SEO is a crazy science of wizardry. It involves millions of factors that are so hard to understand and comprehend that I think we should leave it to the experts. And lets allow them to charge premium dollar for their efforts too. Really? … Well not so much. SEO isn’t really all that difficult. In fact I would go as far as to say that a lot of it is mostly grunt work, applied intelligently. So why do people think it is so difficult to understand how to rank in Google? Well the truth is that it isn’t that difficult to understand, and it certainty isn’t rocket science.Wouldn’t you like to know what the key factors are that determine what pages rank well in Google? Well the information is out there freely available, and you don’t have to buy some dick head’s Ebook to find out, lets take a look.

Key Factors for Ranking in 2011

• Keyword use in title tag
• Keyword use in domain name
• Substantive, unique content on page
• Keyword focused anchor text in links
• Quantity/quality of links
• Diversity of link sources
• Page specific trust rank
• Relevance of link sources
• Keyword specific anchor text from internal links

Source: Search Engine Ranking Factors

Keyword use in title tag

This one is straight forward and the most widely used SEO technique. If you simply include a keyword in the title of your page, you tell Google what the page is about. This will help that page rank for that keyword.

Keyword use in domain name

Domain names that have keywords in them will rank much more easily for a keyword than ones that don’t. It doesn’t mean your domain won’t rank well for any chosen keyword. But it may mean you need to build more backlinks to be on a level playing field. Believe it or not this site ranks on the front page of Google.co.nz for the keyword phrase “Make Money Online”. This doesn’t bring a huge amount of traffic because nz is small in a global search market. But it is still well worth the effort.

Substantive, unique content on page

Google loves unique content. And pages with lots of it, targeted to a keyword will rank better than those pages that may be similar in every other way, but lighter on unique content.

Keyword focused anchor text in links

For me I rate this the most important factor, but also the most hard work. To rank well for competitive keywords you are going to have to build links to your site that have your keyword as the anchor text of those links. I obviously want links aiming at this site with the phrase Make Money Online as that anchor of those links.

Quantity/quality of links

A lot of links aiming at your page or site is going to help you rank better. And a fewer amount of quality links will have the same effect.

Diversity of link sources

Having a site wide link on another site may help you rank a little, but to improve your site ranking you are going to need to build links from a variety of different sources.

Page specific trust rank

Does Google trust your site? Is it new? Or have you been around for a while. Google likes to sandbox new sites to avoid spam sites. This will stop them from ranking for a period of time. The longer your site has been around to more trust Google applies to that domain. As a result very old sites rank easily for competitive keywords.

Relevance of link sources

Relevance of links is important. If you are trying to rank for a term about Internet Marketing, You are going to want to gets links from other sites about Internet Marketing.

Keyword specific anchor text from internal links

This is something you can easily control, and it certainly does help. Think of it this way. Google doesn’t know what your site is about unless you tell them. You can tell them by including the relevant keywords to links around your site. The link at the top of this site has my main keywords in it. The links to different articles have keywords in them as I try to use keywords in titles.

Ok so that’s it. It doesn’t sound that hard. And the above list was agreed upon by 72 of the industries most influential SEO’s. So these factors are very close to fact rather than opinion. Obviously understanding SEO is one thing. Having the skills and character to be able to pull it off is another.

WordPress Onsite Factors

Obviously great content will help. If your site provides useful content that others will find useful, or enjoy reading then things are going to be easier. So, in the long run, a site with quality content is going to get more traffic, so that is the first consideration.

Setup

The first consideration with setup is your permalink structure. Search engines like Google like to see keywords in the URL, so you should change your permalink structure to:

/%postname%/   - This way the title of your post will be in your URL. If you have been using the default permalink structure for an existing blog it’s not a good idea to change it though, as it will devalue any links that are already aiming at your posts.

Plugins

The main onsite considerations with plugins are a site map plugin, and a metadata editor plugin.

Sitemap

With over 6 million downloads, the Google XML sitemaps plugin is your best choice. Basically it generates a sitemap for you, and automatically updates it when you make new posts. You then should submit this sitemap to Google web master tools, and the sitemap will make it easier for Google to spider your content.

Meta Data

Meta data is content that helps categorise each page on your site. i.e. Meta keywords, meta description. By default WordPress doesn’t do a great job with these, so you will want to download one. With over 9 million downloads at the time of writing this, the All In One SEO Pack is a good option for this.

Theme

You want a theme that is attractive and unique, so your site looks professional. It’s a good idea that your theme isn’t too heavy on images, or it may be slow to load, which will annoy your visitors. Most wordpress themes are fine in terms of SEO, however, it’s a good idea to select a theme that doesn’t have a heap of outgoing links built into the footer. Also, when adding widgets, add a recent posts widget somewhere. This gives a link to your recent articles on all of your pages. This will help new articles get indexed by google faster.

Great Places to get Themes for free: Free WordPress Themes directory

Social media and Subscription options

A very good source of traffic is social media, which I will go into more below, but as far as your site goes, you want to have options for your visitors to share your content on their favourite social media site, i.e. Facebook, twitter, Goolge Plus. You also want to make it easier for your visitors to subscribe via RSS and email. Most themes come with an RSS feed button.

Link to your own pages

Google considers every link you give as a personal recommendation of content. So it’s a good idea to link to sites that you like, and enjoy. If you are writing about a topic you have already blogged about in the past, it’s also a good idea to link to that blog post too.

Use H tags

H tags or heading tags tell search engine what your content is about. So it’s a good idea to use H tags in your posts for sub headings. Headings will also naturally include relevant keywords relating to the article, and google will give more weight to keywords included in H tags.

Name your images and photos

When you add photos or images to your posts, it’s always a good idea to add a name to the image in the form of alternative text, or alt text. Alt text is good for search engine traffic as it will tell search engines what the image is. This might bring some traffic from google images. It is also a good idea as it helps with accessibility, i.e. people who are visually impaired and using screen readers.

Analytics to track your traffic

Now you have your site all setup and ready to roll, you are going to want to track your visitors. This will help your to learn what you are doing well, and what sources are bringing you the most traffic. The best tool for this job is Google Analytics, which is a free service provided by google. It will allow you to see what keywords are bringing you traffic from search engines, what websites are sending you traffic, how long visitors stay on your site, what pages get visited the most, what browser your users are using and what countries they come from. It is essential to have some form of traffic tracking installed on your wordpres blog.

Traffic sources

Social Media

Sites like Facebook and Twitter get a lot of visitors, and are a great source of traffic. As mentioned above, it’s a great idea to make sure your content is easily sharable on these networks. If you want to get traffic from these sources it’s best to setup accounts and actually use them yourself.

Setting up a Twitter account and publishing links to sites and resources that relates to your topic is a good method for this. You can build up a following by adding other users who tweet about the same sort of content. Encourage them by retweeting their good tweets, and you should gain some friends. Obviously to use this as a source of traffic for your WordPress blog you are going to want to tweet about your new posts and other content from time to time.

With Facebook it’s a good idea to setup a page for your blog. You need a Facebook account, but most people have one of these. A page is a profile on Facebook that you can setup dedicated to a specific topic, in this case your blog. You can post links to your content, and other useful resources related to your blog, also, this is a great way to connect with your regular readers. It’s a good idea to add a Facebook widget to your blog, so people who visit your blog can see you have a presence on Facebook…they may choose to “like” your page, which essentially gives you another subscriber.

Here is a list of 10 super popular Social media site to explore:

• Facebook
• YouTube
• Twitter
• Goolge+
• Yahoo Answers
• LinkedIn
• Tumblr
• Stumble Upon
• Yelp
• Tagged

Search engines

Google, Yahoo and Bing can be a major source of traffic to your WordPress blog. If you followed all the advice in the first part of this article, you should be pretty set in terms of onsite factors. As far as offsite factors go the major one is building links. If your site content is of a high standard and you are socially interacting with others in your niche, and with people on social networks, this should occur naturally to some degree. However, you can build some links yourself. For example you could reach out to another blogger and offer to write them a guest post, then include a link back your site. You could submit your blog to major directories, like dmoz.org, and botw.org. You could ask if any of your blogger friends want to exchange links in each other’s blog roll, if you have one. You could submit content and articles to article directories and Web 2.0 sites like Squidoo and Hub pages. Links from other sites related to yours will help you gain traffic from search engines, as well as the direct traffic that bring.

Forums

A big part of the conversations that occur on the internet occur on forums. If you are active in forums, you can add a link to your site in your signature which will bring you traffic. If you people are talking about a topic which you blog about you could drop your link into the conversation. Be sure to make sure that this is only done where your site is relevant, you don’t want to be seen as a spammer.

Other blogs

Other blogs can be a great source of traffic. You can comment on their popular posts, which may bring visitors your way, and you can also offer guest posts, which will bring not only direct traffic from the blog but also, will help you with search engines.

Video Traffic

Video sites like Youtube get a lot of traffic. If you have video content relating to your blog, such as tutorials or reviews, adding these to youtube, and linking back to your site in the description can be a very good source of traffic. There are some other videos sites listed below. If sites don’t allow linking back to your site, you can watermark videos with your blog address.

• YouTube
• Vimeo
• Veoh
• Metacafe
• Dailymotion
• Break
• blip.tv

Offline

Depending on what your wordpress blog is about it may be worth exploring offline promotion as a means of getting traffic. Add your blogs URL to your business card, or to signage if it is business related, or put a flyer up on community pin boards if it is a community related topic.

Hopefully this WordPress traffic guide has given you some starting points to get traffic rolling into your wordpress site. Thanks for reading all the way down

When building a new website most people are aware that it will need traffic to do well. But where will you get this traffic from?

Social Traffic

A quick glance around the blogosphere might have you believing that the secret to success to to gain lots of readers, and to build traffic from social media sites such as Digg or StumbleUpon. What good is this traffic? Visitors that come from these sites are webmasters like you. They don’t click on ads. So they won’t make you money. Yes “social traffic” can make you money. If you have a great site with a lot of great content, and you work really hard on it over a long period of time you will probably manage to build up a good sized readership. This readership may even be large enough to allow you to sell ad spots on your site at a flat rate. However, as this traffic is mostly made up of webmasters like you, the people who buy your ads will find that they are not getting many clicks, and it is not worth their money. I don’t recommend you chase this sort of traffic.

Organic Search Traffic

Organic traffic is traffic that comes to your site from search engines. You won’t get any organic traffic until you have a good amount of backlinks to your site. So new web masters who find backlinks hard to come by often give up and often go looking for the social traffic above. There are two types of organic traffic that you can target, and here is how the theory of getting this traffic works:

a) Long Tail

A long tail search term is a term that isn’t searched for often. Something like “How can I make money using free blogger accounts and Google Adsense”. This term is very specific and and the visitor will be highly targeted, so worth a great deal to you. The theory of gaining traffic through long tail terms is that you write a lot of content about your chosen topic, and the more you write the more possible long tail traffic will find you. More content = more possible terms = more traffic. Simply writing more content will get you more visitors.

b) High Volume Keywords

A high volume search term is a term that is searched by a lot of people. Something like “Make Money Online” or “How to Make Money Online”. If you can rank for these terms you will get a lot of visitors. It is important to research high volume terms to find out i) How many visitors the term will bring? ii) How hard it will be to rank for the term? and iii) If you are using Adsense, how much will clicks from that visitor pay? For the first and last points you should use Google’s free Adwords research tool. Go to the tool and search for a general term relating to your site.i.e: “Making Money Online”, you you will get a list of relevant terms. To find out how hard it is to rank you need to consider a few factors. The first place to start is to search the term in Google. What site is ranked on top? What PR does the site have and how many backlinks do they have? To find out the backlinks part there are a number of tools that can help you. A free option I use is the browser plug-in SEO Quake. The more backlinks the sites at the top have the harder it will be to rank for them. That’s not to say you shouldn’t try, it’s just that it will be harder. A lot of competition for a term suggests it is worth ranking for.

Anyone who has read anything about SEO(Search Engine Optimisation) knows that keyword research is important. You probably know that ranking for certain keywords will bring you a lot of traffic. But what else do we know about keyword research? What other factors should we look for when selecting keywords?

Keyword research is probably the most important step for success when trying to Make Money Online, and yet it is probably the step that most people get wrong. Some people don’t consider SEO important, so they don’t do keyword research at all. This leaves things up to luck. Maybe someone will link to their site using a relevant search term, and they will do well. But most likely no links will mean no love from the search engines.

Then there are the people that understand that SEO is important, but are too lazy to do it properly. In most cases they select keywords which they haven’t researched properly, or that they copied from someone who they want to have a site like. In the end they will end up having too much competition, and will struggle to rank.

Good research will find keywords that have lower competition or at least comparable competition for the level of your site, for terms that will bring enough traffic to justify your efforts. There is no point creating and optimising a site, and ranking for a term if it won’t bring you much traffic.

Other factors

Not all keywords are equal. Some are well worth ranking for while others will bring you lots of useless traffic which will be hard to convert. A good way to ensure you are using the right sort of monitization for your traffic is to consider what users are searching for.

Information keywords

An information keyword is a keyword that suggests the searcher is trying to find something out. They are not looking to buy a product. You need to have contextual or CPM ads on sites where you target these types of terms. An example might be: Start a Small Business Online

Buying keywords

Buying keywords are keywords that suggest the searcher is looking to buy a product. You should use affiliate products, Ebay or Amazon ads to make money from sites targeting these terms. Buying terms are going to have a much lower search volume and they are often much more specific, but as the visitor is looking to spend money you can make more money from them. Good examples of buying keywords would be terms like: “42 LCD TV For Sale” or “Buy 42 LCD TV”. The searcher has used the terms “Buy” or “For Sale”, which suggest they are shopping. Other great buying keyword terms are: “Review + Product”, “Scam + Product”.

The Adwords Keyword Tool

The Adwords keyword tool is the best free keyword research tool. Here’s some tips to help you use it correctly.

The first thing you will notice is that I have changed a few of the default settings. I want to see the “Exact” term matches for my keyword, to know how much traffic ranking for that exact term could potentially bring. I also want to see the estimated “CPC”. This tells me how much I would have to pay to buy traffic, I am more interested in how much I would make from a click. The money you make from an AdSense click is normally about a 3rd of that price that the Adwords will will give you. Google take some of the cut, and content ads (ads on your site) cost less than ads directly on the search engine results.

The idea is to select terms which have a healthy global search volume, then search for that term in Google to see what sites your would be competing against.

Competition

Search for the term in Google. What sites do you see? SEO quake is a free browser plugin that will show you the sort of information we need to make decisions. How high is the PR of that site, and how many backlinks does it have. The sort of sites to avoid competition with are typically high authority domains with a lot of backlinks, domains that are government owned (govt), and exact match domains with authority (weightloss.com when targeting the term “Weight Loss”).

What sites do we like to see? Depending on what site/page you are trying to rank with different sites in the ranking can be very encouraging. For example if I am creating a hubpage, I am love to see other social sites or article sites in the rankings. e.g. squidoo pages, e-zine articles, go-articles etc.

Keyword research is really where the money is at. Let me know what you think?

1. Buy my ebook, I have spent years developing this amazing secret information – it will: Make you millions / get you millions of visitors.What it really means…Pay me your money…and have this rebranded PLR product which I got master resale rights for when I wasted my own money on another crappy product. It won’t make you any money or get you more visitors. The information in it are readily available in plenty of blogs all over the net.

   More info about PLR and Master Resale Rights.

2. Just fill in your email and name and I will give you a link to download my  amazing free ebook or free software.What it really means…By signing up to receive my free ebook or software you are subscribing to my Aweber list. I will now try and make money from you by sending you emails with affiliate links and offers in them.

   

3. Try this amazing new affiliate network they have all sorts of amazing affiliate offers ideal for your blog.What it really means…Sign up to this Affiliate network using my affiliate link to make me some money. The affiliate network will be full of products and sites which have nothing to do with blogging, and they will never convert. The only money being made is the money you make me when you sign up.
4. Read this review about this amazing new “service / ad network / link service / product.”What it really means…I am being paid to review this new “service / ad network / link service / product.” I don’t use it or have anything to do with it. But I am making money by reviewing it, you my readers will visit the site, and the link I give is worth money for SEO purposes.
5. Please visit the links in my blogroll – they are all close friends of mine.What it really means…My blogroll consists of other high authority blogs, we link to each other to share readers and links for SEO purposes. I have don’t know these people but they have high authority sites with lots of readers.
6. Be my friend on “insert social network, Digg, Stumbleupon etc”. I am sure we have lots in common.What it really means…I want lots of friends on social networks as it makes me look like an authority and if you are “my friend” you are more likely to vote for my stuff.
7. Read this article it will tell you how to make money online.What it really means…I am just writing about making money online to target my keyword phrase…”make money  online”. I am not telling you anything new, but I need this keyword to show up in my content regularly to improve my keyword density, and help with SEO.
8. I am an honest marketer, I label my affiliate links. Please use my links if you want to buy any of the products I have reviewed, it helps feed my family.What it really means…I have just stuffed your browser cookies…don’t worry I get paid if you buy anything sucker! Oh and I don’t have a family it just sounds better.
9. My online earnings for this month are $XXX – $XX,XXX.What it really means…My lame ass MMO blog has smart priced Adsense ads, and a few lame affiliate links which never convert. I really don’t make much money online.
10. My advice to you is that you should keep posting every day, and reading all my articles and then one day you will make money online like I do.What it really means…You will never make money online if you only ever listen to my advice and read my blog…but please keep reading my blog, I want to try and sell you some more crap.

Hope you enjoyed. And I hope no one takes me too seriously

Step 1 – Select a Niche

It needs to be a niche with significant traffic, and there needs to be money involved or we won’t make any money from our PPC ads.

Example: Photoshop Tutorials

Step 2 – Select Keywords that relate to your niche

A good free tool is Google Adwords Keyword Tool – Just Google search “Adwords Keyword Tool”

• photoshop tutorials – $3.46 – 201,000
• photoshop tutorial – $2.36 – 201,000
• adobe photoshop tutorials – $1.71 – 18,100
• tutorials for photoshop – $0.99 – 5,400
• free photoshop tutorials – $1.01 – 9,900

Results reflect average search results for Google.com – and does not include regional Google searches

We have 5 significantly searched terms, they all pay an at least decent amount.

If the Adwords tool says a terms will cost $3.46 it buy, we as Adsense content providers will make roughly 80c to $1.20 per click. This is because It works out less for content ads and Google takes a nice cut of the profit too.

Step 3 – Set up platform

The best free platform for money making sites is Blogger. It is owned by Google, so they make it easy to integrate Adsense and there are plenty of different free themes.

Go to blogger.com and signup for a new account.

When you are setting up your new account make sure your main keyword in in the name of the blog. Something like “Sweet Photoshop Tutorials”. You also want you keyword in the url as well if possible.So sweetphotoshoptutorials.blogspot.com would be a good choice.

You will also need to create a Google Adsense account. After you have set up your account you can add ads to your blogger template using the built in function of blogger. I recommend large box ads at the top of your posts.

Step 4 – Create keyword rich content

We are going to need to get people to come visit your site. So we need good content. For this project I would create no less than 5 Photoshop tutorials. I would make sure I used my 5 keywords above in the titles of my posts/article. I would use all of the above keywords in a small blurb right at the top of my theme under the heading. I would make category names that had my main keyword in it. I would also put an anchored text link in the footer of my theme that aimed at my homepage.

Step 5 – Build Anchored Backlinks

Building anchored backlinks is the hardest part of this process as it involves getting links to your site on other sites. When I say Anchored, what I am referring to is the text you use for your hyperlink. If we are hoping to rank for the term “Photoshop tutorials” we will need to build up lots of backlinks that aim at your site using the term “Photoshop tutorials”. Photoshop is popular software, so it will be hard to rank for. It this is your first project you will want to go for a term with less competition.

If I search for Photoshop tutorials on Google.com I find just over 3,500,000 results. You may want to find terms, or a niche that has less competition. Between 800,000 and 1,500,000 would be a good starting point. The lower the competition, the lower the traffic, and the less potential we have to make money though, so the playing field is fairly clearly laid out here. The harder the term, the more money you can make.

Easy anchored backlinks

When your site is not popular or if your niche is not a topic where there are likely to be lots of readers, or other sites about it it’s hard to get links from other regular sites. Some easy links include:

• Do follow Blogs – search for ones that let people drop keywords in the name field. And use a name like “Photoshop Tutorial Guy”
• Free article sites like Ezine, Article Dashboard and Go articles. If you write them a small article they will let you drop some self promoting anchored links in the resource box.
• Bookmarking sites…some of which are do follow.
• Forum signatures. Plenty of forums allow you to have an anchored link in your signature. Post on forums that relate to your topic. You can also drop some anchored links in posts. But don’t spam, only post where relevant.

The aim here is to set up a small niche site that makes money on auto pilot and doesn’t require that you add new content often. Goodluck.

This resource is a complete guide to show you how to create an Ebay niche store. There are thousands of profitable niches available on Ebay, probably tens of thousands. Anything that has a good number of people searching for it in search engines like Google is a potentially good niche. As a beginner who is looking to make money from Ebay niche stores you should probably be looking to make 10+ good niche sites rather than 1 amazing one to start off with. There is only so much you can do with a site like this before you are over capitalising and wasting your efforts. It’s fairly easy to make a site that makes $1 – $10 a day… and much harder to make sites that make more than $20 a day. However, if you have 10 sites that all make $1 to $10 a day then you are on the right track.

Sign Up for a Ebay Partner Network account (EPN)

To make money from an Ebay Niche Store you will need to register for an affiliate account with the Ebay Partner Network. It’s straight forward. Just fill out the form, and once approved you will be allowed to log into their site to get your code and affiliate banners for your websites.

Select an Ebay Niche

The best way to select a niche is to search through Ebay’s Listings.

What are we looking for is a niche that has:

• A good amount of listings – Not too brood (1000′s of items), not too obscure, there always needs to be at the very least 10 or more listings, otherwise your not going to have much of a store.
• You make money based on commission, so higher priced items will make you more money. There is also good money to be made by signing up new buyers, who didn’t have Ebay accounts. So you could argue having cheap items listed will increase the likelihood of getting more sales, and increase the chances of more signup’s. But you would be hoping for a lot more sales. Either way, we are going to need lots of small sales or a few big sales.
• It’s not entirely essential but it surely helps if you are interested in the niche and have a bit of knowledge about it. What items are always going to be in demand?
• We want to get our traffic from search engines. So we don’t want to select a niche that will be too hard to rank for in Google.

The niche I am going to select for this example is Wolverine comics. Wolverine is an Xmen character, and there is a separate line of comics about him. There are some nice expensive collectable’s + some normal and cheap priced items for sale on Ebay.

Further Research – Keywords and Competition

Once you think you have a good niche, some further research is needed. We need to find some keywords to target. For this we will use Google’s free Adwords Keyword Tool. Search for the name of your selected niche i.e “Wolverine Comics”. Find out how many searches are made each month for your keyword term and terms that relate to it. We need to build up a list of words to target.

Here are some related terms from the Adwords keyword tool.

• wolverine comics
• wolverine comic
• wolverine marvel comic
• wolverine comic book
• wolverine comic books
• x men wolverine comic
• wolverine comic pictures
• marvel wolverine
• wolverine punisher
• wolverine vol 1
• wolverine cover
• wolverine covers

As we hope to bring in traffic from Google we need to see what we will be up against. Search Google for your main terms…I would search for the top 5 from my list above. A search for “wolverine comics” in Google brings up a PR5 Wikipedia page in the first spot and a Pr4 Marvel page. Both of these will require a lot of effort to knock off. Below that is fairly easy pickings. High PR sites that have lots of links are hard to knock off, so keep an eye out for terms that have a lot of competition and stay away from them.

My main concerns with this particular niche is that 1) The first 2 spots in Google will be fairly hard to knock off. 2) Wolverine Comics don’t always sell for lots. So we might not make that much commission on each sale. If this was a perfect Ebay Niche I would have started a site for it already, and I wouldn’t be using it in this article. It is good to illustrate my example though.

Set up your platform

Hosting: If you don’t have hosting I use Dreamhost. For $9.95 – $10.95 US a month, you can host an unlimited amount of domains. You get what equates to an unlimited amount of system resources, storage and bandwidth. And one of the best parts is that they have one click installs, so you can install WordPress (The content management system we will use) easily and without any advanced knowledge.

Domain: You will need to buy a domain for your new site. A domain is the web address your site will have. i.e. example.com or example.net. You can buy new domains for $9.95 a year. You can use Dreamhost for this also.

Setting up WordPress: I prefer to use WordPress for all my sites as it is both user friendly, and has any amazing amount of free templates and plug-ins. So you can make professional looking sites without spending a dime and with very little technical knowledge.

You need to install WordPress onto your domain. If you are using Dreamhost, just log into your control panel, select Goodies and one click installs. You then need to select “install new website software – Advanced mode”. You need to use advanced mode even if you are a newbie.

Select WordPress, select the domain you wish to install to, (must be hosted with Dreamhost). Make a new database, give it a meaningful descriptive name you will remember with no spaces and all in lower case.

Select “create your hostname”. name it something like msql.yourdomain.com.

Create a new user and password. Use something with at least 6 letters for both. Then select “install it for me now”.

That’s it. Your new WordPress site will be installed for you in about 10 minutes.

The next step is to visit your site. It will ask you to name your site (Name the site your main keyword term – this is important), and it will generate an admin password for you. It will send your admin password to an email address you supply. Copy the password and log into your new WordPress site.

Setting up FTP so you can put files onto your site

You install themes and plugins to your site using an FTP client. You can download and install a free one here. If you are using Dreamhost, you will need to browse to your user tab, and set up a new FTP user. Select “Add New User”.

For type of user account select FTP. Make a new user name. Using something like your name in lowercase will be fine and a password that has 6+ letters. You have to add the password twice. Then select add user. In your FTP client software you will now need to add your site’s detail to be able to upload your themes and plug-ins. If you are using Filezilla as your FTP client you will need to enter your domain name “ftp://exmaple.com” + your username and password which you set up above. Leave port set as it is. And connect to your site. To upload themes and plugins you will need to browse to the wp-content folder of your domain.

WordPress Themes and Plugins

There are 1000′s of great free themes for you to use for your site. The next step is to find one that will fit in with your theme. Download it, unzip it, and upload the theme folder using your FTP client into your WordPress theme folder in wp-content. A good place to start is the WordPress Theme Directory. Having the ability to customise your theme, i.e. Photoshop skills, CSS skills will help you here. However it is not essential. You can use most themes as standard + maybe changing a header images which is simple. When you start making good money you can pay others to do design work for you.

Here is an example of a free WordPress theme that has been set up as an Ebay niche store: Gia Wedding Rings. And here is a link to a download for the free theme used: Polaroid.

The easiest way to incorporate Ebay listings into your theme is to use PHPBay Pro. PHPBay Pro is a fantastic plugin that basically does all the technical stuff for you, and enables you to place a tag wherever you want a current listing from Ebay.

Once you have installed the plugin (see FTP instructions above), you will need to activate it from your plugin section of your WordPress dashboard. Then select settings / PHPBay Pro. You will need to enter your Ebay PID number into the plugin settings so Ebay knows who is sending them traffic. This number is found in your Ebay Partner Network account under the “Campaigns” tab…under the heading Campaign ID.

Once you have the settings sorted for your plugin you will need to tell WordPress where you want to display listings. You can have them in your template or in your posts. You use the format below to add listings:

[phpbay]search term, 5, 123, “exclude”[/phpbay]

Where search term is what you want to show”Wolverine Comics”. 5 is the maximum number of lisitngs to show, 123 is the category number which your items come under on Ebay, and “exclude” is what you can use to exclude items from showing.

To add listings to your WordPress template you will need to add it to the source code of your WordPress theme. This can be done under the design tab of WordPress.

Getting traffic

To get traffic to your site that will buy products on Ebay you will need to focus on building search engine traffic. The only way to build search engine traffic is to build links that aim at your site. The higher authority and more relevant the links are to your niche the better. Trade links with friends, or ask other people with sites about similar topics if they would consider a link exchanges. Online forums are a good place to find link exchange partners. There are plenty of sites that give you links.

There are two types of way we will build traffic. 1) By focusing on building links that have your higher traffic keywords in their anchor (anchored links) 2) By writing some content about your topic, to pull in “long tail” keywords. These are keywords that are about your topic and relevant, but searched much less often.

That’s it. You should have enough information here to build basic Niche store on WordPress. It’s only worth focusing on  search engine traffic or traffic from other sites about the same topic with this sort of site. Other traffic (barring paid Adwords traffic) won’t convert well so don’t bother going after it. Good Luck.

Each page on your site will have a page title and then a heading, and they have to be set up just right. So when you’re placing your main keyword throughout your page, you should insert it in the heading tag too. An equally important concern is to produce content for your visitors which means being readable. Your headlines will be more effectively read by the bots if you place your important keywords at the start of the headline.

More is not better when it comes to optimizing, so just place one instance of each keyword where you can. How you go about doing your alt tags is up to you, but this is really very easy to do so no worries about it. So you know that any hopes of ranking at number one means you need to do all you can with SEO. You will have regular traffic coming in at no cost, and besides taking care of the link building aspect, focus on the on page SEO factors too. You can always find time to make your site better with adjustments here and there.

One method some people use is being a guest on another blog in the form of providing content. Only do this with relevant market blogs, and webmasters will have something on their blog if they want it. Do not be afraid to ask webmasters if you can be a guest poster, so simply ask them all and see what happens. But in order to make this work you will need to convince them with your existing content on your blog. Do not be the last person to build a Facebook page that is really about your blog, and then work to get people to join and like it. If you are willing to put the effort into Facebook, then who knows how well that can do for your blog. There are other places you should include such as Twitter, and then you can combine the power of both of them. This way you’ll make your page more engaging, and hopefully your fans may just share your stuff on their Facebook on a regular basis. This spreads the word about your blog and you’ll gain new readers.

One of the important things about blogs is they must have new information on a regular basis. The best scenario is daily updates with new information, but do not let it get less than even twice a week. You have to maintain your blog and keep it current or else. You also can never slack off from publishing quality content, and that is an inviolate necessity. People come to your blog and return to it because it gives them something of value, and that is the bottom line here. Remember that people will take the time to read something long if it is good enough. Every single step that you take towards building and growing your new blog will take you places. You can get tons of traffic no matter what your market is assuming the numbers available are good.

Figure out which blogs relate best to your niche and have good page ranks. Write down a list of these blogs and start leaving comments on the most popular posts within them. You need to make sure that the post pages that you leave comments on have high page ranks too. This is a great way to start linking to pages on blogs that have a good PR. You can find all sorts of blogs that have lots of really great content posted on them that have earned very high page rankings. If you’re not leveraging these types of blogs for better PR then you will definitely miss out on something that is important. It’s important to focus on finding as many high page ranked blogs as you possibly can.

Social bookmarking is a great way to boost your blog’s page rank. Post a bookmark of your blog on these kinds of social bookmarking sites and you’ll get a backlink. Linking to and from these sites is good because most of them have really great reputations. It is not a good idea, however, to try to spam them. Take the ethical route and then make sure that you are properly leveraging your social bookmarking as ethically as you can. You won’t see fast results with this method as well. Be as patient as possible with your approach. Focus on building as many backlinks through these social bookmarking sites.