I am so excited to introduce you to PathwaysforAging.com. Jeannie and her team have been coaching clients for a long time, and we recently decided to convert her old site to a blog-site…. In addition to the standard blog functionality, we also setup all the other functionality of a regular website, including an email newsletter, a store, and brochure-type pages to describe her services and her team.

One more exciting piece of news is related to the search engine ranking for her site. The old site didn’t appear in Google. I added the SEO functionality from the Wordpress plugins we use last night, and today Pathways for Aging is number 1 and 2 in the Google results. It doesn’t get any better than that!

Congratulations Jeannie and the entire Pathways for Aging, Inc. team. Check out the site at www.PathwaysforAging.com.

One of the biggest challenges for a new blogger learning how to blog is determining what to write about. We have a list of 15 different ways to blog that we share with our clients, and I’ll describe one of them here.

First, think about the question, “What is something my readers really need to know about?” Make a list of the 10 most common questions you get about your topic. Then do keyword research to see exactly what phrases are used most often in the search engines for that topic.

For example, one of the topics you need to know about when creating your blog is a “blogroll”. So I went to the Wordtracker keyword tool and determined that the most commonly typed phrase is What is a blogroll? So then I wrote a post with the title, Glossary: What is a Blogroll? and back when I created this post, I ranked #11 on Google for this phrase–and I got traffic from it.

The Wordtracker keyword tool will tell you the different phrases people type in and how popular each one is. The best way to start is by typing in a fairly general phrase (for example, I used “blog”) and then look at the list Wordtracker generates. Then you can pick a phrase that is used often and is easy for you to blog about.

So if you’re having trouble determining what to blog about, follow these three simple steps:

1) Go back to basics. What do your readers need to know?
2) Do keyword research with the Wordtracker keyword tool to see how they are looking for that phrase.
3) Create a post with a commonly-used keyword phrase in the title and in the post.

It doesn’t get much easier than that when you are trying to learn how to blog!

One of the things I absolutely love about the custom blogs we are setting up is how quickly Google loves them. Our latest blog is #1 on Google in just a week or so.

One of our challenges is explaining to people why they shouldn’t use the free blogs. I have lots of reasons (watch for a future post) but one of the main ones is we custom format and program your blog so that Google loves it.

We’ve researched what works (and what doesn’t!) and while we can’t promise you’ll get the same results, you will be further ahead of your customer who is using a free blog and doesn’t have all the cool features you will!