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I’m currently experimenting with a couple of SEO plugins for Wordpress. The first is All in One SEO Pack from Uberdose.

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This nifty addition adds meta tags to each post. I know all the SEO experts will tell you that meta tags are long dead and buried but we aren’t using them here to gain ranking, but to give the search engines a nice user-friendly title and description.

The second plugin is Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress

I had a very bad experience with XML sitemaps when they were first introduced. It wasn’t that Google ignored my sitemap. Quite the contrary. It came calling hard and fast. Only trouble was I had built one of those grey-hat sites (dark grey) with about 800,000 pages. It was a long time ago when bandwidth was measured in megabytes and it got very expensive very quickly. Since then I’ve been shy of generating them, although I’m a reformed character now and only use purely white hat techniques. Honest.

This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search. As well as generating the sitemap it calculates a priority for each post based on the number of comments and notifies Ask.com, Google, MSN Live Search and Yahoo via ping.

Obviously you can also submit the sitemap via Google webmaster console to monitor its progress.

I’m going to use blogger.com for the niche blog case study.

There are lots of reasons I shouldn’t:

1. They will delete a whole account seemingly on a whim with no recourse.

2. Most blogs get labeled as spam sooner or later with an annoying and time consuming procedure to reinstate the blog.  This seem to happen with most of my hand-written original content blogs after 20 or so posts.

3. If, by chance, the blog becomes popular, you are stuck with myblog.blogspot.com forever and your credibility may suffer.

4. You have less control over the format and links

However, there are some perfectly good reasons as well:

1. It’s free.

2. It’s owned by Google and shouldn’t be banned from their index anytime soon.

3.Because it’s a subdomain of blogspot.com there’s a  possibility of getting some search engine love based on the popularity of every blog on that domain.

4. Blogspot.com should be firmly out of the sandbox

Obviously there are many other free blog platforms with similar advantages and disadvantages such as wordpress.com but I’m most familiar with blogger.com.

Disclaimer. The above SEO points may be total hogwash.  I’m not an SEO expert but my experience is that blogger.com/blogspot.com blogs don’t seem to suffer the same sandbox effects as a blog hosted on its on domain.  Since this is a short-term, make some cash quick experiment, this is important.  For a longer-term project it may not be an issue.

I would like to use the hungry school approach to finding a niche.  Find potential visitors with a problem looking for answers.

This is where you come in.  There are well over 200 people reading this blog most days and I figure you can do some of the work.  Use the methodology in this post (or any other techniques you use) to select a niche with eager customers. 

I will build the blog around the niche I select from reader’s recommendations and – here’s the good bit – after it’s up and running and the case study has finished, I will transfer ownership of the blog to whoever suggested the niche.  It’s theirs to use as they wish.  It should be getting visitors and making money by this point.  All future income will go to the new owner of the blog.  Obviously only one person will get the resulting blog so make your suggestion(s) count.

Suggest topics in the comments section or shoot me an email at micah (at) bloggingonblogging.com.  I will pick whatever niche I think will do well.  Please give me the reasons you suggest a particular niche such as number of searches and competition in Google.

I’ve long been a fan of long-tail searches.  These are those searches in Google that may only result in a handful of visitors each but add up to the majority of your traffic.  For example, your intended keyword may be “Bass Fishing” but your visitors will find you using such terms as “green bass fishing lures” or “best bass fishing spots in Texas”.  Each may only get 1 or 2 visitors a month but there are literally millions of such terms being used in Google daily.   These searches make up at least 80% of my traffic.

These will also often convert far better than more general terms for affiliate marketing.  A search for “buy bass lures” is of more value than a search for “bass fishing”. The first has their credit card out and is ready to buy, the second is probably just wondering what a bass looks like.

Up to now it has been difficult to take advantage of these long-tail searches.  You can go through your website logs but the sheer quantity of them will leave your mind reeling.  Enter Hittail.com

“HitTail is a content intelligence service that reveals in real-time the least utilized, most promising keywords hidden in the long tail of your natural search results. We present these terms as suggestions that when acted on will boost the natural search results of your site. It’s simple, easy to use, and the results are immediate.”

Hit Tail, in beta at the moment, sorts through your long-tail searches and gives recommendations on blog topics.  Topics that your readers are already searching for and, more importantly, topics that will likely result in more visitors.

I’ve been using Hit Tail for about a week now on two of my blogs and the results are impressive.  It has given me some great ideas for blog topics.  It’s too early to say if these will result in more traffic but I’m optimistic.

It’s a bit confusing to see how it all works, so watch their demo and read their blog.

My dictionary describes parochial as being very limited or narrow in scope or outlook; provincial: parochial views.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that the internet is truly global in scale, not just American (or British, or Russian, or French).  Could you be missing out on thousands of visitors from the rest of the world?  It’s quite possible that you only want visitors from the US, but unlikely. 

English has become the language of commerce throughout the world and I find that many of my visitors are coming from traditionally non English speaking countries such as Sweden, Bulgaria, Thailand and The Philippines to name but a few from yesterday’s website log.  I also have hundreds of visitors from Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.

To use a simple example, most countries spell some words differently than in US English.  The United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India all use the traditional British spelling and not the US version which was only introduced in 1828 by Noah Webster.  The main differences included changing “-our” to “-or” (favour/favor),  “-re” to “-er” (theatre/theater), “-ence” to “-ense” (defence/defense)   and “-ise” to “ize”  (monetise/monetize), plus some random other changes including using a single “l” for inflected forms. Leveled instead of Levelled.

If your website is about coloring leather, who is finding your site when they search for “how to colour leather” in Australia?  I’m not suggesting mixing spellings on a single page, although I’ve done this myself, but how about some articles with the alternative spelling?  Maybe everybody is promoting a particular Clickbank product using the US spelling and leaving the field wide open for the rest of the world?

I sure have some awesome SEO talent.  This blog is ranked #1 in Google for mesitholemiamathoma

I must rush off and write a $97 ebook revealing how you, yes you, can also be #1 in Google for any search term of my choice.  In fact, if you don’t buy the ebook right now, the price is going to go up to $197, then $297 tomorrow then I’m going to take if off the market completely.  You will lose out FOREVER on these ground-breaking secrets.

Click here to order now, even if it’s 3am in the morning…

On a more serious note, this is exactly what some of the more unscrupulous SEO firms are doing.  You send them $5,000 (no kidding) and they will guarantee you #1 position on Google by adding some meta-tags to your site.  Unless you read the small print very carefully, and believe me there’s a lot of small print, you won’t know that it’s a search term of their choice.  Usually your company name in quotes.

Easy money but I don’t think I could sleep at nights.

Actually, that’s given me an idea for another ebook. I can see the title now… “How I make $5,000 a day sitting in my underwear at the kitchen table… learn how you too can work at home with just a computer and internet connection with this amazing $5,000 a day opportunity.  Become respected in your community as a Search Engine Optimizer.”  I’ll have to sell this one for $497 and limit the number to 100  96  92 56 (only 12 left! Order NOW!) sales to prevent competition. 

Saturday 8:40 am Mark recently made a comment about a delay in getting blogger.com blogs indexed in Google.  As an experiment I’m going to create a new blogger.com blog and see how long it takes big G to find it.  I’ll report real-time in this post on progress.  I’ll also use most of the $1 a day blog techniques (sorry, I know I haven’t published the doc yet) to get the blog listed in the search engines.

I will spend this weekend writing some content and start the indexing on Monday.  Normally I would do it all on the same day but apparently it’s some sort of convention to spend time with your family at weekends.  So my wife tells me anyway.

I’ve also created an account at Statcounter to track traffic.

I will add a link to the blogger.com blog here on Monday since I don’t want Google to get a head start on a link from this blog.

Saturday 12:30pm I’ve written 3 posts for the new blog this morning, but my wife is now insisting that I go shoe shopping with her this afternoon (ugh!)  Like 296 pairs of shoes isn’t enough for one woman. 

I decided to create a blog about World of Warcraft.  If you aren’t familiar with the game, it will probably be total giberish to you, but I did this for two main reasons:

1.  You should write about what you know and, with a little bit of effort, you may even add some content to the web rather than yet another spam blog.

2.  There are enough blogs about mesitholemiamathoma (or whatever it’s called) already and I’m hoping it will get a decent ranking in big G for a less competitve term.

I will try and add another two posts this evening or tomorrow ready for indexing on Monday.

Saturday 12:45pm  Official retraction and apology. Apparently the Wife also reads this blog.  She has asked me to point out that she only has 262 pairs of shoes (not counting sports shoes obviously) and that my claim that she had 296 pairs was scurrilous and defamatory and makes her look like some sort of shoe addict. I apologize unreservedly and withdraw that remark.

Saturday 6:00pm back from the trials of shoe shopping with only 3 new pairs.  265 and counting.  I’ve posted a total of four short articles on the new blog today.  I’ll go into a why, what and when explanation when I link to the blog on Monday. Tomorrow I intend to write and post another four.   This seems to have turned into a blog promotion example as well as a “how long to blogger.com indexing” experiment.  Hopefully we will all learn something.

Sunday 07:00am Man, it’s called Blogger BETA for a reason.  I’m spending more time dealing with bugs than writing posts.  Why does anybody use blogger.com?  I managed to get one post added after a struggle, now it’s giving me a 404 page not found error when I try to login.

Monday 6:30am I’ve added a couple more posts to bring the total to 7.  I have 3 more short posts to add today.  I’ve spent a total of about three hours creating content and will spend another hour or so promoting the blog.  When I’m properly awake, I will make the blog public (one neat blogger.com feature), ping the world using pingoat.com then add each of the permalinks for the posts to the social bookmarking sites. Since this is a timing experiment, I won’t do anything else until I see that the blog has been indexed in Google.  Once it has been indexed by big G, I will attempt to promote the blog to reasonable traffic levels.  Assuming this works, I will then go through the steps to monetize the blog. 

Monday 9:50am Three of the posts have been added to Del.icio.us, Furl, BlogMarks, Reddit and BlinkList.  No particular reason I used these except they happened to be on my toolbar links.  I’ll add the rest over the next hour.  I’m checking Google every couple of hours to see when the links themselves get listed.

Tuesday 8:00am No links showing on Google or MSN yet but it did receive 162 unique visitors yesterday from the bookmarks.  It’s listed in Technorati search and links are listed in Yahoo.  I would normally be getting an EzinesArticle published and submitting it to Netscape at this point, but I’m restraining myself since I want to see what effect the bookmarks alone have.

Tuesday 10:00pm I received the first visitor from Google at 7:02pm today.  That makes it about 34 hours from blog go live to the first search-engine visitor.  I’m not sure when exactly the blog was first listed but probably not long before 7pm.   Normally a new domain gets listed within 24 hours, but I suspect the fact that blogger.com blogs are on a subdomain may slow things down a little.  I will submit an article to EzineArticles and some other stuff in the morning and see what sort of traffic I can generate.

Wednesday 7:00am 70 unique visitors yesterday including 12 from Google.  Article submitted and waiting for review.  Netscape appears to be broken this morning. I will try this again later.

Friday 3:00pm An average of 60 visitors a day over the last 3 days, mostly from “long-tail” queries on Google.  Still waiting for the article to be approved.  If it isn’t approved by Monday, I will submit it to the second tier article directories.

Monday 7:30am 130 visitors on Saturday and 209 yesterday, so everything is going to plan so far.  Almost all from Google.  I find that they are the quickest to start delivering traffic, with the other search engines following two to three weeks later. Traffic would have been better if the article had already been approved.  No doubt the EzineArticles editors have been slowed down by turkey overdose.  I added links to three affiliate products yesterday morning and got $32.30 in commission yesterday so this is also off to a nice start.

Tuesday 9:00am Only 146 visitors yesterday but another $32.90 in affiliate commissions.  Hmm, if it keeps up at the current rate that’s $11,900 a year.  Not bad for 4 hours work.  I really don’t expect to earn anything like that from the blog of course, it’s just a fluke.  Really.

Thursday 8:00am I emailed EzineArticles support last night. more in hope than expectation, about the lack of approval.  This seemed to have worked since it was approved a few hours later.  131 visitors yesterday including the first non-Google search from AOL. 

It’s a Wrap This will be the last entry in this post.  The blog has been online for 2 weeks and is getting a regular 150 a day, almost all from Google.   In the end, I created a total of 14 posts, some of them trivial.  All posts were original content.  I submitted one article to EzineArticles and a slightly modified version to GoArticles.  I bookmarked most of the pages on the social bookmark sites I mentioned and pinged using Pingoat twice.  Total time spend on building and promoting the blog was about 5 hours. It was indexed, and received the first Google visitor after 34 hours.  Total affiliate commission for the two weeks was $195 and change, about $14 a day.  

Latest update here.