As an avid blogger for the last, roughly, 10 years of my life, I’m naturally incredibly loyal to blogging over micro-blogging, as I view the two as being completely different.

Any passionate blogger who seeks traffic will know that you can’t just stick to blogging and ignore the other platforms such as Twitter, to name just one. Because of this, Twitter plugins have been created for Wordpress blogs, which allow Wordpress authors to have their posts published to their Twitter account or a seperate Twitter account – Personally I go with a seperate account, so I don’t flood my personal account with blog posts.

Now, this is obviously a great way to integrate the two platforms, but there’s one step further, which can work a dream and that’s to include a #hashtag in your post’s title, for example:

How to index your site with Google #SEO

What this does, combined with the Twitter plugins, is send your new blog post out as a tweet to your followers, but it also sends your tweet (post) into a #hashtag stream, which naturally encourages “organic” traffic from completely new sources.

I’ve tested it a few times and what I can say is that if you select your #hashtags correctly, you can attract a lot of new traffic. Now, for those of you who are developers or having programming skills, you’ll be able to take this one step further by avoiding the permalink from including the hashtag and potentially damaging your SEO, therefore only the tweet has the hastag attached, this would work with a custom field, or even better, you could use the post’s category as the hashtag – you’re starting to see the value aren’t you? Another step further and you could have your category RSS feeds sending out to twitter streams with #hashtags, now that’s when things get far more interesting and your traffic will boost, I gaurentee it!

Anyway, I did it, it worked and I wanted to share it with you.

Enjoy!

Pssst – Did you read my thoughts on Twitter Lists?