I know you've had some cheap visits to your blog. You know what I mean. You happen to mention some celebrity in passing, as sort of an analogy to your day's blog post. You've likely heard of some other bloggers who've received thousands of visits to their blog as a result.
I know you have thought about getting some of that action to your own blog. You've dreamed of some added free vistor traffic, all from an off topic celebrity mention. All those of you who are guilty, please raise your hands.
Aha! I thought so!
Okay, now we have that naughty little secret out in the open, we can discuss it freely. Everyone wants extra readers for their blog. It's often thought that mentioning famous people is the royal road to riches in the blog visitor traffic game.
I had an e-mail question on the subject on the weekend, as a matter of fact. The writer wanted to know how to get some quick and easy visits to his blog. He was hoping there were some magic words he could use to streak to the top of the search engines, and pick off some stray internet searchers. He even asked which celebrity searches were the hot topic on Google.
Well, let's consider the idea of fast visitor traffic.
Is there any value to cheaply acquired visits from the search engines like Google, MSN Search, Yahoo, AOL Search, Ask Jeeves, and others?
I don't think so.
First of all, visitors to your blog who are searching for Britney Spears photos, Paris Hilton video movies, or the latest news about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, are not likely to read your blog about knitting, health, or business.
Simply placing keywords in a blog post, suggesting naughty photos and stories, won't develop a blog's readership base. The search engines may list your blog post as a fresh article, and so might the blog searches, but the result is fleeting. At the same time, the visit might even work against you.
The visitor counter will register a new reader alright, but the click away in frustration, by a dissatisfied fan of Angelina Jolie, will be much faster. They will even be likely to remember your blog as not being informative at all. While unfair, that impression could be the unwanted result of such a visit.
There is no magic bullet to gaining blog traffic. No one said building a blog, and a regular readership was ever going to be easy. It takes hard work, and many, many interesting and informative web posts.
While it would be great to gain visitor traffic as a result of popular celebrity searches for Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, Johnny Depp, or Jessica Simpson, it's not going to benefit your blog in the long run. Unless you are writing an entertainment or celebrity news blog, or those topics are components of your current blog, your cheap hits won't pay off very well.
That's if the search engines consider your blog relevant to the celebrity search topics at all.
The search engines might just register your blog high in the search rankings as a result of the famous names. Don't get too excited, however. The resulting visits to your blog don't usually translate into loyal readers.
Instead of looking for cheap search engine hits, on highly popular searches for famous names, concentrate on writing good quality posts instead. Link out to other related blogs that provide even more helpful information on your blog's subject matter. Theme relevance is very important to the search engines. If your blog is not relevant to Hollywood or the music industry, for example, it will gain little benefit there anyway.
Write great posts about your areas of real interest; and that includes your hobbies. With enough posts about your hobbies, your blog could become slightly themed in those areas too. It's especially powerful if you can relate the themes to one another. A gardening blog can become themed for weddings, by mentioning flowers and bouquets, for example.
Don't go chasing cheap celebrity hits from the search engines, however. The resulting visitors won't stay for more than a few seconds, before they click away to a more relevant site. Searchers want to find what they are looking for in the search engines. That won't include a stray mention of a famous person on your blog.
Now, since I have mentioned some celebrities in this post...
Maybe I can get some cheap clicks to this blog...
Nah!
Elvis has left the building on that entire idea.
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