reply 150x150 Neglected Blog Items That Will Bring You More Traffic If FixedToday, I spent a lot of time replying to lots of comments left on my blog over the past two weeks. I am still not done responding to everyone, but I’m working on it. When I was done with my current round of replies, I suddenly realized that this could be used as something to talk about. What made me realize that was my belief that comments should never be closed.

I have discussed this idea in the past, but I have a different (yet similar) spin on it this time. My whole reasoning behind closing comments are two key points.

  1. Fresh content is key to Google showing your site love. Comments are fresh content. If an old article is receiving fresh content, then Google will show that article even more love. Even a blog with lots of traffic should never close comments under the false pretense that they are eliminating spam. If you use Akismet with Conditional CAPTCHA then spam is not even a factor, so there is absolutely no excuse in that argument.
  2. Closing comments will piss off new potential readers. There have been a number of times where I went to a blog because of an article I found while searching Google, and after I read the massive article, I went to comment and it was closed. Do you have any idea how much that pissed me off and made me never go back to that blog?

Closing comments closes doors for you in many ways. But my new spin on this is the fact that you should be focusing pretty hard on where your traffic comes from. One major source of your traffic if you are a long term blogger, should be Google and other search engines. My Google traffic is increasing daily by the hundreds, and that made me realize that by replying to comments adds that fresh valuable content to my blog, which may end up turning into first page Google rankings.

Do you know what this means?

If means that if you were to immediately go back to your older articles, and make sure that you reply to commentators, then you could be adding additional traffic from Google because something new that you say may get ranked!


This also means that there are many other things you need to check to make sure you are not neglecting them. One of those things are closed comments. Go to your settings and make sure right now that you have it disabled.

Another issue I have written about before is the “noindex” and “nofollow” tags you may have on categories and tags. Make sure they are not there. If you have an seo plugin in operation, then make sure those settings are not checked. If they are, then opening them up for indexing will immediately change the dynamic of your blog. You should start seeing an increase in traffic from Google within 2 weeks in your Analytics or other stats tracking platform.

finally holidays Neglected Blog Items That Will Bring You More Traffic If FixedDo you take vacations? If so, how do you deal with your blog while you are on vacation? I know a couple of people who recently went on vacation and didn’t post anything while they were gone. What this did was ended up killing the progress they made with their Alexa Traffic Rank. It also made regular blog hoppers to that blog no longer check it for updated content.

If you are going away for an extended period of time, it is vital to your blogs survival that you schedule some posts. Write an article to automatically be published every two days, and if you can, make sure you stop by at least every 72 hours to reply to comments.

Blogging is a new breed of animal. It is a job that is supposed to be fun. So if that’s the case, then why would you want to take a vacation from it? When I go on vacation, my laptop comes with me. The last thing I would ever do is abandon my blog, even if it’s for two weeks.

If you know me, you know that I believe in scheduled posts. Not only for scheduled vacations, but also for times when you are feeling burnt out, or you just want to take a day off to do something else. In such cases, I have also recommended posting guest posts from others on your blog. As long as your blog is not neglected, then you will do fine.

couch potato Neglected Blog Items That Will Bring You More Traffic If Fixed

Established & Lazy

There is a thing I like to call “established and lazy”. What this means is that you have worked hard to build traffic, and your blog is doing great with commentary and subscription. What happens? Well in most cases, the blogger tends to stop blog hopping as much as they used to.

It is completely understandable that as an established blogger, your time is spread across a lot of different things. You probably have tons more commentary to reply to. You are probably writing lots of guest articles and articles for EzineArticles or other places.

The trick is to balance all of the above with your old activities that made you successful in the first place. If you have stopped blog hopping as much as you used to, then you can instantly increase your traffic by huge numbers if you were to go back to it. Dedicate one day every week to do nothing but comment on blogs. One day will not kill you, or hinder your ability to perform your other marketing activities. I promise you this.

After you start doing what you stopped doing, you can see the fruits of your labor in your stats most likely the next day. Now that you are established, you should have to problem analyzing that data to see if it’s worth integrating into your new lifestyle. Chances are that you will see how this would be beneficial, and stick to it from now on.

Think About It

Is there something that you are neglecting which if changed, you will probably see an increase in traffic? What are you going to do about it?

Neglected Blog Items That Will Bring You More Traffic If Fixed

About the author

Brandon Connell wrote 404 articles on this blog.

I am an author, blogger, investor, musician, and internet marketer among other things. I believe that one person can do many things in life. Check out my local search marketing company at Leads2LocalSearch.com when you are done browsing here.

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