Email to Client Exposes Secrets of the Hottest Blogs

What can I say to help my trusted friend? His site advises people on a controversial subject in 2009: ETFs.

I gave him some tips last summer, and since then, apparently 20,000+ people a month are coming to his site.

That’s pretty good traffic, right? Well, with his subject, his intelligence, and his website’s potential, I know he can do a whole lot better.

I know, I know, shamelessly tooting my horn here. But at least, I thought you might benefit if we share some ideas that have helped. Since it’s really win-win to share, come on into the conversation.

After all, who doesn’t want to avoid the biggest blog hosting mistakes and learn how to blog with the most profitable blog software, which happens to be free?

Blog Templates

Already got your blog? You’ll need a template. Thousands of templates litter the internet. Many of these will not help your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) at all. Don’t have SEO? You’re missing out on tons of people who could be at your website.

We’ll navigate through all the confusion to look at the best blog template I’ve ever found. See the standard for the SEO guru behind 30 of the top 100 blogs on the internet? The template we’re talking about does way better than what Neil reveals there.

It not only looks really hot, it’s extremely simple to use for all the non-coders. Yet it’s customizable to the nth degree. Best of both worlds.

Why don’t I use this template on my site here if it’s so great? It costs $87. I want this site to be an example that as many people as possible can copy from and use. (Maybe you have $87, maybe you don’t.)

My web hosting for this site costs about $70 a year, but I don’t see a better alternative. If you know of a place where you can find a good company with PHP, MySQL for less…let me know.

The price of this WordPress template is why I also recommend the second best template ever (in my opinion), which happens to be free for you to download and use. It’s called NeoClassical (also has awesome SEO and comes from the same author).

By the way, I’d never recommended blogging to my friend before. Imagine what he can do with a good blog plugged into his site!

Choosing Plugins

Not only themes (templates) - choosing the right plugins is essential. See the end of the email below for juicy tidbits on using the right plugins for your blog.

Without further ado, here’s the email I sent my friend today (name changed for privacy):

Jacob,
Wanted to mention some things I think will really be helpful. Also wanted to check all my sources before recommending something.

In the past I’ve recommended some topics - keywords that fewer people are writing about, but a relatively larger number of people are searching for. That’s still a good strategy, but I’ve found some methods I now believe are far more effective for you now.

Whether people have a Google toolbar installed or not, Google has a very good idea of just how many people are visiting any given website. How many people come to your site now tells Google more than anything else how high to rank your site.

In other words, your article may use a keyword like “etf” …but so do hundreds of other articles on hundreds of other sites. And these hundreds of sites are also following Google’s rules: put the keyword in the page title, use the keyword in the article, have a good sitemap, etc.

Your keywords tell Google WHAT to rank you for. The number of people visiting you tells Google HOW HIGH to rank you. The site with the most traffic gets the highest ranking in Google. Problem is, if you don’t have the traffic in the first place, you won’t get ranked.

The bottom line for you is probably not what keywords to be ranked for. The question is probably: What can you do to be seen above these other sites? What can you do to get more people to your website?

Why Blogging and Picking the Right Blog Host Is Crucial

I’ve researched blogging for several years now. I’d say 99% of all the blogging platforms out there - even the popular ones: TypePad, Blogger (Blogspot), WordPress.com - won’t help you.

There are many reasons:
(1) Your content is hosted on someone else’s website - they get way more benefit than you do - even if you link back to your own site like crazy.
(2) These blog sites don’t follow many rules of good SEO - they’re just too big to change when the SEO rules change
(3) If something happens to one of these sites - an outage or they go out of business, what then? No guarantees
This list could go on.

The exception to this is blogging software: WordPress (from WordPress.org, not WordPress.com) and MoveableType. My research says that WordPress is clearly better at SEO than MoveableType.

The Power of Syndication

Syndication is a big reason a blog can be so powerful for getting more people to visit your website. For every article you write, the article is immediately sent to at least 10 other big online news sources - sort of like a press release. (Probably why Google bought the biggest and best blog syndication service - FeedBurner).

Why WordPress

I saw a CNN article that interviewed the creator of WordPress. The article mentioned a Google statistic saying 1% of the entire internet (1 out 100 webpages) now uses WordPress - which is huge. It didn’t hurt the popularity of this software that you can download it for free at WordPress.org and use it indefinitely for free. (The creator of WordPress makes money on optional add-on services that I haven’t found necessary yet.)

Installation Tips

If you choose to do a blog, I would create a directory on your site: ETFguide.com/blog

…and install the software there.

Blogging Strategy

The strategy I’d recommend for using this blog would be to write new articles through the blog. The News/Commentary/Interviews links on the homepage can still look the same, but new article excerpts and links will direct readers to blog articles instead of the older pages.

How and Why It Works So Well

When you set up the blog, it creates a blog admin area where you can log in. It’s very user friendly and writers can publish very professional-looking articles without website coding know-how.

With a blog connected to another free service, FeedBurner, there’s no waiting on Google to visit. As soon as you click the “Publish” button after you write your article…Google immediately visits your site to index the article. Soon after, Yahoo and MSN follow.

More About Installing WordPress

Just having WordPress is, of course, not enough. It has to be set up properly to have Google’s blessing.

Their website has instructions called the “Famous 5-Minute Install” …sounds simple, but if it was, people wouldn’t be charging big money to do it for you. Wanting to analyze everything in detail, it took me many hours the first time I set one up. I can do it quickly now, but certainly not in 5 minutes.

I’d be happy to suggest to you all the things I’ve found, and/or walk you through an install - and tell you what I’m personally using on my blogs. Not only for the best SEO, but for securing your website, etc.

Blog Templates or Themes

For example, when you install WordPress, you have to choose a “theme” (think template) for the visual appearance of your blog. There are thousands of these templates on the internet. Many are free. Many also will destroy the SEO on your blog. Be selective.

In my opinion, the best templates I’ve found (professional appearance, and the very best SEO) are made by Chris Pearson. Seems like the higher traffic blogs on the internet are using his themes, too.

His best free theme is the NeoClassical (I like to use this on my own blogs). However, I really recommend his Thesis theme. (You can get the $87 version for use on one blog. You can also upgrade to the developer edition for an additional $77, or just get it to start with for $164.)

If you decide to use the NeoClassical theme, though, I’d customize it a bit just to change the look of it. The SEO, even of this free template would be hard to improved upon. I’m convinced the Thesis template’s SEO is the best you’ll find anywhere.

SEO and WordPress Templates

Chris’ discussion on SEO at…
pearsonified.com/2007/11/neoclassical_theme_for_wordpress.php

…talks technical about the SEO benefits of this NeoClassical theme (I believe the features discussed here set his themes apart from almost any you can find). These features are also in the Thesis theme, and then some.

At least Chris’ themes follow the rules of the guy who runs QuickSprout (a guy who’s done SEO consulting for 30 of the top 100 blogs on the internet).

Choosing The Right Plugins

Another thing when you install WordPress - you want to choose the right plugins. If you do a Google search for “wordpress all in one seo pack” you’ll find a page on WordPress.org with a free download link for this.

This email is already getting long, so I’ll just quickly say you’ll also want plugins for backing up your blog and for automatically creating a sitemap.

Blogging Services You’ll Definitely Want

You’ll want to sign up with FeedBurner.Google.com. (Be sure to choose the PingShot service which syndicates your blog - this is a huge boost in getting people to your website.) They have a large number of features you can use. About the only one I wouldn’t use is: “Track Clickthroughs” (how often people click links back to your site). It’s part of their FeedBurner analytics package. I use this analytics package, but not this part of it. Why: it changes all the links on your blog to go through FeedBurner first - I think this helps Google’s agenda, but will ultimately hurt your SEO.

I’m sure this is already too much to digest at once, so I’ll quit. If you’d like, I’d be happy to explain more, either by phone or email.

-John

There you have it: the best blogging software, the best themes, some of the best plugins and services - go forth and conquer.

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