Many people often seek out various tips on how to score more traffic to their blogs. Some of the most simple things can actually be the most effective things. The thing to consider with blogs — especially WordPress blogs — is the RSS feed. When you publish on a blog, in many ways its not much different than broadcasting on radio.
A radio station broadcasts on the air using a special frequency, please find and get to know these frequencies by their channel. Every blog has a unique channel — again an RSS feed — that broadcasts the information they publish on the Internet in many places. If you look here you will see how an RSS 2.0 feed is broken down.
The reason why I said that you can increase traffic with the first 50 words of your blog post is because of how your content is being syndicated. There are places that you know of they syndicate your content, places like MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog. But also too, there are tons of other places that syndicate your content that you don’t even know about.
When other places syndicate your RSS feed, they typically pull the following from the feed:
<item>
<title>Post Title</title>
<pubdate>Date of post</pubdate>
<description>The first 50 words of the post</description>
</item>
The element that most places do not pull from your RSS feed is the:
<content:encoded>Your full post</content:encoded>
Here are some screen shot examples:
Garry Conn dot Com RSS Feed on Firefox
Garry Conn dot Com RSS Feed on MyBlogLog
Garry Conn dot Com RSS Feed on BlogCatalog
Are You Noticing A Trend Yet…
What is in common with all three of these screen shots above? If you said that each of these three places that syndicate my content use the first 50 words, you’re right!
Here are two additional screen shots:
Syndicated RSS Title, PubDate, and Description:
This is what the <description></description> looks like in CODE:
Ok, Great! So How Does The Get Me More Traffic?
Well, consider this. If you know that there are many places that syndicate your RSS feed such as MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog, you now know that only the first 50 words are visible per post. So when you are writing your posts, you need to make sure that you factor this in. The first 50 words of your post article are VERY important. If you do not capture a reader’s attention in the first 50 words, then you will not get the reader to click to continue reading your post.
My advice to you is to immediately take what I have said to heart and every time you produce new content on your blog, place a lot of focus on making the post title and the first 50 words of your post very appealing, attractive and inviting for people. If you do, you are sure to get more traffic. Consider this… there are more people reading your content than you would think.
While you may say, “Man… I only get 50 visits to my blog per day, my blog sucks!” Well, that isn’t really true. You may very well get only 50 visits to your blog for the day. However, your content was PREVIEWED by around 250. It’s not your blog that sucks, it is your post title and first 50 words of content that might need a little bit of doctoring up.
Focus on your post titles and your first paragraph of text on your posts and watch, you’ll see a difference in your traffic for sure.
Did you know that SEOHosting.com provides a free Keyword Analysis program? If you really want to make sure your first paragraph looks good and is packed full of attractive keywords, try out the SEOHosting.com Keyword Analysis program. SEOHosting.com also provides you with tools that give you keyword suggestions as well as even will help you with search engine positioning and much more. Be sure to check out the SEOHosting.com full line up of free SEO Tools.
What are some other simple and commonly overlooked ways to score more traffic to your blog or web site? Drop a comment below and share your thoughts.
