Search Traffic: A micro-niche doesn’t have millions of search traffic per month due to the fact that it is a small niche. A good bench mark for keeping in mind is that your micro niche search volume estimates shouldn’t go below 800 searches per month.  Less than 800 people searching for your keywords per month means poor sales for you even if you dominate the serp’s.

Competition: There must be a small enough number of other websites competing for the traffic you will receive to your micro niche. A targeted and well focused keyword can ensure that you will have fewer competitors to have to outrank in the search engines. A broad one word keyword will have you competing with literally millions of other websites to get to the front page of the search engines. Finding a targeted two, three, four, and even five word keyword phrase will considerably lower the number of websites competing with you for search engine traffic. You really shouldn’t go after keywords with millions of competing pages, it’s best to bring that number of competition down to a workable number within the hundred thousand range.

Strength of Competition: You must always assess the seo or search engine optimization strength of the pages that are competing for your keywords. This assessment must include on page as well as off page seo factors. Off page factors are things like well aged domains in your topic area which you will not be able to control if you have a brand new website. So then it becomes extremely important to analyze the strength of the sites you will be competing with for a first page search engine ranking. The weaker the competition is in on page seo factors, the better it is for you.

• What are on page seo factors to take into consideration?
• Do the other sites in your chosen micro niche use your chosen keyword set in their url?
• Do they use the keyword in their site’s title tag?
• Do they use the keyword when making backlinks to their site?
• Do they use the keyword in the header tag or H1 tag?
• Do they use the keyword in their site’s description?

The more you come to find that competing web sites in your chosen micro niche are not optimized for your particular keywords, the better chance you have of getting to the front page of the search engine listings if you take the time to optimize your site with the suggestions I’ve listed above.

The bottom line is that a micro niche embraces the concepts of seo to the fullest extent and if you as a blogger or website owner can do that in your chosen niche, then success is yours to do with as you please.

As a new blogger you’ve probably gotten Wordpress all loaded up to your server by now and even though you might not be too familiar with the Wordpress Admin dashboard you can’t wait to get your blog on and write your first post. While you could by all means get straight to blogging your heart out, one thing you should be aware of is that there are a few Wordpress settings that you will need to configure inside the Wordpress dashboard prior to publishing your first post. Let’s go through them together and once we’re through you can get down to the serious business of blogging about it all. So when you’re ready, log into your Wordpress Admin and let’s have a look around.

As of the writing of this post the current version of Wordpress is version 2.7 Coltrane and it is quite different from other versions of the software and requires some getting used to even for seasoned users, so here’s the nitty gritty:

Once you’ve logged into your account you will be in the default dashboard which is like your blog’s command center. You will be able to see lots of valuable information here like your blogs status in regards to number of posts, comments waiting to be moderated, who links to your blog, your recent drafts, latest news from the Wordpress development blog, and many other pieces of useful and interesting information about your blog.

While the dashboard is a helpful information center, the real heart and soul of managing your blog is found in the list of links in the left sidebar of your dashboard and they are labelled Posts, Media, Links, Pages, Comments, Appearance, Plugins, Users, Tools and Settings.
The first thing you should do to set up your blog is to change the password that was generated for you when you first installed Wordpress and that can be done by clicking on the Users link. You should see your profile and an option to edit the settings there. You will be able to change your email address, the color scheme of your dashboard, your user nickname and of course your password so make sure it’s something you can remember and note it down somewhere just in case. If you are setting up a multi-user blog this is also the area where you would add users and set their access levels.

The very next place you should go to is the Settings link and more specifically the General tab. You will need to add your blog title and tagline if you didn’t already do so when you installed Wordpress. Setting your time zone is also crucial to do as your blog posts and comments will always be off otherwise. It will also wreak havoc on your scheduled posts if your time zone is set incorrectly.

The next important area in the Settings link is the Reading tab. This is the area where you will choose if you want your blog to have a static front page such as a Home or Welcome page or if you’d rather have your blog posts running down your page instead. You will be able to set any page you’ve created as the front page of your blog so make sure to set it up before selecting this option. You also have the choice of how many posts to display on your blog’s front page and whether they display the full post or a small expert if you decide not to go with the static front page.

Next in the Settings link you should access the Media tab. This lets you adjust the default sizes for your thumbnails, medium and full-size post images.

The next option in the Settings link is the Privacy tab. You probably already said yes to have your blog visible to search engines when you set it up, but just in case you didn’t just double-check that your settings are set to being visible to everyone including search engines and such.

The last but probably most important setting you should set appropriately in your Wordpress blog is what sort of permalink structure you plan on using for your posts. This step may be last on the list here but it is crucial that you set this correctly so your post urls are defined the way you want them right away before you start posting…once you’ve set up your permalink structure you never have to do it again so take the time to decide your permalink structure now. If you’re having trouble deciding which permalink structure is for you I’ve written a post about choosing the structure that’s right for you as well as instructions to make changes to your permalinks here.

Now you’re all set, go on and write your first post…send me a link to it I’d love to read it.

Until next time new bloggers…have fun on the Internet and get those blogs up and running!

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In the Wordpress Admin there is a Settings tab and within that tab is the Permalinks tab. Setting up this area of your blog administration is crucial to having your blog post urls (or links) be the way you want them. The default setting for your posts is p=”whatever the post id number is” but it’s not such a nice url to have. Here’s an example: You’ve written a post on your dog care blog about how to choose the best breeds. With Wordpress’s default permalink strucutre your post would look like this:

“http://dogcare.com/p=123/” – What the heck does that even mean to anyone? Not much and if anything were to ever happen to your blog and you didn’t have a backup of your post database, would you be able to remember all of your post id numbers? Probably not, and then all those people finding your posts in the search engines would click and receive an error message because the link they followed would be invalid.

Next option is day and name and again this option is not so great either…why? Because time moves on and again if anything ever happened to your blog and you had no backup of your post database, you would have to re-post to your blog and the date from the re-post wouldn’t match the previous date. You would end up having to implement a redirection plugin to have your old post structure match up to your new post structure. Here’s an example of the original post link using this structure:

“http://dogcare.com/january/how-to-choose-the-best-breeds/” and if you had to repost it months later your new post would look like “http://dogcare.com/december/how-to-choose-the-best-breeds/” and you can see how the new link structure could never match up to the old link structure without a redirection plugin from the old link to the new one.

The same issues would arise with the month and name option so make sure to keep track of which posts were posted in which month.

Same thing goes for the numeric option but again you will have to keep track of which posts go with which number.

The best option by far is the custom permalink option and one of the best custom permalink structures to use is to have your post url structured by category and post name. The value you would need to enter for this field looks like:

%category%/%postname%

This will have your posts looking like this example: “http://dogcare.com/breeds/how-to-choose-the-best-breeds/”and if anything ever happens to your post database it would be easy to remember your categories and post names and they wouldn’t be dependent on variables that change like the date or post id numbers.

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