How to attract visitors to your blog

Together with many other bloggers, I'm looking for ways to optimize the number of visitors on my blog. I have been posting for a few months now, and I therefore think I'm able to share some tips with you. I will reveal some of the tactics that I found to be helpful.

- Choose topics that attract people and stay on that topic
- Keep it short and to the point
- Tag your posts
- Think of an interesting title for your blog or tweet
- Spread the word and test different titles among different social media
- Use images, links and video's in your blog
- Include (multiple) common hashtags in your tweets
- Write posts often so the readers won't forget you

Blogging goals
Obviously, there are many more tactics that can be used. It also depends on the type of blog your writing. I think there are two major goals to write a blog: for personal of commercial purposes. Personal bloggers write to enjoy themselves and other people who want to read it. Commercial blogs are interested in attracting a greater group of people. These blogs need to record their visits and actively attract visitors.

SEO-content
If you want to draw the attention of people around the world, it is wise to write posts so that search engines will pick up your blog. Googles takes three factors into account when providing search results: crawling, indexing and presentation.

The fact that 'Googling' has become an official verb, has proven that it is a widely performed activity. Therefore: write SEO-friendly content. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a web page in search engines via the un-paid ("organic") search results. Just a few tips and tricks:

- Use popular but relevant keywords
- Don’t use too general keywords, but also not too specific.
- Don't worry about plurals; search engines don’t read them
- 6% to 10% of your text should be keywords
- Use links and headings: they have more value to search engines

There are many more tips to be found on the internet, such as on SEO SERP guide, ReverseDelta, Marketingfacts or simply Google's guidelines for webmasters.

My personal experience is that it doesn't help to invite people to leave a guest post. I also linked my blog to Hyves but that wasn't a big success. The majority of the traffic comes from Twitter. Surprisingly, LinkedIn is also a popular entrance, which additionally has the highest 'Time On Site' in Google Analytics. I think the best tip is to write about a hot topic, but keep it specific. The majority of my organic visitors came from the search term 'ipad 2 magazines'. I think also the many links in my posts have contributed to the number of organic visitors. In total, this has resulted in 37 organic visitors (which I'm pretty proud of :))! In these few months my knowledge about attracting visitors has grown, however, there’s still a lot more to learn.