Choose A Niche

When it comes to blogging applications, I have three words for you: Wordpress…Wordpress…Wordpress. Trust me, it’s easy enough for a newbie to customize and robust enough to keep a hard-core techie feature-happy. The good news is Wordpress is free and it has everything you need to build an original, eye-catching, easily navigable blog.

There are tons of design resources online, both in template and how-to guide formats, so I’m not going to delve into that topic too much in this article. I’ll just share with you what I consider to be the three most important aspects of a well-designed blog: (1) It’s not over-designed or too busy. (2) You limit yourself to ten to twenty categories. (3) Stick with a regular posting schedule - whether it’s once a week or twice a day, readers and robots (search engines) like consistency.

There are two types of SEO that relate to your site: onsite optimization and offsite optimization. I am not an SEO expert, so I will just briefly cover some basic optimization methods that you should employ as you build your site. If you took my advice and installed Wordpress, then there are several SEO plugins available to you.

Let’s start with on-site SEO: meta-tags, keywords, and internal linking structure and robots.txt. These may sound a bit overwhelming at first, but I promise they are a lot easier to employ than you’d think. In fact, the two most complicated - meta-tags and robots.txt - can be almost completely automated by some very cool plugins.

Meta-Tags

You have already chosen your domain name with your keywords in mind so now we are going to embed them in your pages as well. When I say “embed,” I’m not talking about any black-hat tactics (never put hidden text on your pages!). You will not find any of those on Choose A Niche simply because they rarely have longevity when it comes to SEO. If it works this month, Google will learn it next month and then you just have a bunch of junk code clogging up your pages. We will be using good old-fashioned white-hat SEO tactics with the help of a seriously awesome Wordpress plugin.

You can write meta-tags by hand if it floats your boat, but my highest recommendation goes to All-in-One SEO Pack. It is easy to optimize and automates all the meta-tagging that you don’t have time to learn about right this minute.

If you are looking for a killer theme that is SEO Pack-enabled, I suggest you pop over to Court’s Internet Marketing School and see his SEO Wordpress Themes. While you are there, don’t forget to subscribe to his feed so you can read his blog regularly and catch up on the archives later. Court gives away invaluable information with every post he writes. Now, back to work.

Keywords

Another on-site SEO tactic is the use of keywords in your posts. Some internet marketers are very mindful of this, making sure each post consists of a certain percentage of their primary keywords. I do not recommend becoming obsessive about it. If you are over-concerned with including keywords in your posts, your content can sound unnatural. The key to keywords is to find a happy medium: use them enough to make your site topic(s) clear to the spiders, but not so much that your readers begin to feel the repetition.

Internal Linking Structure

To achieve the best rankings possible throughout your site, you need to make sure your entire site is being indexed by the bots. The first thing you can do to help this along is to create sitemaps. Most of my sites have two: one for my readers and one for the spiders. There are super Wordpress plugins that automate the creation and maintenance of sitemaps. For my robot sitemap, I use Google XML Sitemap generator. For humans, the Dagon Design Sitemap creates a user-friendly organization of my posts.

With Wordpress, you have the option to place posts in categories. I highly recommend that you use this feature, but plan it out carefully before you begin writing. Choose about 10-20 categories to post within. It is very easy to let your categories get out of control and it will be much harder to fix them later if you don’t plan well now. Trust me, one of my blogs has over 100 categories and it is taking me forever to reorganize it.

An often-overlooked area of on-site search engine optimization are the links you place in your posts to other posts on your blog. If you are discussing a topic that relates to another about which you have already written, link back to the related article. To increase internal links, you can also install the Wasabi Related Posts plugin or something similar. You will need to insert a tiny piece of code into your Wordpress theme, but this is very easy and it is a skill you need to develop as a blogger anyway. Unless you want to pay outsourcing fees every time you want to alter any tiny bit of your layout.

Robots.txt

The robots.txt file lives in the root directory of your blog. It is important because it tells search engine robots (hence the name) what parts of your site to index and what parts to skip. Wordpress creates a ton of duplicate content because it automatically makes pages for each category, archives by date and all sort of other instances where your posts are … well … reposted. With the robots.txt file you can tell the spiders not to index those pages and you won’t have to worry about being penalized for having duplicate content. The Google supplemental index is not a fun place to find your page.

If you aren’t a coder, creating your own robots.txt file is a bit of a daunting task. There are articles online that can help you out. However, if you are new to this, I recommend using the Robots Meta plugin by Joost de Valk. After filling in just a few (well-explained) options, you will have an optimized, customized robots.txt file of your very own. The plugin even puts the file in the right place for you so you do not have to even upload anything.

Incoming Links
Off-site SEO is primarily concerned with getting others to link to your site. You can do this by trading links with other bloggers, but the best type of link is one way. You could pay for links, but Google considers this cheating and your pagerank could seriously suffer. The very best way to get quality one-way links into your blog is to comment on other blogs and make friends.

The key to making friends through comments is to write constructive, interesting things that actually add to the conversation. As my college history professor used to say when we did peer editing of essays: “This isn’t about sending Valentine’s!” Meaning that writing “Great post!” is as useless as never reading the post in the first place. If you put time and thought into your comments people will be intrigued and often they will come check out your blog.

Once you’re up and running, start posting. Writing style, length and content is all up to you. If you feel stuck, visit some other sites/blogs in your niche for ideas or check out some forums. Mark at 45n5 hosts the Top 100 Make Money Online Blogs list. These blogs are all well-written and full of great content on how to make money online. If you are stuck this is a killer place to start.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!