After conducting a Google search on the long tail keyword phrase “daily productivity home business” that I build a blog article around two days ago, I was pleasantly surprised to see the results – #1 on Google’s Page with 1,960,000 other listings.

This most recent result (which has been a fairly frequent occurrence of late) lead me to prepare and publish this article describing the blog traffic techniques I use to accomplish those results.

There are numerous blog posts, articles videos and even a few podcasts describing a host of enhanced blog traffic techniques.  Blogging experts such as Yaro Starak even have devoted blogs and websites to help both newbie and advanced bloggers identify techniques to increase blog traffic.

Though it would be very easy to list over 15 different techniques to aid in building traffic to a blog, I am concentrating describing the five key methods I use to consistently gain great page position of Google and other search engines.

Enhancing Blog Traffic Using Five Simple Techniques

1. Keyword Research and Selection of Long Tail Keyword Phrases – one of the techniques I learned fairly early in my blog traffic research was to both take the time to conduct good keyword research and develop long tail keyword phrases to narrow the competition field and focus on a highly targeted audience.
2. Use of Keyword-rich Titles – using your primary keyword phrase (especially long tail keywords) in your title is extremely important since it is the first part of your content evaluated by the search engine spiders. Hopefully you noticed the use of my main keywords for this article not only once but twice in this post; the first time to identify the topic of the post and then in the actual title for the post.
3. Use of common terms from similar Web content (also sometimes called Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI <== click on the link for more insight).  During the content preparation stage, I am often scanning other people’s existing content as part of my research making note of the terminology they use and similar terms are then used when writing the post.  Note: these are terms or phrases used in the other people’s high ranking content similar in context to the topic but are not formally defined as keywords (tags) for the post.
4. Post a consistently growing number of high quality articles – Google and the other search engines love content, pure and simple.  One of the first things I noticed when some of my early posts landed on Google’s Page 1 – it happened more frequently when the quantity/quality of posts reached a critical mass and incorporated the first three techniques as well.  I am also in the process of testing the importance of this technique with a blog started recently.  Though I used methods one through three on my new posts to that blog, they are still not ranking, likely due to the fact there are only a few posts at this point in time and I am not yet using social buzz.
5. Use of social buzz – this includes periodic status updates and tweets to social networks, social bookmarking, blog commenting, etc.  The impact of social buzz seems to be growing in importance.  Being involved in a community like Social Media Science and participating in content syndication endeavors can make a huge difference in both ranking and the speed at which content gains that rank.

Combining the Five Techniques – Did Blog Traffic Increase?

Two days ago (April 16, 2009), I posted an article called “Tips for Enhancing Daily Productivity for Home Business Owners” with the theme of the post centered around the long tail keyword phrase: “daily productivity home business”.  In this instance I went beyond my normal Facebook and Twitter “shout” when the post published and incorporated additional steps as outlined at Social Media Science and the Syndication Revelation (<== click on the link to access the site to learn more).

After taking the time to use all five techniques to increase blog traffic as outlined above, a three-fold increase in blog traffic ensued during the 24 hour period that followed (32 to 110 visitors).

As stated above this morning (4/18/09), I checked the page ranking position of Google and here’s a short video depicting what I discovered:

I guess you can say that I was more than pleasantly surprised by almost all the page listing results I have been accomplishing lately using these enhanced blog traffic techniques!

I encourage you to leave a comment below if you have had similar results or want more information that way we can also “get the party started” so to speak.

Remember – visitors who comment regularly get a bonus with Do-Follow links activated after for comments.

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One other note … the original post was made on 4/18/2009 at approximately 5:00 PM.  I added this note for future reference (see below).

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Follow-up to the original enhanced blog traffic techniques post at approximately 6:00 PM and 8:15 PM on 4/18/2009:

I only employed the first four of the techniques outlined above, as part of an experiment to see where the article would rank on Google an hour after publishing.

Here is another short video showing the results at approximately 6:00 PM:

The results were better than expected.

Next, I re-checked the post’s page position at about 8:15 PM for both the long tail phrase “enhanced blog traffic techniques” and the second phrase :blog traffic techniques.

The first phrase was still listed #1 – Page 1 while the second (blog traffic techniques) had moved from #1 on Page 2 to #10 on Page 1 both without employing any significant social buzz other than one shout on Twitter and Facebook along with response from those monitoring my posts via RSS.