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.

Today’s post is all about the mysterious business of SEO.  If you’re new to blogging then you’ve probably seen the term floating around the Internet and wondered what the heck the fuss is all about and whether or not you need it in order to survive online as a blogger.

Let me start by saying that the term SEO stands for search engine optimization.  What this means is every time you search for something for example “red tennis shoes” on Google, any webmasters who run sites that match your search words “red tennis shoes” want to be as close to the top of the first page of results that Google or any other search engine comes back with.

Have you ever had a look when you’re searching in Google at just how many sites are returned for your keywords? It can be an enormous amount of websites that often number in the millions. Since the Internet has been around since the early 90’s, there are literally millions of websites out there that span all kinds of topics and interests but they can’t all be the number one search result right at the top of Google’s results page.

So how do webmasters get to the top of Google?  That’s where the optimization part of SEO comes in.  Webmasters who run sites or blogs that match the keywords you type in to search engines will optimize their sites to ensure that they are right there at number one.  Why do webmasters use SEO techniques?  The bottom line: money and sales.  If you’re a webmaster with a product to sell, then you will be extremely motivated to optimize your website or blog to fit somewhere on the first page of search engine results.  But what if you’re a blogger who just writes for yourself or your friends?  Or even just a hobby blogger not interested in money?  Then learning search engine optimization techniques is probably not a huge concern for you as the financial aspect of blogging most likely doesn’t concern you. However, if you are looking to supplement your income through your website, then you should really know the basics of search engine optimization even before you put up your first site or blog.

The topic of SEO is a very broad one and encompasses more than just a few tips and tricks.  There are even folks who have written whole books on the subject of search engine optimization and courses available online.  If you’re serious about getting to the top of Google, it’s worth investing in a good seo book or online course to help your site reach the top of Google and stay there.

What the heck are dofollow links anyways? Basically, you can leave a link at any site you like on the Internet, but some webmasters choose to use “nofollow” link structures on their pages. This means that they would like to keep the search engines on their site only, not let the search engines pass to your blog through the link you have posted on their site. A website that uses “dofollow” link structure allows the links you post on their sites to be found by Google and the other search engines every time these search engines come around to their sites. So think of sites that have ton of constantly  updated content and you will start to see how easily you can find places to put links to your blog on their site. Here is a list of the best sites that offer dofollow backlinks to your blog:

Squidoo – Create a page on Squidoo about your blog topic or something you’re interested in, and link to your blog from within the page
Ezine Articles – Write an article for Ezine Articles in the topic of your choice and add a link to your blog in your signature box
Go Articles – Same as Ezine Articles
Propeller – Submit a blog post to propeller and it automatically links to your blog
Slashdot – Same as Propeller

Other things you can do to get backlinks to your blog that will be seen by lots of Internet searchers even if they aren’t dofollow, is to Tweet your posts on Twitter as that will go around the Twitter universe and bring you some traffic. You could also leave a comment on a blog you find matches the interest of your blog and that will send traffic to your blog as well. Agree to trade links with other bloggers you like but be wary of link farms or placing your link on sites that are irrelevant to your site’s topics.

Most if not all of these dofollow websites expect you to earn your backlink by adding valuable and original content to their sites. So simply pasting your blog’s url all over the place without contributing content will put you in the doghouse with most of these sites and could get you banned for being a spammer.

In the spirit of helping others get the most out of their Wordpress blogs, I’m divulging the list of plugins I use on my blog in the hopes that it helps someone out there get more functionality out of their blog software. Feel free to try these plugins yourself and recommend any plugins you feel a blog shouldn’t be without. All of the Wordpress plugins that are listed are hyper-linked for your convenience so you can check out the some more information about these Wordpress plugins from their sites. I’m not affiliated with any of these plugins in any way and all of them are freely available on the Internet so enjoy the list.

AddInto – Allows you to make it easier for visitors of your website adding alink, article in several favorite systems, social networks. Instead ofhaving a link to each of them, you have a single link or button to all!

All In One SEO Pack – Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box for your wordpress blog …

Disqus Comment System – Disqus is a powerful comment system that easily enhances the discussion on websites. In minutes, connect your community with those of over 45,000 other websites.

Google XML Sitemap – This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of yourWordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages aswell as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemapis updated and all major search engines that support the sitemapprotocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notifiedabout the update.

Robots Meta – This plugin makes it possible (and very easy) to:

* Prevent indexing of your search result pages, while still allowing the search engines to follow the links on them, by adding noindex,follow robots meta tags.
* Prevent indexing of the subpages to your homepage, by adding a noindex,follow.
* Prevent indexing of your login, register and admin pages by adding noindex robots meta tags.
* Add noodp an noydir meta robots tags, allowing you to opt out of DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory descriptions.
* Prevent Yahoo! and Google from indexing your feeds by adding a meta tag to their head-section.
* Disable author and date-based archives.

Statpress – The first real-time plugin dedicated to the management of statisticsabout blog visits. It collects information about visitors, spiders,search keywords, feeds, browsers etc.

Tagaroo -Tagaroo is designed to make your WordPress blog better for you,better for your readers and more accessible to search engines. As you’re writing, Tagaroo analyzes the text in your post and suggestsintelligent tags for the things and events you’re writing about. You can use these tags in your post – but even better – you can use these tags to automatically get great images from Flickr to include in your post. The Tagaroo website doesn’t seem to have the latest version of their own plugin but the good news is you can download the latest version of Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file. right here from New Blog Help and it’s fully compatible with Wordpress 2.7

Wordpress Download Monitor – Download Monitor is a plugin for uploading and managing downloads, tracking download hits, and displaying links. I use this plugin because sometimes I give away my own free graphics and they can be quite large to upload inside my posts. This plugin allows me to upload my graphics in archived format into my blog right from inside my post editor. Just think if you gave things away on your blog like ebooks or pdf files this plugin would be really, really handy.

WP-Note – This plugin allows you to create nice notes in your Wordpress posts or pages.You just should add note tags in your post.There are all five tags: note,important,tip,warning and help.

WP-SpamFree – An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin for WordPress that virtuallyeliminates comment spam, including trackback and pingback spam.Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog! Includes spam-freecontact form feature as well.

That’s all the plugins I use and maybe they can help solve a Wordpress functionality issue for someone out there who might be new to Wordpress and it’s huge amount of plugins. If you need a larger list of Wordpress plugins then be sure to have a look at the repository which contains over 4,000 free Wordpress plugins. Until next time new bloggers, stay safe online and blog about it all…

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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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