You are the Ruler of Your Blog – Not Google
A lot of bloggers that begin blogging have a pre-established idea that their traffic, earnings, and more all come from search engines, which is far from the truth. There is a good chance that you’ve seen people complaining that their Page Rank went down, yet they did little to reverse this action, which may have simply been a change in the algorithm used to calculate your site’s importance versus others. In one sentence: You have to work as a blogger to work against Google in order to create a more successful site/blog.
While the tools offered by Google are considered some of the easiest, and best integrated among the free software available, I am not directly referring to the services that it offers, rather the idea that your entire blog should run based off any one company that is trying to generate a profit by “selling” its services — convincing people to use its search engine, in this case.
The Premise
Your traffic initially solely is driven by Google search results. People discover your site through search engines, looking for tips, content, and other forms of media, which they either discard, not finding anything of use, or bookmark, subscribe, or share the site with others, leaving you in a great position. Your main goal, as a content creator, is to convince people that they need to subscribe, an arbitrary decision that you should make as soon as you start seeing traffic levels that exceed what you initially predicted, levels that will be able to continue growing.
What Google (and any other search engine does, for that matter), is deliver results to Internet users, based on queries that have been entered into the box. The results are based on the relevance to the terms entered, then the user is able to select the result, influenced by keywords, titles, and URLs of the individual websites. They do not rule your blog, determining how much money you make, what type of content you produce, or the types of visitors that you receive on your blog — these are all driven by your particular actions and how you present your blog.
Become Independent of all Search Engines
There is no step-by-step guide available to set you free of all search engines, but there are some key tips to help you advance your blog and learn that they are generally working against your blog and your much larger ambitions.
First, you have to rehearse your goals again in your head. Like I previously mentioned in a previous post, your goals should stick with you, constantly molding and adapting to each step and progression that you make in your blogging adventure. If you are working towards growing your subscriber, or community base, you’ll need to create several lead-in pages to ensure that you receive a greater click-thru rate and return rate for the time you spend doing these steps.
Each person (whether a direct visitor, referred from another site, or from search engines) you are able to get to subscribe to your blog is one less person that will be forced to search for your content from search engines, and one that is likely to visit or read your content nearly every day.
Secondly, everyone believes that traffic is the key to earning and growing your online business. This is true, in a sense, as without traffic, your site is simply a compilation of text, images, and other media formats like video. However, when you combine everything together, a site is a piece of inspiration for others, source of content for another individual, and income generator for you.
Quality versus quantity is where all differences start. Traffic from search engines is generally targeted, as someone is looking for that particular piece of information, but the results may not be the most relevant for his or her search. Thus, the impact would be monumental in the amount of time this person would spend on your site. When you are able to grow you quality traffic, you are able to exceed your month-over-month goals.
To drive traffic from search engines into people that visit your site directly, you need to focus directly on your brand and image. The first place to start would be in your blog theme. This is often the first element of what you have to offer that people see when they venture to your property. Every site, even if just text, has a theme. Make yours unique, standing out from the rest. My theme is not the most unique, but I did customize a few elements of it to convey a strong message to visitors.
Next, use plugins that help readers stay connected with your site, including the social bookmarking buttons/drop-down lists, “forcing” your visitors to bookmark your content for a later time.
Leverage the 10-75% of your visitors coming from search engines into visitors that respond well to your blog, instinctively knowing that you are the premier source for information – content that will stick with them, even after leaving your blog. In another sense, you also want to encourage readers to continue returning, break apart content to garner a lower bounce rate, then focus on other areas down the road.
On Page Rank: This is simply a ranking system developed by Google to place more importance on more popular sites, although advertisers (who want links back to their websites) look at it as a more important measurement device. Should you fear a drop in your rank, there are ways of recovering it, although you likely lost it because you were not fairly doing business on your blog.
Final Thoughts
Since blogging is one of the most difficult professions to get into, you must be aware that it takes a lot of time, months turning into years, until your blog is to the “authority” level that you wanted it to reach. Once you reach this level, you can literally become independent of other traffic generation services, including Google, Yahoo, Live, Ask, and the other smaller sources. At this point, you’ll be able to further leverage this control on your blog and draw in return visitors — results that many bloggers strive for day in and day out.
