While general search engine optimization (SEO) tactics are beneficial and necessary for the long-term health of your blog or website, it is often a daunting and confusing task for a beginner.  Usually it takes time and sustained effort to gain and notice results from link-building and improved page rankings.  Like a retirement 401(k) fund, the efforts you invest in your website’s search engine optimization will pay off down the road.

But how about getting some results today, right now, to whet our appetites and keep us motivated to continue the effort?

One solution I’ve found is to attach my blog site to already existing audience traffic streams outside of the search engines.  Many popular websites in your niche will allow for guest bloggers.  My local news website has its own blogging platform where anyone can create a blog that will then be featured on the homepages of its network of news sites around the region.  By creating a blog account with these sites and using them to tease my latest posts, I am able to draw traffic from these streams to my primary website.

The result is several hundred pageviews a day, right now, while my sites are still new and working their way up the search engine page rankings.

Plus, my audience is known, specific, and therefore more intimately targetable, as opposed to the general passive stream of search engine referral traffic; this usually allows me to write with greater detail and concrete precision in relating my subject, because I’m writing to a specific audience rather than casting words and thoughts to the wind and more often deliberately left open-ended and generic in order to catch the various unknown readers who might come across it through search.

It is also beneficial that by linking to my primary website from these other established sites and platforms I am by definition doing the link building work that is so essential to improving page rank.  At the same time I am gaining valuable insight and intelligence on what posts and pages of my site are resonating with my readers, allowing me to make adjustments and improvements where necessary so that when that continued search engine referral traffic does start to flow, I’ve already got a refined draft of information presentable.

As a beginning blogger I have found this technique to be a powerful booster shot to keep me interested in the daily grindwork of the often seeming hopelessness of writing when nobody is listening.  By tapping these traffic sources, people are now listening, and I’m gaining valuable feedback and actual traffic to my websites right from the start.