4 Tips to Search Success When Starting a New Blog

These are great tips for starting a new website in general [http://web.archive.org/web/20101231070559/http://www.metromarketingblog.com/category/general/], but for a new blog project these few tricks will help you take that first step down the road of success online.

1. Choosing a great domain name to insure success in your new blogging project.

Many times people new to creating websites or planning websites just don’t grasp the simple things you can do to increase exposure to your website. You have to get a basic understanding how search engines think and find your content. The best traffic is free, targeted traffic.

When starting this blog I chose to put the words ‘marketing’ and ‘blog’ in the URL. Remember: the URL is displayed in Google search result pages. Every page on this blog has unique, keyword identifying file names and title tags. Learn to bridge the gap between how Google thinks and how the average Joe Everyman thinks when he does a search.

2. Use the best blogging CMS ever created called WordPress.

Don’t listen to people who say, “Start a bunch of Blogspot.com blogs and blah blah blah…”

Those people are dumb. Currently, and probably forever, Blogspot (Google) doesn’t allow you to easily edit any title tags or meta data for each page or post. For as long as Google has owned Blogspot you would think they would be hip on the SEO side of things.

WordPress allows you to easily install free plugins to help you with every aspect of marketing your blog to the search crawlers. I will be writing reviews on some of the newest ones I am trying out on this blog at a later date. From what I’ve seen digging around the past few weeks the SEO tools for WordPress have greatly improved over the past 2 years.

Download the latest release of WordPress here or I suggest using GoDaddy.com for web hosting and 5 minute automatic installs of WordPress and other web applications. They do all the work you just tell them which domain you want it placed on. I’ll have lessons on this in the future.

3. Submit your new URL to Google.

Usually right after I register a domain I get started on getting tangled up in the search engines. Google is the main concern because the rule the web search industry.

There are videos online of employees from Google saying it may take up to a week or even a month to get listed in search results, but I’ve never seen it take more than 3 days in a long time. I guess the order and quickness of how I do things plays a part in getting listed quickly.

4. Use Google Analytics to your advantage.

They give you all the tools you need if you just pay attention to them. I’ve been using their stats tool since it came out a few years ago. It really lets you get an understanding of the habits of your users and lets you easily track success in any web project. Best of all, it’s completely free to use.

I’ll show you how to better understand parts of the free Google Analytics tool in future posts.

You must have a Google account to use this service, but don’t worry that’s free too. Just sign up for a free Gmail account and you’ll be on your way to success.