Getting readers to participate in your blog is an important part to growing it. If there is not an active discussion in your posts, your blog is probably not helping your site, because individuals aren’t getting enough out of the posts to participate. The best way to guarantee repeat traffic is to foster an environment of open discussion in your blog.

1. Address your readers:

Your writing is, after all, for them, so ask them to get involved, even if its just suggesting future topics or encouraging them to express an opinion on the topic. If you can target your readers needs and interests, you will get a lot more repeat traffic.

2. Respond to comments:

Comments aren’t a one way street, if you aren’t responding to your readers you are ignoring them. Every reasonable question and comment deserves a response, so stay engaged!

3. Offer benefits to users who participate:

You may even want to offer frequent visitors the opportunity to write for you, but at a minimum you want to reward your frequent visitors with something, whether its the ability to add a custom image to their comments or just keeping track of the total number of comments they have made.

4. Be nice:

Your readers are your customers, and by being harsh with them you will alienate them. Instead, you should always interact with readers in a friendly manor, after all, people are less likely to comment if they read rude responses.

5. Make sure commenting is easy:

Depending on your software, you may need to change it from its default settings. You should make it so as many people can comment as possible, generally even if they haven’t signed up with your site.

6. Review Products:

If you review products, you can ask readers to input their own experiences with the product. This will encourage readers to come back and read each others comments, and will help improve the quality of your reviews.

7. Write Controversial Posts:

Don’t be too offensive, but offending people a little bit is a great way to get them to post on your site. This will lead to arguments and discussion, which is all added content and traffic.

8. Poll Your Readers:

Introduce a daily or weekly poll question to encourage lurkers to participate. This will benefit you in other ways too, since a regular dialog improves your ability to provide for your readers’ needs.

9. Write a lot:

The more you write, the more there is to respond to. If you write daily, you’re off to a good start, but getting more comments means writing even more often. This likely means you need more than just one writer, so consider expanding.

10. Build a website around your blog:

Make your site more than just a blog. If you can create a community your readers will spend significantly more time on your site, so offer features outside of the blog itself to help network your readers and give them content they want.

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
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When starting search engine marketing there are a number of important things to focus on. But one of the most neglected elements of good SEO is choosing your keywords wisely. You can use all the right formatting, put your keywords in all the right places, and still suffer if your site doesn’t use the keywords that bring in traffic. If you are wondering what exactly qualifies as a keyword, it is any combination of one or more words, in a specific order, that describe your site. It is important that keywords be accurate, because all the traffic in the world won’t benefit your site if they aren’t looking for your content. Spam just wastes everyone’s time, and your bandwidth, so don’t bother.
So how do you choose keywords? You want terms that will receive a large number of queries on Google, Yahoo!, MSN and other popular search engines. If your terms aren’t being searched for, having your site index relatively high on search engine pages isn’t going to improve your traffic. Unfortunately the widespread usage of SEO has also crowded certain popular keywords, so you are looking for a keyword that is both popular and relatively unsaturated with established competitors. This can be difficult to find without help, so its important to know what tools you can use.
Google is a great resource for SEO in general, and as usual they have a tool that helps while brainstorming terms. All you have to do is input a search term and they will provide you with other popular search terms, allowing you to take one keyword and quickly expand to having several. As a rule it is good to have numerous keywords, since your customers will be coming to your site from different places and for different reasons. Make sure you are thinking of numerous different ways to describe your site, as customers will likely search with lots of different keywords.
Once you have keywords mapped out, you should also run them through a third party keyword tool. Some examples can be found here, here, and here. These usually give you traffic information about each keyword, allowing you to identify the most popular search terms, and therefore helping you choose which terms to emphasize. From here you should check the saturation of each keyword, do a Google search of the word and see how many responses you get, and more importantly, how many of them use the term specifically. Now you have to make a choice, you want to pick out a few keywords, 2-3, that will focus the most on. You might want to choose slightly less popular keywords if they are less saturated with content, because it means you will need to do less to make it to the top of those Google searches. Be careful, as unpopular search terms won’t likely bring in traffic. On the other had, if you cannot get on at least the first 3-5 pages of a search engine, you won’t benefit much either. Each decision is based entirely on the context of the keyword.
Now that you know how to get started, its time to find your keywords!

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
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Omnistar Interactive is proud to introduce a series of Search Engine Optimization videos for webmasters. Each video addresses one element of search engine optimization, allowing you to focus on one step at a time to improve your site’s search engine performance. By focusing on these elements of your site you can vastly improve your Google rank, helping your site draw in traffic.

http://www.omnistaretools.com/seo-videos.htm

The first 4 videos cover Title Tags, Meta Description Tags, Backlinks, and the Google Site command. Title tags are important for bringing in traffic to every page of your site, and they are an important place to deploy keywords. Meta descriptions are another perfect spot to use keywords, but take less precedence in search engines like Google. Backlinks are extremely important for search engine rank, so we take you through different search engine tools for examining your links. Finally, we demonstrate the Google Site command and recommend how you can use it to examine your site.

Search engine optimization is one of the simplest ways to improve traffic to your site. All it takes is a little attention to detail and you can start making it onto Google’s results and bringing in traffic.

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
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One of the most important things any webmaster has to do on a regular basis, other than, you know, master the web, is to advertise his or her website using the best possible methods.

The process of promoting one’s site consists of three fundamental steps:

Step 1: Brainstorm good promotion ideas.
Step 2: Initiate good promotion ideas.
Step 3: Go back to step 1.

Thankfully, with my help you can all skip step 1 as many times as you’d like. That’s because I’m about to show you a few of the greatest methods you can use to promote your website. (The following were all stolen from omnistaretools.com, but since I wrote the page in question myself, I don’t mind the blatant plagiarism. Though you should note how I’m careful not to mirror my own content, since both of these pages are indexed by search engine spiders.)

1. Publish An Article

Write a really good article in your niche and e-mail all the bloggers in that field to let them know about it. You’ll be surprised at how many may link to you. Just remember to make sure your article is good, or you may get some bad press. (On the other hand, even bad press still counts toward your pagerank, unless they link you with a nofollow tag. But really, who takes the time to do that (except Matt Cutts, of course)?)

7. Be Opinionated

If you happen to notice a blog entry or forum topic where the majority opinion seems to be completely incorrect, be very opinionated on letting them know that you hold the opposite opinion. If you’re lucky, you may get a few links back saying that you’re wrong. (In fact, why not just hold the opposite opinion every time, even if they’re technically right? After all, in the SEO world, any link back is a good link back.)

18. Create a Great Favicon

A good favicon image accomplishes so very much: it increases brand awareness, makes your site stand out from the crowd, and gives you that street cred that comes along with every well-made favicon file. Just don’t make it animated gif style—you may think it makes you stand out even more, but users have been known to delete a bookmark or close a tab solely because of an animated favicon. Just don’t do it.

You can, of course, find many more great tips at the best ways to advertise your site page, hosted right here at Omnistar. (c;

Oh, and as a reward to my faithful blog lurkers, I’ll even add in an extra tip that has yet to make it on that other page:

0. Advertise Your Webpage Through Your Blog

When you finally make that great webpage that you want to spread the word about, don’t ever ever forget to write a blog entry about it, with lots and lots of links pointing right at it. Preferably with good keywords, like Web Promotion Tips You Just Can’t Ignore!.

If you have any tips of your own that you’d like to contribute, feel free to leave a comment. I’ll gladly post any suggestions that make me smile. (c;

Posted by Eric Herboso.
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