Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
If you’re using WordPress then you need to keep your blog as SEO air tight as possible! You want, need and absolutely must optimize your blog to the max. As newsflash people, this social thing isn’t going to last forever. Sure, social traffic keeps on increasing and all, but search engine traffic will always be the dominating source in my opinion. Everyone seems to keep focusing on sharing and getting referral traffic from sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and StumbleUpon.
The truth is I KNOW social traffic very well and it serves me well… BUT – it doesn’t last for a very long time. Here’s the lifecycle of one of my blog posts:
Post Gets Published > Everyone Shares It On Facebook, Twitter, and lots of bookmarking sites > Traffic pours in and lots of it > 1 week later the traffic slowly decreases > 2 weeks later it’s almost nonexistent > 2 and a half weeks later I start getting a steady flow of 10 to a few dozen visitors a day from Google.
That’s pretty much the lifecycle of my blog posts and I’m sure many others. That’s why SEO is so important. Your content will only be shared, talked about, and featured while it’s new. Most bloggers realize that and practically throw their posts away after a few weeks. The smart people who realize SEO is essential start a link-building campaign for each post straight after it’s published. Usually, the link building kicks in 2 weeks later and a steady flow of traffic starts.
Right now everyone seems to be teaching social this, social that – everything to do with frigging social media. It’s the latest trend next to local business marketing. Anyway, my point is your posts should receive a surge of social traffic during their first 2 weeks of existence, after that SEO should take over. Your post should rank for a keyword and bring in a steady flow of traffic for years to come.
So what kind of SEO should you do?
Well first you need to set up the social side.
Social SEO
Unlike SEO, social media can be completely automated. SEO can sort of be completely automated, but you still need to do a bunch of submissions, etc. For your social media, you should really have your new blog posts syndicated onto your Facebook Fan page, profile, groups, and any other relevant pages you have.
You can automatically syndicate your posts onto your Facebook Network using NetworkedBlogs, the Facebook App (just search it on Facebook). It’s important that you syndicate your posts all over Facebook. Then there’s Twitter, it’s a good idea to have at least 5 Twitter accounts for your blog. Using a tool like TweetAttacks you can automatically grow your Twitter followers on multiple accounts. Again you can use NetworkedBlogs or Twitterfeed to automatically syndicate your posts onto your Twitter accounts.
Then there’s another thing you can do to turbocharge your social SEO. You can use Hootsuite.com to automatically syndicate your new blog posts through Ping.fm onto 30+ social networks. Ping.fm allows you to connect and submit to 30+ social networks. So you can join Ping.fm, create accounts on the 30 social networks, and then connect them. Once done, use Hootsuite to auto-syndicate your new blog posts onto Ping.fm automatically by using the RSS feature (look into it). Once you have that all set up your new posts will be going onto their own Facebook and Twitter network.
They’ll also be getting syndicated onto 30+ social networks. To top it off, you can even syndicate the social network’s posts via Ping.fm. That’s it for social SEO.
Link Building SEO
Next, all you have to do is build some real backlinks. The social syndication stuff gets you instant attention and rankings. However, your rankings won’t last if that’s all you do. To ensure long-term rankings, you need to slowly build quality backlinks. I personally recommend people having an article or three written and spun for each blog post they publish. You can submit the spun articles through blog networks like Unique Article Wizard, Article Ranks, and My Article Network.
Blog networks slowly drip your spun articles onto hundreds of high PageRank blogs resulting in sturdy search engine rankings. You can also submit your articles to article directories manually or with the help of a tool like Article Marketing Robot (check my resources page). Doing all of the above will yield almost instant and long-term rankings. However, if you’re like me and want to do all you can to make the most of every blog post you publish…
You can build web2.0 backlinks. Web2.0s are like Hubpages, Blogspot, WordPress.com, Typepad, and Wetpaint. You can build free sites on them, paste a unique variation of your spun article on each one, and link back to your blog post. Besides that, you can build blog comment links, forum profiles, web2.0 profiles, you name it. At the end of the day, all that matters is you have a steady link-building campaign of high-quality backlinks for each blog post you publish. That coupled with the social SEO stuff results in instant and long-term search engine rankings for every post you publish!
In Prosperity,
David Wood
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Comments
1. Sarah W.
This article was a fantastic read! I’ve been struggling with SEO for my WordPress blog, and your clear explanations and practical tips gave me the confidence to start optimizing right away. Thank you, David, for sharing your knowledge!
2. Kevin L.
Are you sure these strategies still work today? I’ve tried some link-building tactics before, but I didn’t see much improvement. Do you have any recent examples of results you’ve achieved using these methods?
3. Laura M.
I have a question regarding the social SEO part. How often do you recommend updating or resyndicating older posts? Does it make sense to use Hootsuite for posts that are a year or two old?
4. Jake P.
While I appreciate the depth of this post, I have to say that some of the tools mentioned feel a bit outdated. For instance, Ping.fm no longer exists. Maybe an update with modern tools would be helpful for readers?
5. Ellie G.
Wow, David! Long time no see. I loved reading your post. It feels like forever since we last caught up. I’m curious, how have you been? We should definitely grab a coffee soon. Great post as always, keep it up!
6. Tom K.
This article really hit home for me! I’ve been facing the exact problem you mentioned with social traffic dropping off after two weeks. I never knew how crucial SEO was for keeping the traffic steady. Thanks for the insight, David!
7. Greg S.
I found a great alternative to Ping.fm called OnlyWire that works in a similar way for syndicating posts to multiple social networks. I highly recommend checking it out if you’re looking for a replacement. It’s been working wonders for my blog.
8. Hannah B.
This was incredibly informative! I never realized how essential long-term link building was for maintaining SEO rankings. Thanks for breaking it down into manageable steps. I’m excited to start implementing these strategies!
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Called this ‘building your own syndication network’ in the 2000s. Same five Twitter accounts per blog trick, new decade, new name.
Gus’s point about five Twitter accounts being an automation trick reminds me of the bike shop owners who used to keep three Yellow Pages listings under slightly different business names, same shop, same phone number, just hedging their bets across every channel that existed. Different decade, same instinct: if you can’t be sure which channel counts, multiply yourself across all of them and hope one sticks. This post’s whole syndication section is that instinct wearing new software.
At my stage in life, the two and a half week lag this post describes before organic traffic settles in is the part that concerns me most, rather more than the tools themselves. I have the patience for it, having waited on far larger things in my career.
Arthur, breaking down the timeline the post lays out: week one and two, social traffic surges then fades; week two and a half, a trickle of organic starts; from there it’s meant to compound for years and quietly overtake the initial spike entirely. What’s missing from that timeline is any mention of how long the actual link-building step takes to translate into ranking movement, which the post treats as nearly instant the moment it ‘kicks in,’ with no real timeframe attached to that word.
What the post describes without naming it: social shares are a decaying asset, search rankings compound. The two week window sounds more like folklore than data though.
Reminds me of the regulars who’d come in the first week after we changed the menu, all curious about the new special, and then never order it again once the novelty wore off. The post describes exactly that curve for a blog post: everybody shares it the first week, then it’s dead within a fortnight unless something steadier is underneath it. We kept the specials that survived past that first rush by putting them on the permanent menu where people could find them without being told twice. Sounds like that’s what the SEO half of this post is actually arguing for.
I tracked this exact curve on my own blog for a post I put out last spring: day one through four, a genuine spike from sharing it myself, about 200 visits total. Days five through twelve, that tapered to almost nothing, maybe five visits a day. Then around day sixteen, organic search visits started showing up, three or four a day at first. By week eight it was steady at around twenty a day from search alone, more than the entire social spike had brought in total by that point. The post’s timeline matches what I saw closely enough that I don’t think it’s exaggerated, at least not for a blog my size.
In other words: the shares are a firework, the search traffic is a slow stove. Kelsey’s numbers just proved it. Nice to see it written in actual figures.