It is possible and recommended to diversify and avoid relying your business solely on one traffic source — and company, Google. However, search engine traffic converts and if you can get more of them to your site, and assuming everything is the same, you will increase the sales figures and revenue from ads.

The details about how search engine works may be beyond most of us — in search engines don’t reveal their exact algorithm — but the basic is not rocket science at all.

Here are 5 tips to help you grow search engine traffic. (If you are interested to learn more about SEO, I have a complete article series of blog SEO.

1. Know your keywords. Keywords are the building blocks of a blog and web site. Naturally, you should target just one keyword per blog post. Avoid creating content just for the sake of having the keyword on your blog. You should provide valuable content and impress the visitors. Only then will they consider subscribing to your content feed.

You should be thinking about what the visitors do on your site. Optimizing the result from the same amount of traffic is as important, if not more. But, I digress…

2. Optimize your blog design. You will be surprised that many bloggers claim their blog themes or templates as search engine friendly because the themes were advertised as such. Spend some time to check the template to make sure it has the right title tag, order of content, heading tags and so on.

Your time will be well spent. After all, it is most likely a one-time task. It may make a difference between ranking for long tail keywords and not getting found at all.

3. Restructure your site. Theming with silos is a great way to structure and divide your blog content into subtopics. Many SEO experts represent siloing as simple tiered content. They are quite similar in a few points but nevertheless you should thinking about making your content topics obvious to search engines.

4. Gain inbound links. There is more than one way to do it, from article marketing to link baiting, blog commenting, forum marketing and so on. When you are just starting out, every little tactic matters to grow your traffic level to a few hundreds a day.

Your aim is to reach more center of influence. Once you are at this level, every new post will result in a few more backlinks to your blog.

5. Patience As the age of your domain increases, your blog will also be considered more valuable, especially if you keep it active throughout the time.

Search engine optimization doesn’t produce flood of traffic immediately but it is often worth the effort. Giving up too early in the process is one of the biggest reasons why people fail at this.

Another thing to keep in mind is that traffic from organic search grows gradually. As you target more keywords within your content and gain more authority through backlinks, you will only grow your traffic.

2. Decide: To Host or Not To Host
When it comes to starting a blog, your biggest decision will be whether you want to host the blog yourself, or use a free blogging service that is hosted for you.

• Free Blogging Services
  You can host your blog for free, but you have to remember there are limitations to hosting with a free service.  When you start a blog with a free blogging service, you don’t get your own domain. You get something like myblogname.blogspot.com (where there are a million other blogs at blogspot.com) and you don’t actually own the blog. If you decide to move your blog to your own hosting account, you have no way to take your readers or content with you, because you have no control over the site.
• Host your own blog using Wordpress on your own Hosting Account.
  This is the method I suggest, because it offers much more flexibility and freedom to do what you want. You will have your own domain name, like myblogname.com. You can get this for as little as $50 per year and get a free domain name. In my experience, Wordpress is one of the best blogging software and its so easy to use.

3. Pick a Domain Name
Once you come up with a topic for your blog, you will need to decide on a domain name. Think of a name that relates to your blog. For instance, if you were blogging about WINE, use a domain name like:  mywineblog.com, ilovewine.com, myblogaboutwine.com

4. Find a Web Host for Your Blog
By far, the easiest way to get a blog is to go with a hosting company that offers “One click installs”. This simplifies the installation process, in fact you do not need any skill whatsoever, you just have to click the install button.  I suggest that if you do not have a current hosting company, to use LunarPages.com. Their hosting plan is only $4.95 per month and you can host an unlimited number of blogs each with their own domain name (of course you have to pay for each separate domain name). This website is hosted with LunarPages.com and I use WordPress as my blog software.