Hi DPers, My http://www.moneyestate.com (4 year-old personal finance blog) should get more love from Google. It's not penalized by Google (I've contacted the Webmasters Tools' team and confirmed this...) It has plenty of pages on Google Index and the content is unique. I regularly promote the blog posts on social media. I do get traffic, but ZERO search engine traffic is simply too much... It's listed on WiseBread.com's Top sites (THE site for personal finance - highly relevant) Some people I talked with surprised that the blog doesn't have much traffic. What gives? Your expert view is much appreciated!
To start, especially if you're getting traffic, I would recommend installing Cackle or something equivalent so people can comment by logging into their social media profiles (ie their own FB profile). This will automatically post the comment to their page and build you more links, which will slowly build your authority up in Google. It will hopefully also give you more than 9 likes on your page -- which I hope automatically updates every time you make a post. I would also make the social media links below each post larger, maybe with an arrow or something to draw attention. Below that, I'd add a blurb that shows up after each article encouraging readers to post their comments, questions, concerns, or stories. You could either manually write it into each article (more relationship) or have it be generically worded so it works no matter what.
Some good tips from Sharpay however changing the look of your site/posts will not generate traffic. Why not go where your demographic hangs out...Where..? Forums! Do as you do here on DP and add relevant helpful content to some of the big Finance and Money Saving forums and utilize sig links etc (don’t spam) and try to genuinely help people and they will be interested in what you have to say and click through to your site. Also try to look for some long tail keywords to target in your articles, add these keywords to your titles and meta tags. You images need alt tags, also add relevant article keywords to each article. You OnPage SEO needs work and doing these simple things will improve your search engine visibility. Just remember search engines are not the only form of traffic you can get You have a nice site, good luck with this!
Do your keywords have searches? organic traffic will only counts as a search engine traffic. If you are gettin g traffic from forums, articles or blogs that will only be count as a referral traffic.
Are you saying all your traffic is direct? Congratulations! Try http://moonsy.com/google-keyword-rank-checker/ and enter the keywords/anchor text you're trying to get from the search engines. I'd also double check your robots file to make sure everything is cool there.