breeze. As an example, take “create account Payoneer” keyword. When someone creates a Payoneer account using my affiliate link, I and he/she receives free $25 bonus when the account holder exceeds $100 balance in the account.

The intend of person who google this keyword is to create a Payoneer account or sometimes create a virtual bank account indirectly. Anyways, I get commissions after he/she created their account.

That’s the beauty of proper keyword research.

If you want to find keyword like this, use Long Tail Pro. I recommend this keyword research tool as a must-have SEO tool in your arsenal.

As you can see above screenshot from Google webmaster tools, every day many of posts rank for new keywords that I optimized and not optimized. All that because well-researched keywords.

Blogging strategy #3: I analyzed Keywords and Backlinks Deeply

One mistake that many bloggers do, is that not tracking keyword positions and checking backlink profile they have. I have been also in that group since some time ago. However, I understood the importance of checking keyword rankings and analyzing backlink profile.

Keyword Position Tracking

Before tracking keyword rankings, you’d analyze the organic keywords on webmaster tools accounts. Here’s a great technique to get more SEO keywords in your blog posts. But, the downside of this technique is when it comes to adding sitemaps. However, you’d find handful of content keywords through Google webmaster tools and other webmaster tools (Bing, Baidu andYandex).

Find whether your posts rank for irrelevant keywords. You’d find keyword prominence by navigating to Google Index >> Content Keywords.

How to Track Keyword Positions on SERPs

There are lots of search engine marketing tools out there. However, SEMrush provides excellent SEO tools for bloggers and SEO experts. Position Tracking tool of SEMrush is an amazing tool that can track every keyword you rank on SERPs.

Traffic Strategy Step #1: You have to create an account in order to track keyword positions. Use this SEMrush coupon to create a SEMrush Pro trial account for 14 days free of cost. (or read all information about this SEMrush coupon over here)

Traffic Strategy Step #2: Login to your SEMrush account over here and go to SEMrush position tracking page.

Traffic Strategy Step #3: Now create a new project and start adding your own website, competitor websites, keywords that you want to track, search engines etc.

Now you just set up a project to track keyword positions. Remember not only Google, you can also track keyword ranking in Bing also with SEMrush position tracking tool.

Here’s a screenshot how I use SEMrush position tracking tool to check keyword rank positions on Google.com database.

Backlink Profile Checking

Backlink is one of top ranking factors that search engines such as Google uses to rank web pages on SERPs. If you want to increase blog traffic fast, you have to have high quality backlinks from authoritative websites.

In other hand, if your blog’s backlink profile is filled with irrelevant backlinks and spam backlinks coming from adult websites, gambling websites etc, that practice surely will hurt the SEO performance of your blog.

Here’re a few tools to check backlinks of your website.

• SEMrush Backlink checker tool
• Ahrefs
• Majestic SEO
• Monitor Backlinks
• Webmaster tools: Google webmaster tools, Bing webmaster tools

When I checked backlinks of my blog, I was amazed how many copycats have stolen my content and linked back to my blog. I simply informed a few of them to delete those posts from their blogs and for others who didn't react to my message, I used Google’s Disavow tool.

Maintain a clean and quality backlink profile is essential when it comes to search engine optimization. Else your website will be in the area of Google Penguin.

By analyzing Keywords and backlink profile of my blog, I was able to rank my posts higher and so get more blog traffic.

Blogging strategy #4 Wrote Longer Content

Long form content in most cases beats short form content. After I started auding my website, I realized that most of my blog posts which rank on Google #1 spot and has lots of comments have generally more than 3000 words.

A survey conducted by serpIQ found that average word count of top 10 results in Google SERP is more than 2000 words. So don’t predict to rank on #1 page, if your blog posts’ average word count is just about 500.

And also a survey conducted by Okdork and Buzzsumo found that the most shared content ranged between 3000-10,000 words.

And Moz found that long form content gets more backlinks than short-form content.

Also, there are lots of case studies that prove that long form content gives better results.

Why you should write long form content:

1. Rank for more keywords: The more words your blog posts have, it increases the potential to rank for more keywords.
2. Ability to add primary keyword(s) repeatedly: The longer your content is, you don’t need to worry about keyword stuffing or keyword optimization. It’s just enough to sprinkle your target keyword/keyword phrase in the body a few times.
3. Rank for long tail keywords: This is one of the top reasons why you should write longer form content rather than shorter form content. With the time, your post will receive traffic from more long tail keywords that aren't even in the post body.
4. Rank for competitive keywords easily: Another reason why I like to write long-form content on my blogs. It’s easy to rank on the first page for competitive keywords. More about ranking for broad keywords in blogging strategy #11.
5. More social shares and backlinks: As you saw above case studies and surveys, longer your post is, more social shares and outbound links your post will receive.
6. Converts: Have you ever thought why many niche websites (ex: a clickbank affiliate product pages) have lots of content including testimonials, case study, benefits etc? It’s because long-form content converts better than the short form content. Also, Neil Patel, a popular SEO expert found that leads coming from long-form content are more quality than leads acquired from short-form content (or concise marketing).

If you want to build a high traffic blog fast without backlinks, consider writing long form content with proper research. I was able to increase the authority of Pro Blog Tricks after publishing a few longer content.

• How to Create a FREE Blog using BlogSpot.com – and How to Make it stand out from other spam blogs: exceed 8000 word count
• Keyword Research with Google Keyword Tool: more than 3000 words
• SEO Keyword Research Tools for Blogging, Marketing everyone should know about: more than 3000 words
• Search Engine Submission Guide – rank in every search engine NOT only Google: more than 2000 words
• How to Make Money on Facebook Spending a few Hrs per Week: More than 2000 words, plus a few presentations

These posts not only added up more keywords which strengthen the Pro Blog Tricks content foundation, but also ranked them on the first page in less than one month. Still Tumblr SEO tips and tricks guide rank on Google #1 page for Tumblr SEO, SEO for Tumblr and Tumblr SEO optimization competitive keywords.

Have you ever wondered why authoritative websites rank first page for almost every competitive keywords? Ex: Wikipedia?

Because the articles on those authoritative websites are longer and longer. If you don’t believe me, go to Wikipedia and open any wiki page.

If you want to build a blog that boost website traffic every single day from search engines, social media and other websites, start writing lengthy content.

Yes, you’ll have to spend more time and work hard to compile a precise blog post with lots of words. However, in the long term, they will bring traffic to your blog.

Blogging strategy #5: I audited my website thoroughly

Website audit is something that you should do quarterly or monthly. When I first audited my website, I found lots of errors, warnings and mistakes I did on my blog. Actually, I thought I did everything right on my blog. But, after I received my website audit report, I found that I had been doing many flaws.

There are lots of website audit tools to examine your website. Some blog audit tools are free, while others are premium, but worth using.

SEMrush search engine marketing tool has a website audit tool which makes really easy to audit website to find weaks and poor practices.

Here is a screenshot of the website audit report I received from SEMrush. I was able to improve total score from 53% into 61%. It’s a 8% improvement. Not too bad considering, I didn't do much changes on my blog.

Even you can find internal nofollow links using SEMrush website audit tool. That’s a good way to find whether you add the nofollow tag to important internal pages. Here’s another screenshot of a blog audit report that demonstrates the internal broken links linking to horizontal menu bars post.

You cannot drive traffic to your site, if you don’t take care of small on-page SEO settings on your blog. Using a good website audit tool will help to find poor SEO practices you do on your blog that you can’t find easily using other SEO tools.

Blogging strategy #6: Leveraged On-page SEO Practices

This is one of the top reasons why I was able to increase my website traffic by 20.95% within four weeks. On-page SEO is very important when It comes to optimizing blogs for search engines for better exposure.

In every minute, two new blogs created anywhere in the world. And in every day, two million new blog posts published to the internet for the sake of getting web traffic.

So, how do you make changes on your website to stand out from others? It is so simple. Properly follow white-hat on-page SEO techniques. Here are a few of them.

1. Tweak Page Title for both search engines and people
2. Clean and clear Page URL structure
3. Increase Page loading speed
4. Reduce website bounce rate
5. Proper interlink strategies
6. Responsive design
7. Meta tags
8. Heading tags

Now let's discuss how these on-page SEO settings help to increase website traffic fast.

Tweak Post Page Title for Both search engines and people

Page title is a major part of web page, so in search engine optimization too. I was able to increase the CTR (click through rate) by 103% and 75% of two blog posts after a simple tweak of post page title.

As you see above blogging case study, after tweaking page title, the CTR, total impressions and Avg position on the SERP are also increased dramatically. Second blog post in this screenshot (Add JavaScript and CSS files on Tumblr) is a little bit too old. That’s why its search exposure is decreasing dramatically. But, it ranks #1 for high competitive keywords such as tumblr javascript.

I’m pretty sure that I can increase blog post traffic by more than 50% after doing blogging strategy #11 in this article.

The best way to find the most converting titles for your blog post is just by doing testing. I tweaked the post title in creating a virtual bank account tutorial thrice to find the optimal post title.

8 out of 10 people will read the post title. But, only 2 out of 10 will read the rest. So, if you want get more blog traffic from social media and search engines, you should craft titles for search engines and people.

Copyblogger has published a great article on Magnetic headlines that teaches you how to write enticing blog post titles that enforce people to click and read the blog content.

And read this section on Blogger SEO tutorial to find the structure of a great, intuitive headline that people and search engines like.

Clean and clear Page URL structure

I have seen many blogs don’t take care of the importance of a clean URL structure for SEO. Still Google gives more weight to permalink structure when ranking web pages on SERPs.

Choose what’s the simple, clear and easy to remember URL structure as your opinion.

1. www.example.com/article/aaffs15372682_saf582.html
2. www.example.com/361458425
3. www.example/seo-for-blogging

Obviously third post permalink is very clear and easy to understand, as a person’s and the search engine bot’s perspective.

When structuring post permalinks, make sure search engines meet your primary keyword in it.

Increase Page loading speed

What’s the last time you waited long time to view a web page online? And when did you visit that forever-loading web page again?

No one likes any web page that takes a lot of time to load, even Google. That’s why Google has clearly stated in official Google webmaster central blog that they start utilizing page loading speed as a Google ranking factor.

Google ranking factor? Yes, so what do you do to improve website speed?

There are a lot of reasons why your website takes minutes to load. Here are a few treatments to decrease page loading time.

• Reduce HTTPs Requests: This is a major reason to increase the page loading time. If you can reduce HTTPs requests by using CSS sprites, removing unwanted widgets, plugins etc, you can increase the page loading time very widely.
• Compress images: You should compress images to load it faster on slow-internet connection places.
• Load JavaScript asynchronously: By loading JS files asynchronously and placing them on below the HTML content (right after

tag), you can increase page loading speed.

Combine all CSS files into one file: More HTTP requests increase the load time. So why not trying to combine all CSS code files into one file and load it.

Use Google Page Speed testing tool to check your websites and web pages’ page loading timings.

Not only search engines like fast loading web pages, but also people too. Look at how Amazon does a great job at increasing the page loading speed. They have found that every millisecond late to load pages, they lost millions of dollars. In fact, one second late costs $1.6 billion in sales.

Reduce website bounce rate

If people bounce off your website right after loading the web page, it’s a strong single that it’s not the post that they were searching for. I always take care of the Bounce rate on my website. That’s why I compiled a detailed guide on How to Reduce website Bounce Rate.

What will Google think and understand, if someone hit the back button after visiting your web page? That’s simple. I will not show this page on this spot for this keyword again.

Here are a few tips to reduce bounce rate to improve website traffic fast.

• Interlink relevant articles in blog posts.
• Open external links in new window.
• Add a related posts widget to your blog.
• Add images to catch up the reader's attention before bouncing off.
• Use proper calls to action.
• Use relevant keywords that drive relevant traffic. (an important factor)
• Prominently show the search box.
• Use an intuitive navigation menu.
• Encourage people to click on the links. (diversify links, use buttons, link images)

Decreasing the bounce rate not only will increase the page viewers, but also returning visitors and user engagement too.

Proper interlink strategies

Interlinking is more powerful than you thought. I was able to increase the rankings some of my web pages higher on the Google SERP for high competitive keywords by utilizing proper interlinking strategies.

Use these interlinking best practices in this post to boost blog traffic and increase the user engagement.

Responsive design

It’s not a secret yet that Google uses Mobile responsiveness to rank web pages on Google for mobile devices. Google tested a few different things in the past several days to improve the Google interface for mobile users.

Google has clearly said that they use Mobile responsiveness to rank web pages on Google. So why not using a mobile-friendly theme for your blog.

Use the Mobile Testing tool in Google webmaster tools to find the issues on your website interface. Here are a few common issues in a responsive design.

• No gap between two links: You should add more spaces between two links in order to clearly click on the exact link.
• Small fonts, buttons: Test changing font sizes to determine the optimal font size for your blog.
• Popups: If you use popups to collect email addresses of your readers, get them to follow you on Twitter, Google+ etc.,   so you should stop showing them on mobile devices. They are really irritating. Instead, use mobile friendly following widgets.

If you want to get an attractive, responsive theme for your website/blog, visit Themeforest over here and choose one of thousands of beautiful and professional themes.

Meta tags

If you used meta tags incorrectly, that may cause to not show your website on SERPs. So use meta tags caustionsly.

Meta tags help search engines to understand what your web page is about. Ex: meta description tag. So when using meta tags, don’t spam to trick Google to increase your blog posts’ ranks. If you don’t know how these works, don’t use them. 

These days, Google don’t use the meta keywords tag to rank posts for keywords. Although you can use other important meta tags such as meta description, canonical tag, hreflang tags, next and prev tag, author tag to improve the on-page SEO performance of your blog.

Properly using meta tags will help search engines to understand your website. So get more web traffic from search engines.

Heading Tags

Heading tags are another important part of your website which help search engines to understand the structure of your site.

Use H1 tag for blog post title. Use H2 tag for headlines of your blog post and other H tags for sub-headings and minor headings etc.

Don’t overuse heading tags on a web page. A well structured web page doesn’t have H2 tags under H3 tags. Googlebot indexes heading text as an important text on your web page. So add long tail keywords in your heading tags to get more benefit out of it.

By improving Pro Blog Tricks blog’s On-page SEO performance, I was able to improve my Google search impressions by 27% and clicks by 21%. It’s not bad considering just by setting a few changes on-site, my blog received free web traffic that worth thousands of dollars.

Remember that I deleted hundreds of blog posts that was sending hundreds of unique visitors every day. But, quantity doesn’t matter. What actually matters is quality.

If you want to learn how to increase website traffic or how to increase traffic to blog, first consider in improving On-site SEO. That’ll not only generate more search traffic, but also improve the authority of a website.

Blogging strategy #7: Image SEO

Can you increase website traffic through Images?

Yes, absolutely, why not. Here’s the proof of my Google webmaster tools account which demonstrate how images on Pro Blog Tricks received a lot of impressions and clicks from image search.

Is image traffic worth? 

Yes, in my previous SEO guide on Image SEO Optimization: How to Optimize images for search engines, I explained step by step how to properly mark-up your blog for image search and how to increase website traffic through image search techniques. If you didn't check it out, I recommend you to follow the steps in that post to boost web traffic from image search too.

There are a few parameters currently that cause to where your images rank on search engines (even in first page too). They are;

1. Image File Name
2. Image ALT tag
3. Post relevancy
4. Image Keywords in ALT attribute and post body

Here is how these things influence to ranking your images.

Image File Name:

It’s like your post permalink. Search engine bots read the image file name and get an idea what your image is about.

Ex:

1. www.example.com/uploads/cooking-recipes-step-by-steps-with-pictures.jpg
2. www.example.com/host/files/images/seo/seo-tools/blogging/wordpress/yoast-seo-plugin-installation-screenshot.png

When you next time upload images, make sure you add target keywords into the image file name. Don’t just upload them without a clear file name.

Image ALT tag:

Image ALT (alternative text) attribute is one of the most influential part of image SEO. Search engines find what your image is exactly about after reading the alternative text.

Like in image filename, add target keywords into the image ALT text.

Ex: white hat SEO definition” />

If you didn’t add ALT text to your blog post images, search engines will not be able to rank them on SERPs. So use SEMrush website audit tool to find images with no ALT text.

Post relevancy:

This is not a huge image SEO ranking factor. However, there are more case studies where SEO experts and bloggers have experienced that some images get more hits and drive more traffic, just because the post relevancy.

Look at these stats on Google webmaster tools. There are no lots of images on Best Social Media Sharing Widgets post. However, there are several keyword phrases such as add social media buttons to website and share button for blogger widget on the post body.

The reason why images such as ShareThis logo, AddThis Logo and Monarch WordPress dashboard screenshot rank for these keyword phrases is because the post relevancy.

Google thinks that these images are related to keywords such as sharing social media and media sharing.

If you write long form content, as we talked in step #4, your posts will also receive more traffic from image search.

Image Keywords in ALT attribute and post body

Above are SEO techniques to rank images on image search. But, you have seen some web search results includes images. So, how do you optimize images for Google web search?

It’s pretty simple.

You just need to do is follow these steps in the Image SEO optimization post and apply them to your post images.

That’s how I was able to increase website visitors even that post is about PayPal donation button.

Check the click through rate. 4% CTR is very good considering, it is a really hard work to get people come to blog post, instead of downloading the searched image.

I know some bloggers are getting less than 4% CTR for web search too. So these stats is not too bad. Isn’t it?

I was able to increase website visitor counter by properly improving images for search engines. I was able to increase total image impressions by 2% and total clicks by 22% within 28 days by following these methods.

Image traffic is one of the best ways to increase website traffic that many bloggers neglect. They are free website traffic. But, converts breeze and still adds up numbers to total website visitor counter.

Blogging strategy #8: Duplicate Content issue in GWT

I am not going to talk about content thieves or canonical tag issue here. Instead, I will expose another hidden issue in Google webmaster tools that many bloggers neglect and/or doesn't see.

What is it?

It’s URL Parameters.

What are URL parameters and how do they matter to duplicate content issue?

In most cases, webmasters use URL parameters to track website traffic. Ex: Google analytics UTM parameters.

Ex: www.problogtricks.com/?utm_source=facebook-page&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=blogging-seo-1

And also some blogs use session ids (for login details)

Ex: www.example.com/?sessionID=14628658785

Some eCommerce websites use URL parameters to store cookies too.

Ex: www.aweber.com/?438887
      www.themeforest.com/?ref=chamal13

Although some URL parameters change the original content (ex: www.example.com/?productID=146&location=US&curr=USD&lang=US-EN), some URL parameters don’t change the original content on the page (ex: UTM parameters). So eventually they may cause duplicate content issues. It’s not a good practice to increase website traffic.

Here are two URLs which render same content, same web page, but have distinct URLs.

Ex: www.example.com/this-is-a-post/
Ex: www.example.com/this-is-a-post/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=twitter

My experience with UTM parameters: I have a few blog posts which used to be ranked higher on SERPs and drive more traffic. Many of them exceeds 2000 word count. So, these should at least drive 10 visitors a month, right?

Well, unfortunately, due to UTM duplicate content issue, some posts such as Image SEO, keyword research with Google keyword planner and free Facebook comment box plugin to Tumblr tutorials only received less 10 visitors a month.

How did I get rid of URL parameters, especially UTM Parameters? And how can you do it ?

If you use Google analytics to track your website visitor activities and you use and automatically generate UTM parameters, you can specify Googlebot that UTM parameters don’t change the original content.

Step #1: Login to your Google webmaster tools account and choose the blog you want to change crawl settings.

Step #2: Go to Crawl >> URL parameters.

Step #3: Click on the edit link under UTM parameters.

Step #4: Under pop out box, choose the option: No, Doesn't affect page content (ex: tracks usage)

Step #5: Do this for other UTM parameters.

If you use any other tracking parameters that don’t change the original content on the page, you might follow this method. If you don’t want Googlebot to crawl any type of content, you may use Robots.TXT file. Here are more information about Robots.TXT and how to edit it.

Blogging strategy #9: consistency

If you don’t publish posts/update posts on an editorial calendar, how your readers can connect with your blog? Can you retain your potential readers by publishing rare posts once a month or once a two month?

In some months such as July, I didn’t post anything on Pro Blog Tricks. That caused to drop my website traffic and decrease the number of returning visitors.

Yes, it’s difficult to write a good, informative and lengthy blog post. But, it will reap in any day. Many bloggers such as Neil Patel and John Chow has said that the foundation for their thrived traffic base is the consistency.

In other hand, Google loves regularly updating blogs. So, Google will crawl your website fasterwhen you add new content.

If you want to grow website traffic with regular fan base, consider updating your blog regularly.

Blogging strategy #10: Utilized Social Media to increase Engagement

Social media is the new SEO. Google uses Google+ shares and +1s to determine the user-engaged content. Not only for search engine optimization, but also for blogging, you can use social media to drive a lot of web traffic for free.

As my case study, within this time period, Pro Blog Tricks received 249 social sessions which end with lots of page views. The social media conversion rate is 1.6%. That means 16 out of every 1,000 new social readers join my newsletter. Don’t forget that I used double-opt in. So the email subscribers are really engaged.

These all because of the social media. I used different social media sharing widgets on the blog. In many cases I used AddThis which allows me to track social shares and follows on one dashboard.

When I mention any brand on my blog posts, I add twitter handle and inform them to check it out.

As an example a few days ago I updated Best free social media sharing widgets post and added a new social widget called Monarch Wordpress social media plugin. I mentioned it when tweeting to the developer website of Monarch, ElegantThemes. They retweet it, so Pro Blog Tricks got a traffic boost.

Social media not only helped to increase the number of visitors, but also the brand exposure.

Blogging Strategy #11: Revised older blog posts

Why you should update older blog posts? Is it actually helping in increasing website traffic fast?

Yes, indeed, it helps a lot. Post revision is my favorite method to increase website traffic to existing blog posts. First of all take a look at this traffic stats got from Google webmaster tools. Notice how much search impressions and search traffic increased to Add Blogger contact form to specific pages post?

This is a new level of that post. That means when starting, it used to rank for only long tail keywords such as “ how to add a contact form on blogger” and rarely for a few broad keywords. You know that “how to add a contact form on blogger” keyword phrase is an informational keyword that makes its little bit hard to convert into buyers and subscribers.

But, when I updated the older post a few times by adding new fresh data and importantly sprinkling new keywords, I was able to boost blog traffic by 120%. The most interesting thing is that when everytime I update the blog post, not only number of clicks, the total impressions and average position also increased dramatically.

Now this post ranks for high competitive and buyer keywords such as blogger contact form andblogger contact page. If I added a few more words and new competitive keywords related to blogger contact page (ex: custom blogger contact pages, premium contact pages etc.), my post would rank for these keywords too.

So, chamal, it’s great. But what’s the secret behind this blogging trick?

Actually, there is no any trick. Take this citation. Google loves fresh content. Updating blog posts.

If you believe that you can rank on Google #1 for your target keyword forever without updating it, sorry to say, you don’t know actually how search engines work.

I have seen a few brilliant bloggers who do this practice such as Brian Dean (who inspired me!), Darren Rowse (master at this), Harsh Agrawal, Amit Agrawal, Jon morrow, etc. Their excellency can be seen by seeing their traffic reports and the quality of blog posts.

Have you ever seen any blog post older than two or three years on the first page for a competitive keyword?

I think you’re with my answer: NO. (if you have seen, please let us know it.)

So, by editing older blog posts, you can increase your blog traffic really fast without backlinks.

Here is another great example of blog post revision on my blog: How to open us bank account online for non US residents (I tweaked title here)

These are money keywords. Some keywords have higher keyword competitiveness (for advertisers), so their CPC exceeds $4.00. When start creating the blog post, my target keyword was a too long, long tail keyword “how to create us bank account for non U.S. residents”. But now, that post even rank for high competitive keywords such as virtual bank account.

Look at above screenshot again. Determine, how Google specifies the keywords for that post.Virtual bank US bank account >> Virtual Bank Account. Another important thing here is that, I start targeting an informational keyword phrase, but ended with a lot of buyer broad keywords.

Interesting enough, yeah?

The moreover and regularly you update the blog post, it might rank for more broad niche keywords.

That’s the easiest method I know to rank for high competitive broad keywords and drive a lot of targeted traffic. This method works really well for older blog posts. You just need to give a boost by editing the old post.

Best Practices to Blog Post Revision:

• Choose an outdated post.
• Start auditing that post using SEMrush site audit tool.
• Remove older images, videos, and add new ones with backed-up data.
• Get the ranking keywords of the post. (use webmaster tools, Analytics tools)
• Find the best potential keyword phrase that you want to rank for.
• Analyze your blog post for keyword densities of ranking and targeted keywords/ keyword phrases.
• Add a new text and sprinkle new keywords (you can find new LSI keywords using Google webmaster tools).
• Tweak title. Remember to include your target keyword in the post title.
• Change the post update date. (Important)
• See the results.

After updating your blog post, make sure you followed one of these free easy ways to get Google Index your webpages less fast than 5 minutes. Yes, I do this to expedite the crawling rate and improve the search exposure quickly.

Blog post revision is the best way as my opinion to increase blog traffic to existing posts. Don’t worry about link building. Publish quality articles that have the potential to get natural backlinks.

Now you know almost everything I used to increase my website traffic by 20.95% and page views by 25.67%. But there is a one more thing, you need to follow up to improve your web traffic.

Blogging Strategy #12: promote Blog posts everywhere you can

You have written an amazing article that will be everyone like to read and act. But, wait, who are everyone? How do they meet your blog post?

This is where many blog posts out of two million posts published every day got wrong. If you don’t promote your blog posts to build the blog post exposure, how your post will receive social shares, outbound links and sales that you predicted.

Ever thought, why big technology blogs that receives millions of traffic every single day from search engines and user-shared links such as Mashable and Techcrunch still make use of social media to promote their blogs?

Simply, It’s because to get the first start right. When they boost their new posts to all social media channels/accounts, they get tons of likes, retweets, pins, etc. These social actions help in driving more website traffic and generating more sales.

Generally, after I published a new post, I share them on my personal social accounts and brand pages. Then send a mail to my email subscribers to inform that I just published a new post.

If it’s necessary, I continually share the post on online communities and other groups where my target audience settles down.

Here are a few great places to promote your website for getting free traffic:

• Facebook Groups
• Google+ communities
• Twitter lists
• LinkedIn groups
• Pinterest Pin Boards
• VKontakte Public Pages
• Reddit sub-reddits
• Tumblr

There are a lot of ways to promote your blog efficiently to get more blog traffic fast. However, don’t forget to start creating an email list, if you don’t have an email list already. There are lots of reasons to have a quality email list. But, to you note, email marketing’s average ROI is far away than any industry ROI.

Want to learn more about it?

Read this article on why you should have an email list and this post on what you can do with an email list.

Conclusion

Lots of information, yeah? Well done, you read it thoroughly. By now you know how to increase website traffic fast without any manual link building practice.

Today, I discussed with you how I increased my blog traffic by 20.95% and how you can replicate it. No hard works, No tricks, No black-hat SEO techniques. Everything is pretty simple to follow.

I am pretty happy to know your thoughts about this article. Please share your views, complaints and suggestions in the comment form below.

P.S: Please can you favour me to spread out this post among brilliant bloggers like you? If you enjoyed reading this post and think it’s informative, helpful and your friends also will like to read, please share it with your friends on any social network. Thanks for your support. I really appreciate it.