Search Engines are great source of traffic and not just simply any traffic but quality traffic, most of the search engines readers actually become regular readers of the blogs or if you are trying to sell some thing from your website/blog then they tend to buy them too*. (*Conditions Apply).

Although search engines prefer blogs as they get updated regularly, however there are few things on which we can work on and can ensure that we can get listed at the top of the search results. With these tricks alone you can easily gain more than 60 % of your blog traffic from various search engines (it may vary for lot of blog, some may get up to 70-80% as well).

Please note that I’m no authority on this subject, however these tricks have helped me in various ways in my blogging experience of 3 years, so I know that these tricks are definitely worth and are completely white hat too.

1. Keywords are the key : When we search with specific keywords, then it is clear that it is these keywords only which are the most important part of the SEO business. If you can find out the best keywords and if you can target them properly then you can gain lot of quality traffic from the search engines. All-in-one-seo pack is a great plugin to help you in doing the changes in the posts for better SEO.

You can find relevant Keywords from these places -

a) Google adwords keyword suggestions.
b) WordTracker

1. Keyword density : It’s important to put the keywords in your blog posts. Try to keep the keywords at around 5% - 10% of the total blog post.
2. Bold those keywords : Search engines understand that if you are highlighting some words then those words are important and they get more preference over rest of the text.
3. Include the keywords in post heading : Try to include those keywords in post heading as that brings the keywords in the H1 tag of the theme and thus gets more importance.
4. Importance of the Title tag : Title of the pages also hold lot of importance and if you include the keywords in the title then you’ll be doing lot of good to your rankings in the search results.

2. Let the search engines know where your content is : It pretty simple that if search engines can’t reach your pages then they won’t be able to show them anywhere in the result. So the idea is that let the search engines find the content of your website in the simplest manner. So, it’s good to have a sitemap and Google sitemaps generator is one of the best plugin to achieve the task.

Once you’ve generated the sitemap of your blog, feel free to submit it to Google webmaster tools and gain access to various wonderful tools which are part of Google webmaster tools.

3. Build incoming links : Incoming links are one of the most important factor, when it comes to ranking well in Google and here are some of the tricks to help you build the incoming links -

1. Original ideas, tips work really well : If you can write unique content regularly then you are bound to get some great back links from people. A nice and original tips get circulated well and bloggers talk about it and share the link love.
2. Write resourceful articles : List posts do really well and get lot of link backs from bloggers around. Darren has written a post where he shares 8 reasons of why lists are good for getting traffic.
3. Submit your articles to social networking sites : There are many social networking websites which have Do Follow tag and thus submitting your articles over there will give you incoming links and thus will help you in gaining the link love.
4. Link baiting : There are few posts which are called as link baits and there is a very nice guide shared by Nick Wilson where he tells you about various link baits and how you to write them.

4. Providing free stuff for your readers : If you provide something for free, then you are surely to get lots of incoming links as people generally talk about it and that helps you in gaining lot of link backs and thus improves your authority in various search engines.

Do share your tips and tricks, in case I missed something and I’m sure that if you’ll use these tricks you are surely to get better search engine rankings.