It’s generally accepted by users that Wordpress blogs produce highly effective websites that through dynamic page content can be used very effectively to enter niches in search engine results. But how and why are these scripts and the related plugins such an effective platform? This article deals with the technical points on why Wordpress is so effective and how you can apply a simple yet proven format to take over your own search engine niche market.
Wordpress is a one click installation of uniform PHP script that forms a platform on which users can then select an attractive website look or ‘Theme,’ that influences what the visitor sees. It is therefore a template, that allows anyone with some basic HTML and PHP code knowledge to adjust the visual look of the pages and their navigation to suit the site designer’s own tastes.
In order to focus on a particular market however, you must first consider the importance of the choice of domain name and hosting location. In this example we have a client with a golfing holiday apartment in Southern Spain. After there research in to keyword strategy, the principle target on search engines for the web site will be the branded golf resort ‘Roda Golf’. The regional market that is considered will produce the most sales is the UK marketplace. The first step therefore is to register a domain, in this case www.rodagolfstaynplay.com and pick a hosting provider in the UK who offer resources that meet the requirements of Wordpress installation.

Installing the script

The next step is to download and install Wordpress according to the instructions found in many other articles. Many hosts now offer a one click operation from the control panel. There is no difference in the end result, so it may be easier and quicker for the novice to contact a hosting supplier with this option available as standard.
Once installed, we will need a theme or template to control the visitors’ side appearance of the script. These themes can be found on many template directories by searching Google. We have chosen a theme called Demar by webdemar as it has adaptable navigation and the page layout allows for the substitution of a full page header at the top. The new theme is uploaded to the server in the /wp-content/themes directory, then applied by logging in to the admin area of Wordpress and in the design, selecting the new theme.
We will not deal with the adaptation of the look of the theme in this article since it is not important when targeting search engine placement.

Adding the Tools

The next stage is the installation of the necessary plugins what assist in the site optimisation for search results. Plugins, after being downloaded and unzipped, are uploaded and activated similar to new themes except we instead upload to the directory /wp-content/plugins. Here is the list of the plugins we will apply to this site:

• All in One SEO pack
• Google Analytics for Wordpress
• Google Sitemap Generator
• Feedburner Feedsmith Plugin

All in One SEO Pack

This tool allows for a high level of manipulation of the search engine site title, site metatags and the addition of personalised page/post tiles and metatags. All an essential part of a well optimised page.

Google Analytics for Wordpress

Whilst not essential for high search engine placement, this tool is being applied in order to monitor the success of the campaign to capture key phrase results, once the site has reached its top result. The range of keywords used by visitors arriving on the site will then be clear and can then be analysed to measure the effectiveness of placement against sales.

Google Sitemap Generator

This tool is essential for Google to index dynamic websites and hence rank well. It creates not only a dynamic XML sitemap it also pings, or notifies Google when new content has been added to the site, calling the search engine spider back to index. The result therefore of daily posts can often be a daily indexing of your web sites new content. An advantage many PHP developers and SEO’s would be happy to have on their domains.

Feedburner Feedsmith Plugin

This plugin creates a feed of your sites pages and posts and allows you to add that feed easily to a network of other feeds on Social and Blog Network sites. Yahoo Explorer uses these feeds and the resulting increase in real visitors has the effect of improving search engine visitor satisfaction, holds visitors on the site longer and contributes to high search engine rank.

Filling the site with content

Now we can start to add content and structure to the blog in order to form a theme or group of themes, often call the SILO effect , the buzzword SILO is applied to the fact that although a farm may keep many different types of grain on a farm, the Silos NEVER hold more than one type of grain in each. So our new site must have 2 or 3 areas of the site which contain different themed content, but we will not mix the content between area in order to allow both search engines and visitors to clearly navigate a storage area that they are interested in. We will use the Categories area of Wordpress to control this.
To mirror the master site www.spanishgolfstaynplay.com I will next create new pages that form the navigation on the header. Each new page will be optimised using ‘All in One SEO’ on the following guidelines:

• Page title and SEO page title where possible will include a target set of keywords, be no longer than 6 words in total and be written so as to be likely to attract clicks when visitors find them on a target search engine results page. Why? Because this element of the content is what the Search Engine displays as the first line of the 10 search results on the results page.
• Keyword Description. This is a sentence or group of phrases, loaded with the target keywords yet written well enough to encourage click-through. This is normally the second row of the search engine result. This field should ideally be 160 characters long because that is the length of the field displayed on Google.
• Meta Keywords is the last editable field. Lately the industry tends not to put much emphasis on the page metatags, but this SEO is of firm opinion that different and themed keyword metatags on individual pages enhance the indexing and hence placement. You should target between 4 and 5 comma separated words in this field.

That is the basic structure of the site prepared. Now we can look at the SILO structure using categories. www.rodagolfstaynplay.com offers the opportunity to form 3 individual themes. The first is RODA GOLF, in which we can add content about the background, features and characteristics of the Golf resort. The second is the LOCATION of the Roda Golf resort. Since the aim of the site is to encourage visitors to the resorts accommodation through the site, one of the most important factors is likely to be location. Lastly the main original selling point of the site is the opportunity to stay and play golf on a pre-packaged basis. We will therefore use the last category to talk about GOLF. There are facilities to display unlimited categories on Wordpress but we do not want to spread the content too thinly, the result would be a weak SILO structure and therefore be disadvantageous for SERP’s (Search Engine Results Position).
The sidebar is the area of a Wordpress blog where dynamic menus, links and widget tools are displayed on all pages of the site. Using the Widget area of the Wordpress design we can add a text box to the sidebar. This can be filled with keyword content and headed ‘About Us’ to add a friendly hint to arriving visitors. The Categories widget can also be added below the text box and the title changed to sound less blog like. We will use ‘More About’ as an invitation to click.
Now we can start to construct posts for our site. We will apply exactly the same principle to posts as we applied to new pages, using the ‘All in One SEO’ feature to focus the titles and keyword descriptions to exactly match out target keywords.
There, that is the first part of our campaign finished. The site is complete pending additions. If you had the foresight to prepare some original content in a file before you created the blog, the whole operation up to now may have taken less time that a 9-hole round of Golf from start to finish.
See part 2 of this insight in to search marketing next week, when I talk about propagating your site articles around social network sites and link building forums in order to guarantee fast Google indexing and produce the niche SERP’s that we are aiming for.

Technorati Tags: Blogs, Marketing, SEO, Wordpress

Q. Host your own blog..? Why would anyone want to do that when there are plenty of well established blogging platforms that will let you set one up and operate it for free?

A: Better SEO, total control, more traffic and more sales - although those reasons won’t apply if you’re not blogging for business!

When I started out blogging I opened a blogger.com account. That worked fine for me at the time because I was new to blogging. In fact, I knew so little about it at the time that I didn’t even realise that I could host my own.

Even if I had realised that, it’s not something I would have given a moment’s thought to. I was too new to working online. I was (still am) totally non-techie and it would have been too daunting a task.

So I happily blogged away on my blogger account until I logged on one day to find that Google had translated all the admin pages into Chinese. I live in Hong Kong so Google, thinking they were being smart, used my IP address as the basis on which to make the decision to translate it.

Not being able to find the help link (because I can’t read Chinese) I logged into my Google account (Adwords, Gmail, etc,) to raise a request for them to translate my blog back to English.

After a week nothing had happened. I’d got no reply and still couldn’t read my admin screens. So I simply decided to transfer my blog to Wordpress.com.

By this time I had learned enough about blogging to have heard that Wordpress was the place to be. So I imported all my old Blogger posts and started to learn Wordpress. Given what I’d heard I was looking forward to great things.

One thing I noticed immediately was that my posts were suddenly figuring much more quickly in the natural search results, so it looked as though at least some of what I’d heard was correct.

And I happily blogged away until…

…one day I tried to log on to be met with a notice telling me my blog had been suspended for infringing Wordpress’ terms and conditions.

DAMN..!! Twice inside a month I’d been blind-sided by my blogging platform and the second occasion was even more damaging than the first. (It doesn’t look too professional when your visitors are told that your blog’s been suspended for infringing terms and conditions).

So, finally, I was pushed into the realisation that I had no option but to set up my own blog and host it myself.

So off I clicked to Wordpress.org to see what I could find out. And I was pleasantly surprised.

Firstly - the instructions they’ve set out for downloading and installing a WP blog are delightfully clear and easy to follow.

There are a few minimum requirements set out, which pretty much every hosting provider meets. You can always check with your provider if you’re not sure. Mine does, so I printed off the instructions and got going.

First step is to set up the database. Easy to do - the instructions are very clear, include screen shots for every step of the way and are written in simple, non-techie language.

I then downloaded and unzipped the blog files, entered my newly created database details into the config file, (just followed the instructions), uploaded the files and accessed the installation screen via my browser (the URL is provided in the instructions). That kicked off the installation script and I was all done.

It was, literally, a 5-minute exercise.

However, the majority of hosting providers now give you an even easier method than that:

One click installation.

I’ve never done a 1-click installation so I can’t confirm whether it really is one click or whether a few more are involved - but it’s definitely very easy and it doesn’t involve any downloading, unzipping and uploading of files.

So what are the benefits of running your own blog on your own server?

You have total control. You can write what you like, you can drive traffic to affiliate programs, no one is going to translate it into Chinese, and no one is going to lose your database.

You can customise it as much as you like. Customisation is done through plug-ins, and there are plug-ins for just about anything you can think of. You decide what you want to do with your blog, then you can either go to the Wordpress plug-in directory or do a Google search for a plug-in for the function you want.

Download the plug-in, unzip it, upload it and activate it through the blog admin screens. It’s that simple. Really.

But of all the sexy things you can do with your self-hosted blog, probably the biggest benefit of all comes from the SEO elements.

This really turns your blog into an incredibly effective way of figuring strongly in the natural search results.

Optimising your blog for the search engines is simply a question of installing and activating the appropriate SEO related plug-ins. And you can find probably the best list of these in Jack Humphrey’s Authority Blackbook.

If you’ve gone to the trouble of setting up your own, self-hosted blog then you should absolutely download this book and follow the guidelines in there for optimising it properly for the search engines.

Firstly, it’s free and secondly, if you don’t set up your blog properly you’re wasting an enormous portion of its SEO potential.

It would be like buying a Ferrari but never taking it out of the city centre.

I’m now using my blog as my primary means of drawing in traffic. I haven’t spend a dime on promoting it - and I don’t have any intention of doing so going forwards.

And yet my blog is now attracting a little over 50% of the total traffic I’m getting on a weekly basis - that’s traffic to my blog plus traffic to all my other sites - and that’s almost totally due to the SEO effectiveness of my plugin-rich, self-hosted blog.

Within the next year I’m aiming for that to be well over 80%.

About this author

Martin Malden grew up in Zimbabwe and now lives in Hong Kong. He writes a blog covering tips, techniques and resources for small- or home-business owners. For more information check out his blog here:
http://www.wealthydragon.com/blog/

Technorati Tags: Blogs, Marketing, SEO

There is now no doubts that blogging your company’s services, products or business can produce a very effective increase in visitor levels but watch the pitfalls. Here is the portfolio of our agency’s blogs and 5 reasons why errors in blogging for business can cause your efforts to produce lacklustre results;

• www.costa-blanca-properties.eu
• www.cyprusprops.com
• www.blog.fx-foreignexchange.com
• www.gatehouseestates.co.uk
• www.gatehouseestates.com
• www.gatehouseinternational.com
• www.gatehouserental.com
• www.ibizavillasforsale.com
• www.italyvillasforsale.com
• www.mallorcavillasforrent.com
• www.mypolarisworld.eu
• www.portugalprop.com
• www.sellmyvilla.com

• No clear objectives. With all the buzz and promise of increased search engine visibility, improved customer communications and PR, many companies task their IT group to “set up a blog” without ever planning exactly what the key objectives are. A few weeks later, you’ll often hear, “OK, we have the blog installed and a few posts made, where’s all the traffic? What do we do now?”There are many reasons to start a business blog ranging from PR goals like building thought leadership and better connecting to customers to serving as part of a SEO program by archiving newsletters, FAQs and “link bait” content. The key is to identify the objectives for the corporate blog, get key metrics identified and create a content creation and promotion plan consistent with reaching those goals.

• Unrealistic expectations and resource allocation. Blogging is work, no doubt about it. Not everyone is a natural blog writer and community builder. A successful business blog puts a personality on the company and both listens and responds to the community. Expecting a blog to be a silver bullet purely based on the SEO friendliness of blog software for example, is as shortsighted as expecting on-page SEO alone to solve a web site’s search engine ranking problems.Successful business blogs require a forecast of resources (people, process and technology) so there are no surprises and so the blog doesn’t “run out of gas”. Setting short and long term goals along with mechanisms for reporting them is key. It’s also important to implement measures of accountability for those involved. If a company is going to start a blog, they should plan for success rather than treating it like a crapshoot. Commit or go home.

• Not sourcing content for the long term. One of the most common reasons business blogs lack content or posting frequency is a combination of not participating in the blogging community conversation and not identifying content sources. Keyword researched blog categories can serve as a sort of editorial guide on what to write about as well as identifying a mix of post types to be written on a regular basis. For example, we run polls, review SEO blogs, cover conferences, write about common client marketing issues, invite guest posts, review books, list “top 10 resources” and interview well known people in our industry. That list makes up our editorial guide so we don’t “run out”.Companies would also do well to identify multiple people to write for the company blog so no one person is tasked with too much. Businesses can also tap into the knowledge and idea streams that come from front line interactions in their organization such as those between customer service and clients as well as sales and prospects. Aggregating common issues from those interactions provides excellent content sources for a business blog.

• No feedback mechanisms. Comments and trackbacks are a big part of why blogs are different than web sites. However, many business blogs don’t allow comments because they fear the time/expense of staffing required to handle them. They also fear what readers might say. My opinion is that a blog without comments isn’t really a blog. Comments are a goal not a liability. Feedback from readers, good and bad creates a conversation that includes the company. The conversation is already happening elsewhere, why not have it in your own backyard?The second part of the feedback mechanism is analytics. Web visitor analytics, RSS feed analytics, on-site search, social media monitoring, inbound links and comments on other blogs all provide abundant opportunities to measure the effect of a business blog and its reach. This kind of feedback can motivate the right mix of resources to evolve the blog as a key component of the organizations PR and marketing program just like any other marketing effort.

• Do it yourself syndrome. Companies can setup blogs themselves quite easily, but judging by the number of “dead” blogs out there, it’s a very different thing to setup a blog than to start a blog and be successful with it. As with any potentially complicated and lucrative venture, anticipating all the contingencies and dependencies is near impossible unless it’s been done before. As blog consultants we encourage companies to start their own internal blogs and see what’s involved. That way they can appreciate the challenges of developing a successful blog. Substantial time, money and effort can be saved by having the right consultant provide strategic and tactical insight. For the same reasons people hire guides on jungle, mountain or desert excursions, businesses can realize the benefits of blogging more efficiently and cost effectively when working with a capable consultant. Avoiding major risks due to uninformed decision making is also a benefit of working with a consultant either periodically or on an ongoing basis.