Increasing traffic to your blog.

The two main sources of traffic to most blogs are from Google search and from links that are in the right place to bring traffic interested in your writing.

You can achieve both of these in the same go by making blog comments on other people's blogs.

(As an aside here it is important to know that Google reads and remembers everything on the web. If you go to Knol it will tell you to what extent the articles there resemble articles elsewhere on the web. Clever stuff.)

So this is what you do, say you have written an article about polarisation and 3D graphics. Go to Google Blogs and do a search: http://blogsearch.google.co.uk/blog...&q=polarisation+3d+graphics&btnG=Search+Blogs
You can now add a comment to each of these articles. Make sure that each comment is different (otherwise Google will ignore them) and hand crafted to be relevant to the article you are commenting on. Most comment systems allow you to embed your url. And if it is relevant you can put a direct link back to your article in the body of your copy.

This process is brilliant for your website. The links are in exactly the right place to both generate traffic and to improve your results with Google search.

Blog owners welcome such comments if they are not spam, there are loads of urls in the comments on my blog.

Now, to make it more powerful. Not all websites are equal. A link on the BBC is worth a lot more to you than some brand new 11 year old fanboy's site. So to pick the good ones use Firefox SEO on your Google Blogs search. This will tell you the Google page ranking etc of each site so you can cherry pick the good ones.

You can use technorati instead of or as well as Google Blogs, this time using Authority to pick your sites.

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Whatever you do, do not use link farms or link directories to get links out there. Google knows all about these and so downgrades you on search if it sees you doing this.

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A really good way of promoting your blog is a press release. I have one going out tomorrow, for instance. You can see how these are done by going to a press release site and seeing how other have done them.

There are loads of free press release services: Free Press Release, ClickPress Fastpitch and Pressbox, for instance. Or you can pay for a more powerful service with PRWeb. Always email your releases to Gamespress, they are a big resource for game industry journalists. Include a photo with your release if you can.

Always put your url in the press release. Then when it is copied and pasted the link is retained.

Press releases get mentions of your blogs and your url into exactly the right places. So you get direct traffic. You also build your position with Google.

Here is some proof for you, this is a C&P for Bruceongames at Google Webmaster Tools (an essential part of your Google account):

Links to your site
function GRID_sort_by_column(fieldName, columnId) { var sortByField = document.getElementById(fieldName); sortByField.value = columnId; sortByField.form.submit(); } Page Links (6,891) / 4,610
/2008/02/08/the-bible-v-video-games/ 102
/about/ 94
/2009/06/05/johnny-chung-lee-on-xbox-natal/ 79
/2009/06/01/what-is-android/ 69
/2009/04/30/eight-new-stories-304/ 52
/2008/04/23/game-piracy/ 51
/2009/05/29/180000-copies-of-the-sims-3-stolen-in-4-days/ 47
/2009/05/12/drm-hits-resale-more-than-piracy/ 41
/2009/05/27/free-realms-over-2-million-users-in-less-than-a-month/ 41

Those 102 bible v video games links are because it is one of the few articles I have press released.

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Next. If you write an article that is original then post it up on N4G. If it is accepted you will get a lot of traffic. Also it will be seen by journalists and other bloggers. And by Google.

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So blog comments, press releases and N4G.
None of these are underhand or spamming or black SEO. They are quite simply putting relevant and correct information in the right place on the web.
Best of all this is all free, it just takes a bit of time.