If you’ve done any kind of research into SEO then you’ll have undoubtedly seen mention of much lauded authority websites. Such sites are lauded for the provision of high quality content and, if the stories are to believed, they effectively suck in visitors from search engines, blogs, and other industry related websites.

With such incredible benefits the question, then, is how do you become an authority website yourself? The truth is it takes time and effort as well as a raft of useful and accurate information and resources.

If you’re fairly new to blogging, it can sometimes feel like you’re not getting anywhere with your blog.  You’ve got very little traffic, almost zero interaction, and not much hope it will get any better any time soon.

I started my latest blog roughly around October/November of 2009. (I think!) So around about six months ago.  Today it’s currently a PR 3, with an Alexa ranking of 478,175 and climbing.  In the last six months I’ve had roughly 22,165 visits and 57,129 page views.

Now that is fairly modest in comparison to many more established blogs, but I’m pretty proud of the traction I’ve gained so far and am excited about its continued growth.   And I feel there are a handful of simple things I did that really helped to propel that growth fairly quickly.

I’ve been guest blogging as long as I’ve been blogging: for about 3 years now. All my self-branding achievements as well as all my most notable career ups would not have been possible without guest posting.

Throughout my guest blogging career, I have been wondering if that would be a smart idea to attempt to create such a place where guest bloggers might get connected to the blog owners who look for good free content for their sites.

In the end, I thought that would be a a useful tool actually because such a service would be a place where everyone wins and quality plays a decisive role: guest bloggers get links and exposure, blog owners get free content (which means extra traffic, more search referrals, more social media shares, etc) and poor quality posts get rejected.

Best way to boost your blog popularity is by converting your visitors into readers. Nothing can beat loyalty of repeat visitors because they actually like what you have to say. But how do you accomplish such a difficult task?

Many people don’t necessary arrive to your blog on your front page and might have landed on page that interested them but wasn’t the best example of your work. How do you draw people deeper into your blog and present them with your best work. Well, if they commented – you have an excellent option!

This post was written by Monika Mundell of Freelance Writing

Tracking your blog traffic could be the best thing you ever did if you aim to rank well in search engines. There is one simple reason for me to say this. That reason is “link clusters”. Courtney Tuttle wrote a great post on link clusters and what they can do for your rankings the other day.

There is no point in repeating what he said, since he explains it all too well already. But I wanted to touch on this and show you how to take a step back from what he recommends you do and actually track your traffic with ease.

This morning I woke up to a pleasant surprise – my RSS Subscribers chicklet displays a 600% of growth OVERNIGHT! And no – it is not a fluke, not a glitch in the system – these are real results.

Going from 500+/- subscribers to 3400+/- might seem like a huge jump but reality is much simpler then you think…