SEO Tips starting a Blog in 2010

Shortly before heading to a New Year Party to celebrate this "intense" year that gave us all so much I wanted to share a few tips with all people that are starting a blog going in 2010. Whether it is your business or your personal interests these tips apply and do give proven results.

They are based on the success of my wife Ina blog about trendy outfits. Started roughly 1 year ago from 0 visits today google analytics measured 40 000 visits,Google Webmasters - 1121 backlinks. While for many this might be minute, I am sure there are a lot of businesses and individuals who will get very excited on the idea of how to lay additional 40K sets of eyes on their content next year.

Here is the plan:

1. Chose Blogging Platform - We chose Worpdress for its ease of use and output code favoured by the search engines. While this is a great "out of the box" tool here is a list of handy plugins that will enchance search engine presence. Installing and configuring those is one click away. A catchy website template is very important. We chose a free one and looking forward to changing it. There is so much choice out there, its incredible.

 2. Decide on a topic - Using Market Samurai and Wordtracker, I found some keywords that have moderate traffic such as "trendy women's clothing" which we started out as our main keyword. The key is to target a keyword that has moderate competition and high enough traffic to target.

3. Post, Post, Post - We came up with a list of topics connected to the keyword thay would be valuable to the reader such as trendy women's clothing for the office, for work, for going out, for special occasions and etc. / see the topics in relevant blog category /. Then tried to do a post each other day. It is very important when you launch a new website to post regularly in the first 3-4 weeks so the search engine can get used to the fact this website constantly provides good content. As people say, first impression is key.

4. Fish for Links - I've mentioned this many times but I cannot stress how much 30 day challenge program has helped me and people I have worked with. The basics of getting backlinks to your site - so important for traffic and rankings, explained in a friendly and intuitive way. All for Free. Visit www.thirtydaychallenge.com. I took all the tactics the course provides and applied. Social Bookmarking, Article Sites, Hubpages and Squidoo, commenting on fellow blogs helped gather links and get a ranking boost.

6. Research - Looking at other blogs' backlinks using Yahoo Site Explorer and getting involved in commenting on their posts helped tremendously in identifying bookmarking services that are vertical specific and give good quality backlinks and traffic ( for clothing that would be stylehive.com ). As seo experts will say a link is as good as the traffic it brings.

7. Social Media - Building your blog presence on different networks helps bring more awareness because some people like hanging out on Facebook (period). Having a fanpage about your blog would not do anything by itself but combined with a little marketing it definitely helps. Ina did a small giveaway and I did a Facebook advertising which brought 30 new fans in as little as 3 days and $50 advertising spend. You can expect results only from the networks you put effort into.

8. Tweak, Tweak, Tweak - The great thing about google improving on their infrastructure is that once you get their attention your changes are applied very quickly. My-vogue.com posts are indexed within 1-2 hours of posting. We can make title changes to target new keywords in a matter of a week. This is the beauty of having well indexable blog.

9. Reflect and improve - your dream of getting a lot of traffic is clouded by the myriad of other bloggers online. In order to succeed you need an edge. While this would come naturally to some and they would become overnight viral celebrities, for majority of us it is a very difficult and long lasting process. Buy a book, read problogger.net, mashable.com, sphinn.com or find your sources of inspiration and information. And I promise if you are dedicated, the edge will come to you and you are off to being super successful online. The web is getting huge but so does the number of people that have access to it. So no worries, you have plenty of fans out there, you just need to help them find you.

Happy New Year!