BoostRanks SEO Tips

As far as software goes, it’s hard to beat wordpress at this stage. There’s tons of free themes and plugins to extend its functionality. It’s widely used and there’s plenty of documentation and support for it.

Hosting is a different matter, there’s no clear choice. If you’ve got the inclination to use or learn linux, a linode VPS can’t be beat. It’s cheap, reliable and fast with great support. A popular blog will work best on a dedicated host, so you’ll either need to learn how to administrate it yourself, or hire someone to do it for you. A linode VPS is a good way to wet your feet in learning to administrate.

Shared hosting for one site is the cheapest, but as you add sites, a linode VPS will work out cheaper because you can host a lot of sites on it. As far as shared hosting goes, register your domain and sign up for shared hosting at the same place, it works out cheaper. The only thing I would warn against is godaddy’s terms of service. You can read it for yourself, or google for godaddy horror stories.

It’s pretty hard these days to register a cool domain name, but for your first professional blog, a longer name with your targeted keywords in it is good choice.

Say for example you wanted to target “homemade red widgets”. You could choose a domain name like homemaderedwidgets.com. Later on down the track, you might want to broaden your target to the more lucrative “red widgets” on its own, so you’re better off with redwidgetshomemade.com. Puts the red widgets at the start of the domain name for a boost when targeting just red widgets.

For your first professional blog, run part time from home, one designed to be popular, monetized, and authoritative, you’ll want to chose a topic that isn’t very competitive. For the reason that you’ll have a better chance of getting on the front page of google in the first few weeks, and getting organic traffic without having tons of links.

You’ll need to use keyword research tools to help find the right topic, and right keywords to target in that topic. There’s three types of tools I’d recommend you use, in order of weight to give each tool.

• Search Engine
• Keyword Search Volume
• Keyword Ad Competition

Step 1

It’s probably a good idea to open a spreadsheet to record your research as you go. Google a topic you’re interested in covering, it can be broad at this stage, we’ll narrow it down later. Record the number of hits google returns. The lower the better, don’t worry if it’s millions, when we narrow down the topic, it will come down.

Step 2

Use a tool like http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/ to find search volume. There’s a few free tools that do this sort of research, and a few that charge. At this stage, I would use the free ones. The higher the search volume, the better. Wordtracker also give you alternative keywords, so record them in your spreadsheet, along with their search volume. Step three also includes search volume and alternate suggestions, so you can skip this step if you like.

Step 3

Use google adwords keyword tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool to find out how much advertisers are paying for a keyword, search volume, as well as getting alternate keyword suggestions.

After entering your keywords, click get keywords idea. In the Choose columns to be displayed selector, add show search volume and show avg search volume. In the Calculate Estimates using Max CPC box, enter 110 and click recalculate.

This tool gives you more keyword ideas, how much advertisers are bidding on them, as well as search volume. So the higher the search volume and the higher the CPC the better. I would concentrate on search volume at this stage. Measure the success of your blog in terms of traffic, not money generated. So record in your spreadsheet CPC and average search volume.

Now you have a bunch of extra keywords, but you don’t have how many hits in google the extra keywords have, so go back to step one and record the number of hits for each keywords. Wash rinse repeat.

Take your time, it might takes a few sessions to fully research your topics. At the end of it, you should have a keyword or phrase that has a few 1000 hits in google, a healthy amount of search volume. CPC, well, that really doesn’t matter at this stage.

This is the first in a series of posts. For your first professional blog, getting experience is the most important thing you’ll want to get out of it. You’ll want to charge yourself with knowledge, but mistakes are fine. You won’t make much money with this sort of blog, but after you have a bunch of posts in the bag, and 6 months on the clock, you’ll make more than you spend, and you can go in maintenance mode while you work on more lucrative blogs using your experience gained.