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.

One way to strengthen the community in your niche is to start a planet. A planet is an aggregation of blogs with a web page and a feed.

The idea of a planet is to join and build a community around a niche. This just happens to have SEO benefits, too.

All the bloggers who belong to the planet selflessly chip in with links and articles (the same articles as on their blog, or a subset), and the planet pays back with links and interest. The more successful the planet gets, the more it pays back to it’s bloggers, which in turn feeds back to the planet.

It’s somewhat similar to twitter, but with full blog articles, instead of short notes. What you send to the planet, subscribers of the planet receive, and if they are also a blog member of the planet, they can reply with their own blog post.

The result is a stronger community, a community others can join in or watch from a distance.
A community who gets to know each other quicker, and help each other in their niche.

It’s a common convention to call the planet, planet *niche* (where *niche* is the topic of the niche) and the domain is planet.niche.com (replace niche.com with it’s own domain name)

Leave a comment or a message if you’d like to know more, or help with setting one up. Indeed, if you have an SEO related blog and want to join a planet, drop us a line.

The more high quality sites that link you, the more authority you’ll get. The higher up in the search results you’ll be, and the more traffic you’ll get from search engines. When you’re first starting out, it’s not always easy to get links. There’s a few places that allow you to link to yourself, though.

There’s a number of social bookmark sites out there, probably the most popular being del.icio.us. Sign up for an account, and bookmark posts as you publish them with a few choice tags.

Then there’s digg, but be careful, only digg your own work occasionally, and only your highest quality, or most interesting stuff. Digg has a culture and doesn’t suffer outsiders spamming them well. Diggers are cynical of pages with advertising on them, for example. You might want to turn ads off a page when you first digg, and if it builds momentum, you can always turn them on again later.

Stumble upon can get you a few visiters, same rules apply to digg.

Traffic from delicious and search engines finds your site based on text, get the right words in the right order on your page, and you’ll get some traffic. For success on digg and stumble upon, you’ll need more of an angle. A pretty page, an interesting story, humor and a reputation doesn’t hurt. Experiment, but don’t try and force your way in. Participate from the sideline, occasionally having a go in the middle yourself.

There’s a lot of talk about duplicate content, people go to great lengths to try and stop search engines indexing duplicate content. But just how bad is it?

Well, it depends. There’s different types of duplicate content. For example, you could have a site.com and a site.net, personally I would redirect .net to .com, but if not, the search engines are smart enough to know they are the same site. They will direct traffic to the site with the most incoming links. Still, it’s preferable to redirect.

Another cause for duplicate content is having the same content on www.site.com and site.com. Again, you won’t get punished for this, search engines will pick one url as the main site and direct traffic to it. In the case of google, you can even tell it what the main url is. It’s still preferable to redirect one url to the other. I like plain site.com, I think prefixing the url with www is dated. I set it up so www.site.com redirects to site.com.

Yet another cause for duplicate content is having a url like site.com/page/ where the same content will also be on site.com/page/index.html. I personally prefer urls like site.com/page/ and as long as your site doesn’t link to site.com/page/index.html, all incoming links should point to site.com/page/. No cause for alarm here.

With blogs like this one (a wordpress blog in this case) there will be duplicate content in the various indexes, like tags, categories, date, etc. There’s plugins to insert headers to stop search engines indexing different indexes, but it’s no big deal. The search engine knows the content is the from the same site, and you don’t get punished. People don’t usually link to indexes, they link to articles.

Where you will get punished is when site.com and thief.com have the same content, in this case, the search engine will pick one site as the original, and punish the other. Sometimes they get it wrong. One way to help with this is to put a link on your page pointing back to the same page. That way, if someone scraps you, their copy will have a link back to your page, and the search engine should pick yours as the original. There’s a wordpress plugin that does this for you called RSS Footer.

The other disadvantage of having multiple urls with the same content is stats. If two urls which point to the same content get linked, there’s no easy way to combine the clicks for each link.

So my stance is for urls like site.com and site.net, redirect. www.site.com and site.com, redirect. Where content gets duplicated because of, say, wordpress, I don’t worry about it. Just add a link back to itself, and be happy ;)

Meta description tags can be used by search engines to show searchers what a page is about. You can leave off the tag and let the search engine create their own description, or you can provide the tag yourself. Even if you provide the tag, the search engine might not use it. If you’re going to use it, make each pages meta description unique.

I’m not too worried about them, I tend to use them because you sometimes get a better snippet from the search engines when the searched words are at the top of your page in the heading and there isn’t very interesting text near by.

The title gets used by search engines for ranking and displaying to searchers, so the title must make sense to someone that hasn’t visited your site yet. A title of “Home” is meaningless to them, it should include your site name and what the page is about. Each page should have a unique title.

The very first post is the simplest. Most URLs aren’t typed out, they’re clicked, so they can be long and descriptive. Include important keywords in them, separated by - . Don’t include every keyword under the sun, you’ll look like a desperate spammer.