How to Get Google to Send Traffic to Your WordPress Blog

After recently moving a number of blogs from Blogger to a hosted WordPress Blog I discovered a BIG problem, Google stopped sending me traffic.

I managed to resolve the problem, and after a lot of hardwork, frustration and after what seemed like a life time, Google has started sending traffic to my new WordPress blog. I naively thought that this would be straight forward process and I wasn't alone as when I first started writing about this issue on my blog I was surprised to find that this is a common problem.

So when I finally found the solution I thought I would create an article and summarise the steps taken to resolve the problem.

It was certainly easier to get Google traffic to a blogger hosted blog as most of this process seemed to be automated.

These are the 7 steps I followed to get Google to send traffic to my WordPress blog:

Step 1: Tell Google your site exists, go to Google's add URL page and enter your sites details.

Step 2: Register an account with Google Webmaster tools. This will give you a meta tag so that you can be tracked by Google's tool set, by using the Google Integration Toolkit plugin for WordPress.

Step 3: Install the Google Integration Toolkit plugin for WordPress. This plugin is useful to integrate a number of different Google tools into your blog i.e. Webmaster toolkit, AdSense, & Analytics.

Step 4: Install the XML-Sitemap plugin for WordPress. This plugin is useful as it automatically creates and updates a XML-Site map of your site. Sitemaps are useful as they help search engines like Google crawl through your site.

Step 5: Install the All in One SEO plugin for WordPress. This plugin allows you to potentially increase your page ranking by incorporating SEO techniques into your blog. When you create a post a new section becomes visible which allows you to fill in a few details for SEO, then the plugin does the rest.

Step 6: Create some internal links. Google appears to like internal links, so I wrote a blog post which linked to every other post.

Step 7: Allow Google to see your site. Make sure your robots.txt file allows Google to crawl through your site – Google WebMaster tools can easily provide a working robots.txt file. There is also an option in the privacy settings of WordPress to block or allow search Engines, make sure this is set to allow.

I hope these 7 steps help some people out there.