Do you want better blog traffic? We blog because we want to share our lives with others. We have a desire to communicate. We have a message of some sort that we want to share. Maybe it’s not a heavy message. Maybe it’s just about connecting with other people who share our passion.

It’s not really important that we connect with thousands of people. If we have a few favorite friends who come over and comment once in a while, we’re happy with that. Blogging, for me, anyway, is very satisfying even on the small blog I have that only has a handful of faithful readers. 

But here’s the thing–if you’re going to blog, why not blog well? If you’re going to take the time to write for an audience, why not do what you can to get your blog posts to the largest audience possible?

Alexa measures the traffic on something like thirty million blogs.  Thirty million.

OK several million of them are probably ones that someone started and abandoned right away. But of the twenty million that are left–how do you plan to stand out in such a crowd? How do you plan to connect with your intended audience? Have you got a plan for growing your blog traffic?

One way to figure out how to be more effective is to go to Website Grader and check out how you’re doing. Check your site against other blogs you like. And then work on the things it tells you to work on. If it dings you for too many images, ignore that if you want. Book blogs have images. It’s what we do. But pay attention to the google page ranking, to the DMOZ and yahoo directories and to the alexa traffic figures.

This blog has a grade of 93. I’m happy with that seeing as how we only had our first tour last August and I’ve not devoted a lot of energy into posting on the blog between tours. But I’m going to see if I can’t do one thing a week to improve my traffic. I figure if I submit my blogs to one directory a week, or if I work on meta tags, or links each week, I will be able to improve my rankings. We’ll see.

I’ll try to talk some in the coming weeks about how we can put meta tags into our posts and how we can improve our traffic ratings. I’m no expert, but I plan to research this a bit. If you come across any good articles on how to improve website traffic, feel free to leave a link for the rest of us.