My Poor Blog

[Bella Pearl]

Okay, I'm new to SEO and all of this stuff. I didn't have a main focus for my blog, I was just focusing on gifts but realized I needed to narrow it since gifts are too huge a market without specializing. So around Christmas time, in early Novemeber, I started making a lot of posts about Christmas. Within a few days, my blog started taking off. I went from 1 view a day to 200 views a day by Decemeber.

I wasn't able to keep posting for a lot of reasons, and didn't post for about a month and of course I knew my views would go down, and took them awhile to go down. Problem is I thought that once I started posting again I would see the same nice results I saw before.

So I've decided to change the focus of the blog to babies. I understand these are 2 different keyword sets but I can always post about baby's first Christmas, christmas gifts for babies, Christmas toys for babies etc.

So basically, I have made some 'baby' posts and my views just will not go anywhere. I'm barely getting any organic traffic. I'm dying ot get my stats back up; but I hope it won't take months and months.
Does anyone have any ideas about what the problem is? If I got a lot of traffic because it was Christmas time, well everyday of the year is baby time in a sense. People are always searching for baby items?

[Jeannie Zavala]

Are you using any plug-ins? Try All in one seo by Michael or Mark something. Sorry i don't remember from the top of my head. And do you have a visitor tracker? I use WassUp! Love it! After posting a blog, try to create backlinks for it. Do a PDF page of it and post it in ezinearticles so your post is at more than 1 location. Have people leave comments on there, that will help build backlinks. if you want, i can leave one for you Use google keywords tools and look up the highest traffic keywords and write your post with those keywords. Hopefully that helped

[Ms.Billie]

Well, I'm not a blogger (yet), so I don't have a lot of answers to get you started. I'm sure some of the pros will chime in and tell you what you need to know, or at least point you in the right direction to find out what you need to know.

As for my input, have you tried any marketing strategies, such as affiliate marketing and link exchanges? I know that those are some methods that you can use to try to get your traffic back up. Check out the threads in Writing: Blogging, Social Networking Link Exchanges and Affiliate Marketing. You should be able to get plenty of information, guidance and ideas from there.

It's not much, but I hope it helps a little.

Good luck!!

[dlandry]

I've been doing product reviews since 2008 and from the past few years can tell you that traffic goes up and down with the holidays and Christmas and Valentine's Day are usually the higest traffic getters. People are looking for that perfect gift or something unusual as well as trying to find information or reviews about a particular item. This is a common complaint on other forums.

Another topic of mine that gets good hits around the holidays are recipes. In 2011 I had a couple of recipes posted and for one of them I was getting about 1,000 hits an hour for a couple of days then nothing. Last Christmas I got over 23,000 unique visits in December and now I'm averaging about 3,000 a month.

[geekmom]

You could add Yoast, which helps you make sure the title, keyword, content, and description have some SEO in there. Also, adding the SNAP plugin will help you update your twitter, facebook, and tumblr with updates from your blog when it gets going. That way you can front load it with posts and have it automatically update then have fun chatting it up while it's doing the posting for you. There are so many other ways to get noticed. Hub pages, squidoo, etc.

[KNicholls]

You can also do a lens on Squidoo and link that back to your website. I do that with mine and it generates some traffic. Also do you have a Facebook page? I built my Facebook page with fans and then registered my blog with networked blogs on FB. Every time I do a post on my blog, it also publishes on my FB page, but just a snippet, which drives them to go to the blog to read it. Just a few ideas. I agree that plug ins are key to really helping to automate that. I also use the All in 1 SEO plug in and I use Stat Press Visitors to track activity on the site.

[Bella Pearl]

Thanks everyone. I don't have any SEO plugins? But I do have the social media share buttons where after I make a post, it goes to my FB page, twitter, stumbleupon, tumblr and pinterest. Yikes. Only thing is I really have no follwers on any of those social media pages so no one sees the info anyway. Stumbleupon is really the only thing that brings in a little traffic. The few fans I have on FB never respond. I do think I can get discouraged when people don't respond back.
I'm just not understanding how search engines sent so much targeted traffic my way a few months ago and now...nothing at all.
I do sometimes post on high authority blogs to get backlinks.

[KNicholls]

Search engines look for new, good content. The more you write, the more you will get found. I find that the more I post on my blogs, the more the traffic comes.

[lindastacy]

Originally Posted by Bella Pearl

T...
I'm just not understanding how search engines sent so much targeted traffic my way a few months ago and now...nothing at all.
I do sometimes post on high authority blogs to get backlinks.

1 - I think it's easy to understand why you got traffic then and not now. A few months ago, intentionally or not, your content contained was indexed and your pages were well-ranked with keywords people were searching for at the time. Now one or all of those factors aren't there.

2 - When you post on blogs are you getting backlinks within the content and with keyword anchor text? And do you know if these methods (or the method you are using) are still effective for SEO? (I don't know anymore.)

[dlandry]

Originally Posted by Bella Pearl

Thanks everyone. I don't have any SEO plugins? But I do have the social media share buttons where after I make a post, it goes to my FB page, twitter, stumbleupon, tumblr and pinterest. Yikes. Only thing is I really have no follwers on any of those social media pages so no one sees the info anyway. Stumbleupon is really the only thing that brings in a little traffic. The few fans I have on FB never respond. I do think I can get discouraged when people don't respond back.
I'm just not understanding how search engines sent so much targeted traffic my way a few months ago and now...nothing at all.
I do sometimes post on high authority blogs to get backlinks.

Having the social media buttons don't send the posts to your FB, Twitter, etc...You'll have to manually post them there or use another service like Networked Blogs to auto-post. I personally prefer to manually post because I can then personalize the update and then add the link. A bit more interactive with my followers and less spammy when nothing but links shows up in their feeds.