Boosting Your Blog Traffic and Performance

Caution: This post does not include technical stuff.
This time I would like to share with you some inside stuff from the other side of boosting traffic performance. This time I would like to share with you several SMO, SEO and user satisfaction boosting methods:

1. Make sure your blog is really in the right language. For example, blogger.com default language is your own one. If you tend to blog in other language, please make sure you changed the blogger.com settings to the appropriate language.
2. Turn your site into a top news site using related links with images widget. Take a look the cool outbrain widget.
   
   Outbrain Thumbnail Widget from Outbrain on Vimeo.
   
3. Place a popular posts widget at your blog's side. If other people thought these posts were good, there is high chance that your next visitor will be interested in them as well. See example and PostRank. Do not forget to register PageRank and subscribe to your blog in order make sure the widget is correctly initialized.
4. Place a recent comments widget. Users content is free traffic generator, and if your visitor is interested in the comment, he may leave another one. See example.
5. Avoid connecting your blog to Google Buzz, Facebook notes, Plaxo and Linkedin. These sites crawl your posts from the blog and prevent users from getting into your original post. According to my experience it can be up to 50% of your daily traffic.
6. Do use posting of links to Linkedin, Twitter (the Linkedin connection is really useful), Facebook, Google Buzz and Plaxo. It will generate high quality traffic to your site.
7. Add social sharing toolbar. Surfers my like your post and retweet/like/etc and will generate more traffic and more credibility. See sociofluid.com solution and WidgetBox and ShareThis.
8. Facebook badges are great to generate returning traffic and credibility. See profile and like.  
9. Add retweets to make it twitter oriented. Add Stumbleupon as well and don't forget digg
10. Place your blog feeder in other sites in order to generate more traffic. See Google example.
11. Use Google Analytics and ClickTale to analyze your users behavior. 
12. Take a look at other additional cool hacks.
13. Write a good stuff :-)

Few more tips

1. June 2010: Update and refresh your Twitter profile. Use twitbacks.com for that. See my Twitter profile as an example.
2. July 2010: Add tools to enlarge your Twitter followers group, that may help you get more traffic later. TwitterCounter is a great example.

Now it's time to start working :-)

Note: There is a great comment thread to this post with interesting insights.

Keep Performing,
Moshe Kaplan