SEO is scary for many bloggers - I’ve said it quite often. With all the search algorithm updates released by Google the SEO journey has really become a roller coaster ride minus the fun part, of course.

The latest addition to the algo updates, Penguin 2.0, has left many webmasters sleepless and panicking.

There are a lot of other webmasters and my nice pals who don’t really pay much attention to these updates and they don’t panic. Fortunately I fall into the second category too.

Problogging Success was mildly hit by the first Penguin when it was released - not a manual hit but an algorigthmic hit and I know many of my fellow bloggers who weren’t involved in any black hat techniques were hit as well.

Although Problogging Success was not washed away totally from the SERPs, a major portion of my search traffic certainly fell off. And the traffic plateaued after that which is quite painful.

All the hard work doesn’t seem to pay from the point of view of search traffic. I can still see many crappy sites that outrank my high quality blog posts for the same keywords.

Well I’m not the only one saying this, I know. So I’ve started to pay much lesser attention to the algo updates really. And I’m not panicking any more.

I’m not saying you should not keep tabs on what’s going on in the SEO world, but panicking will take you no where. And if you’re hit, all you can do is sit and pray - well I’m kidding.

And even if you are hit (say seriously washed off the search results) by any of the Google algorithm updates, you can still ride on happily without falling off.

Let’s dive right in.

Do not put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to consistent web traffic

And this is the key point. Everything else comes next.

When it comes to traffic, make sure you don’t let any source rule you.

If 70% of your traffic comes from Google, and if you are penalized by an update, you are going to lose 70% traffic. Rather make sure that you keep any traffic source to contribute between 20%-40%.

What are the other sources of web traffic you can think of?

Well, social traffic is a big winner. It has always worked for me. There are social media avenues like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Pinterest and many more.

For me Facebook works great. LinkedIn and Google Plus come next. It could be something else for you.

It doesn’t mean that you have to be overwhelmed by the number of social media platforms that are available. You can simply try out 2-3 of them and stick to what works.

You don’t have to be present on ALL social media plaftorms.

Your online presence can be a great source of traffic. You can extend your online presence in any one of the following ways:

… and so on. I’ve only mentioned a few possible ways here. You can use many more ways (just use some dose of creativity) to establish your online presence.

Your online authority will get you really good, long term traffic - I call this quality blog traffic.

The ways I’ve mentioned above to increase your online presence WILL help you to improve your online authority IF you use them properly.

For instance if you take the example of blog commenting, there are people who comment one or two lines just to get a link back. There are also people who really leave a comment to voice their opinion or help people out.

You need not only help people by sharing your knowledge in blog comments - you can also jump in to discussions that happen at social sites, forums and so on.

If done consistently and correctly, your online authority WILL get you quality blog traffic.

So you mean I can forget about Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

No way! You still need to SEO your blog posts. You have to follow the basics and they don’t change.

On page SEO is about having the RIGHT keywords at the right places - this is not a trick or a gimmick or a black hat thing.

We are simply letting know the search engines what the page is about so that they can rank our pages for those keywords when people search for them.

You should be using your keyword in the title of the post (preferably near the beginning), the keyword should be present in H2 and H3 tags (in at least on of them) and you should also naturally sprinkle the keyword throughout the post.

While optimizing, you should use keyword variations and long tail keywords to make the post look natural and human friendly.

Here’s the primary thing that will get you consistent web traffic

Quality. Let me say that again - QUALITY.

If people know you are the one who provides quality and useful content on a specific topic, no one can stop them from becoming popular.

Provide quality wherever you are - both on your blog and outside your blog (say in social media sites etc.).

Without quality content, no matter what “techniques” you use to grab people’s attention, you will never succeed.

So that’s my way to getting consistent web traffic without having a bumpy SEO journey.