building seo niche blogs

Building SEO niche websites with WordPress

Why should anyone bother to use the blogging tool WordPress to build search engine optimized niche websites ? Why not stick with a HTML website builder and good old static webpages ?

Well, there are quite a few advantages of building either an entire site with WordPress or at least adding a WordPress blog with keyword focused articles to an existing site.

1) Getting indexed fast without having to pay for high PR links:

In a previous newsletter I�ve told you my experience with different ways for getting a new site indexed and the fastest was by adding a blog and submitting the blog to important feed and blog directories as well as to myYahoo. How to submit your blog is tought in the blogging video tutorial that you�ve got as gift for subscribing. Don�t skip this important part. Just by submitting my blogs to these directories (which costs nothing but 30 minutes of my time), all my blogs received a Google PR 3.

2) Additional Traffic:

If you are building a SEO niche site with traditional static webpages, your main free traffic sources will be the search engines and your link partners. With a well optimized WordPress blog, you will get free traffic from search engines and link partners, too. But in addition, you will get free traffic from feed directories and other websites whose webmasters syndicate your articles (Hint: many webmasters display headlines from Yahoo�s RSS feeds and if your blog is in Yahoo�s directory, your articles are included in these feeds, too).

3) Easy, automatic site growth

A website that constantly grows has a good chance to rank better than a site which is stagnant. Whith WordPress, you can post all your articles on the same day and still make your site grow constantly over time.

So let�s see how to do it.

First of all, do the research for your niche site topic and conduct a keyword research for your niche topic just like you would do for a traditional SEO website, too.

For a detailed step-by-step course in building SEO niche sites, I suggest you study Dr. Andy William�s mini course which he�s publishing in his newsletter. The first lesson starts in the newsletter issue #89 and the course is still going on. Andy�s past issues are on his ezseonews blog.

Organize your keywords into primary and secondary keyphrases. The primary ones will be used to create different categories on your blog and the secondary keyphrases are the ones which will be used for the keyword focused pages (blog posts).

Hence, I recommend you choose medium competitive keyphrases (between 5000 and 20000 competing pages in Google) with good daily search counts for your blog categories and low competitive phrases (up to 1000 competing pages) with an average of min. 2 daily searches for your articles.

Here is an example of an organized keyword list related to the home improvement niche. From the various topics in this huge niche, I�ve inlcuded only two possible categories for this example. Please note that the number of competing pages might already be different by the time you read this article - since I�ve researched these keywords, a lot of water has flown down the river Danube (as we use to say here).

daily search count - competing pages in Google - keyword

Primary keyword #1:

84 4530 bathroom remodeling ideas

Secondary keywords:

15 15 bathroom remodeling southlake tx
14 55 ideas for remodeling a small bathroom
11 814 bathroom remodeling pictures
7 19 bathroom remodeling planner
6 19 bathroom remodeling checklist
6 636 small bathroom remodeling
5 13 remodeling a tiny bathroom
4 386 bathroom remodeling philadelphia
4 24 bathroom remodeling and ideas
3 10 bathroom walls remodeling

Primary keyword #2:

142 180000 cabinet refacing

Secondary keywords:

15 121 affordable cabinet refacing
14 29 cabinet refacing franchises
11 105 refacing cabinet doors
10 114 kitchen cabinet refacing price
10 2 cabinet refacing jobs ma
8 18 cabinet refacing nj
7 590 cabinet door refacing
7 57 kitchen cabinet refacing do it yourself
7 626 cabinet refacing cost
5 188 do it yourself cabinet refacing
4 129 cabinet refacing materials
4 32 cabinet custom refacing
3 488 cabinet door kitchen refacing
3 30 cabinet refacing michigan
3 28 cabinet refacing how to

Whether you write the keyword focused articles yourself or hire a ghostwriter to do this job is up to you. These articles for your blog posts do not have to be very long - something between 200 and 400 words is well enough. To add more content to a short article, you could simply include a keyword focused newsfeed at the bottom of the article (as tought in the updated advanced CaRP tutorial).

Once you have your articles written, it�s time to tweak your WordPress blog to make it SEO niche site ready. I assume you already have your blog installed and went through the basic configurations like shown in the video tutorial.

The first thing you need to do is to use a search engine optimized theme. I have created three simple and easily customizable SEO themes that are included in the updated blogging tutorial. You can also download them separately from EasyWebTutorials just in case you have the old version of the tutorial:

Get SEO Themes

Second, you should enable the permalinks and use a custom URL structure that includes the category names and post titles. Go to your blog�s admin panel > Options > Permalinks and enter the following custom structure:

/%category%/%postname%/%post_id%/

Now go to > Options > Reading and set the first option to “50″ “posts” (”Blog Pages: Show at most: 50 posts”). This way you make sure that direct links to all the keyword focused posts are always live on the category index pages and your pages are only a maximum of 2 clicks away from your blog�s homepage.

Posting the articles to your blog.

To post an article to your seo niche blog, simply enter the article�s title into the title field, the article body into the post editor and I also recommend that you use the article�s keyphrase as post slug. The post slug is used in the permanent URL of a blog post instead of its title. It makes your URLs shorter and cleaner looking.

You should not post all your articles at once but constantly over a certain period of time in order to simulate a constant growth of your site. This looks far better to the search engines and might give your site better rankings. I know that it would be a time consuming task to log into your WordPress admin panel each day and post a few articles. Fortunately, there are ways to speed this up.

A simple way would be to change the timestamp for each article to a future date and time and then click on the publish button. The article will then appear live on your blog only when the specified time has come. This way you can post all your articles to your blog�s database on the same day, and still make them only visible to the public and the search engines over a certain time period.

The only negative aspect of this technique is that WordPress would still send out the pings for all the articles on the same day. It would be better to send a ping only when an article appears live on your blog.

I have a nice plugin that allows me to save articles as drafts with a future timestamp instead of hitting the publish button. The plugin checks periodically if there are any drafts to be published and if yes, publishes these posts and makes WordPress send the ping. Unfortunately, this is not a free plugin - it was included in a different WP tutorial.

I�ll try to get either resell rights to it or hire someone at Elance to program a new plugin from scratch that does the same job, so I�ll be able to give this to you for free.

Another technique would be to setup the publish by e-mail feature and use an autoresponder to send your articles to your WordPress script. I�ll create a short step-by-step tutorial next week to show you how to set this up, so stay tuned and watch out for e-mails from me.