I’m sure the reason you have set up a blog is to make money. There is certainly no problem about that, if there was, I’ll probably be the first to be guilty of it because I love blogging for money too.

But there is a big obstacle that most bloggers will sooner than later come to realise preventing them from making the money that is actually available to be made from their niche industry. And this impediment is no other than “no traffic” situation.

Even if you have a blog on hot topic with hundreds of thousands of people interested in it, but none ever comes to your blog, you will still not be able to make money that you can be proud of from it.

The absolute fact is that you need people to visit your blog so that they can be exposed to your money making devices, such as adsense and affiliate products. Without over emphasising the point, the issue of website traffic is too crucial to achieving the money making goal of a blog or website, which every blogger should take with ultimate seriousness.

If you expect most of your traffic from search engines, I will be sharing with you a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Strategy you may not have implemented on your blog, and which could have harmed your blog terribly [traffic wise] all this time.

Before I go into that, let me briefly explain to you how search engines work. This is necessary so that you will see the essence of the SEO strategy I will be revealing to you shortly to implement on your blog.

Search Engines, such as that of Google or Yahoo, are made up of three software: one takes the query from the searcher, another, known as spider crawls the web to find the information needed, and the third indexes the data obtained.

To search for information on the Internet, one will have to type certain words [known as keyword] into the search box provided by the search engine, and then click on the Enter button. The query software of the search engine gets the query and sends it to the spider portion, which crawls all the pages on the World Wild Web in search of relevant pages to the keyword in question.

The indexing software portion of the search engine then collates the relevant pages found and arranges them in order of relevance [as it perceives it] to the information the searcher is looking for.

To determine how relevant a page is to the information being sought, one of the very important things the search engine spider looks at is the URL of the page. The URL of a page is the web address of the page, something like http://www.moneyway-online.com/makingmoneywithblogs.htm. The Spider will check if the URL contains any of the keyword from the searcher. If it does, it will index the page, but if it doesn’t it will simply by-pass it.

Now how does this affect your blog traffic? I will show you. If you are using WordPress go to your blog and click on one of your previous posts. What does its URL read like? If you have not set up Permalink, the URL of that page will read something like this: http://example.com/?p=N , where N is the Post ID number.

This is the default Permalink that WordPress will display for that page. But this does not help you as long as search engine is concerned. It doesn’t say anything about the kind of information you have on that page, and so the search engine will not index it if someone searches for the kind of information you have there – and there goes your traffic!

If you have set up your Permalink, the URL of that page will describe the page by showing the title of the article on it, which would contain the keyword of the searcher. The URL will look something like this:

http://moneyway-online.com/blog/category/internet-marketing-ideas-tips/page/2
. If someone was searching for internet marketing ideas, this page would definitely be index by the search engine.

Apart from your posts, if you have your Permalink set up, it will also reflect in all comment and archive pages.

How can one set up Permalink for their blog? you might want to know at this point. Not to worry, I will tell you. Log in to your admin panel of your WordPress Theme, then go to Option (or Settings for recent version of WordPress theme), you will find the Permalinks link there, click on it and you will be taken to the Permalink page where you can set up Permalink structure for your blog.

There are different Permalink formats given that you can choose from, such as the ones that will make your blog pages read like: http://example.com/category/post-name/, http://example.com/year/month/day/post-name, or http://example.com/achive/post_id/

And if you want to customise your Permalink, including making it to end in .htm, there is a box you will type in the format you desire in this manner: /%category%/%postname%/%post_id%.htm

By /%category%/ it means the URL will show the category in which the post is made; %postname% means the URL will show the title of the article on the page; %post_id% means that the URL will show the page ID, which is the page number.

Although the URL of this page http://moneyway-online.com/blog/category/internet-marketing-ideas-tips/page/2 takes the format /%category%/%postname%/%post_id%.htm, you can use any other format, but use one that has the %postname% tag so that the title of the article on the page, which contains the keyword of the searcher, will be shown.