Are you looking for the best way to get more search engine traffic? Be sure to jump on the blog bandwagon. Search engines love blogs because they frequently have new content and automatically notify them when a post is made. For example, when I publish this post, Google will get a “ping” that says, “There is a new blog post on YourBlogTeam.com. Come and review it.”

Here are some statistics I gathered recently on how some of our sites rank in Google. These are all sites that have been alive and doing blog posts for at least six months (we set up the optimal system for them and they did the legwork of getting incoming links and posting regularly.) –

WellnessCoach.com (currently #1 for wellness coach)
DrewStevensConsulting.com (currently #2 for drew stevens)
PathwaysforAging.com (currently #1 for pathways for aging)
GreatChristmasBook.com (currently #1 for great christmas book)
MinutestoMoments.com (currently #1 for great mom book)

(Please note: These results may change. The search engines love new content so if these site owners quit posting or the content becomes older, Google may move them down in the rankings.)

Your first step in getting some of this traffic is to set up your blog to be search-engine friendly (we have a proprietary combination of plugins and features we use). Your next step is to determine what phrases are most commonly searched for. Use Wordtracker or the Google Keyword Tool and search your topic area (read more about this at How to Blog: What Should I Blog About? Part 1). Then create a post using the phrase in the title and and a couple times in the post. This will get you started attracting the search engines.

Congratulations to Erica Ross-Krieger of WellnessCoach.com who hit #1 on Google yesterday for the highly competitive phrase “Wellness Coach.”

So how did she do it? Erica started her blog last September (so it’s been almost 10 months) and she has been climbing in rankings since then. Here are some of her secrets to success:

• Very-well written posts that appeal to her visitors.
• Regular very frequent posting, especially at the beginning.
• Development of a community of readers who link to and comment on her blog.
• Use of our propriety search engine traffic building system.
• Regular commenting on other blogs to build lots of incoming links.
• Adding photos to her posts to appeal to readers and encourage site stickiness.
• Persistence even when the results didn’t appear immediately.
• Selection of a “juicy” target market… wellness coaching is a very popular topic.

Great job, Erica!

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!