One of the most important things when starting out a blog, is traffic, which should be built up as you go along. There are tons of ways to build your blog`s traffic nowadays,some of the most popular techniques are SEO (search engine optimization) , advertising (you need to set some monthly budgets, and the word of mouth, which only applies for great content blogs, this is not really a technique but something that happens when you really provide the most interesting and unique content in your niche., people will actually remark you and link to your blog without even asking them. There are lots of websites and blogs which have been built up only by the word of mouth. So a blogger should always concentrate on the content of the blog, which makes the blog stand out from the other. We all have seen lots of garbage around the Internet, which should not even be there, useless, unwanted content.

I have been blogging for almost a year now, that is why I have decided to make a list of the best tips to consider , when optimizing a blog.

1. Use a descriptive title for each post. Think about good , attractive post titles before publishing them. Catchy headlines will always attract more readers. Also use high paying keywords in order to optimize your ads better, no matter what advertising program you choose. Do not use the same title more than once, in most of the cases they might be considered as duplicate content and this is not what the search engines want. Just be creative. A blog`s post can tell nearly everything about the posts content. The few first sentences of each post should include pretty much everything, you are going to write about in that post. Provide a short summary at the end, so people understand better, what exactly you want to point out.

2. When creating a blog , give it a name related to the site`s content. That means you should choose a domain name related to your blogs subject. This is not a must, but a SEO technique. Search engines will always look at these things as well to determine how high your blog could possibly rank.Do not write irrelevant stuff onto your blog, never do that. You can make your blog personal, but just don`t write irrelevant, useless stuff, this will prevent your traffic to decrease. I would always go for a self hosted blog, but again this is not rule number one. There are successful blogs on free hosting services such as blogger, or Typad, any of these would do. The difference is that you don`t have as many features , as you have when you self host your blog. For example Wordpress doesn`t allow users to advertise on their blogs, Java Scripts are not allowed.

3. Use keyword research tools in order to optimize your blog. Keyword density is also very important (the percentage of keywords in your post that are related to the topic). Ideally, keywords are used once in the title tag, the heading tag, and in bold text. Some SEO`s say that underline, bold , italic , and capital letters will always help the search engines in crawling the content of your site, and really understand what your main subject is. Keywords should be placed at the top of the page, and phrases can be inserted in every paragraph, depending on how long the paragraph is.

4. Link exchange. Contact other webmasters/bloggers to exchange links. Your page will rank higher in the search engines. The more incoming links the bigger your page rank. Do reviews and ask for reviews with other bloggers that write on related niche to yours, each of those reviews could include links to your blog.

5. Feeding your blog with fresh new content every day will also increase the traffic to your site, and let the search engines crawlers (bots) to index your page better. So new , unique content will always increase your traffic. If you aren`t able to update it daily do it at least once every two days, if you are only able rerely to post on your blog, then the rewards will be accordingly to the work you put in.

6. Build you own mailing list. This is an effective way to have loyal visitors to your site. You should publish quality contents to your website to be credible. The visitors will trust your website and will be the first choice during a visit to the net.

7. Hire good writers to your website. Of course writing your own content, will not only save your money, but your are able to make your blog more personal. However, there are things you need to master before you can write a quality article. By inviting writers with good reputation, your site will be a good hit to the visitors especially to the ones who appreciate good insightful literature. They are going to write quality articles that will make your visitors comeback to your website. Create small budgets, and hire some good writters to provide content for your blog once in a while, there is nothing wrong about it. Ask other bloggers for guest posting.

8.Advertise your website through banners, text links, paid plugs, magazines, newspapers, media and offline advertisements. You can always choose article marketing to promote your blog, it takes a lot of time to build up a decent number of articles, but it will be highly rewarded. If your writting skills are excellent you can start writing an e-book and let your visitors download it for free, this one technique should boost your rankings, back links , traffic and of course increase your traffic. Again if you aren`t able to write, your skills aren`t good enough, you can always hire someone to write the e-book for you, someone that knows a lot about your niche.

9. Stay away from the black hat techniques. Utilizing them could get a site blacklisted from the search engines. Spamming is a no-no, and the following techniques are considered spamming: doorway and identical pages, tiny or invisible text, cloaking, usage of keyword phrases in author tags, black and gray hat SEO.If you are thinking about hiring a SEO, do a bit more research on his previous projects, most of them are very tricky. I am not saying they are not effective, but some of them use techniques which are not tolerated by the most search engines.