You know, you always read in SEO articles about how important blogging is for increasing traffic. It’s one of the top suggestions around for improving a website’s search engine juice. Well, I am here to testify that it truly is a great SEO tool.
Granted, the title of this post is hyperbolic link-bait. ;) But it’s true nonetheless!
I’ve had this site, http://chilipepperdesign.com, up for probably five years now but only as a static portfolio site for most of that time. Then, a year ago, I upgraded the site and added a blog to it. In that year my monthly page views have increased 2,500% and the number of monthly visits has gone up 4,400%.
I don’t claim to be a great blogger. I’m not even a prolific blogger. And I had a very small amount of traffic before, so the percent gain is in some ways exaggerated. But it’s still an impressive change to me. The idea that casual blogging can increase traffic even just a 1000% would be impressive! But let’s get a little perspective:
Website Traffic Factors
- Even though I have few posts, some of them are on very hot topics like Facebook Fan Page design. One single post accounts for a full 1/3 of my site’s total traffic!
- I crafted my blog with very “Search Engine Friendly” markup. Without this, a blog is useless.
- I have not used any paid advertising, or done any link building to speak of. This is purely organic search engine traffic from the blog.
- My website’s traffic was pretty much negligible last year, and that skews the percentages. I’m sure now that I have real traffic my gain next year will be much smaller in terms of percentage.
So, take from this what you will, but it is a fact: blogging gives search engines what they need – content. When you provide a search engine with content you will be rewarded.
Happy blogging!