If you want your blog to become popular, you may have heard that it would need to become an authority in its niche. Many bloggers and online marketers wonder how this could be accomplished. The steps to take are relatively straightforward, however they will take time to complete fully. Here’s what you can do to put your blog on the road to being a respected site in its niche:

• Create Quality Content for Your Blog

There’s really no way around this one. Your blog, in order to be viewed as an authority and respected by both readers and search engines, must have something interesting for the readers in it. This means that the content must be original and likely to appeal to your audience. Don’t just repeat what others have said, especially if you post on topics such as news. If you post about something that’s been in the news lately, for example the controversy surrounding the SOPA act in the United States at the moment, users will want to read something original about it and not just a rewrite of what the major press outlets have said. Add information from different sources. Add your own opinion, as well as the opinions of others. Include graphics, images and videos when it becomes necessary.

• Participate in Niche Communities

Discussion forums, other blogs, social media pages, etc. are all great places where you can get some exposure for your blog. Include a link to your blog in your profile. Include a link to your blog in your forum signature. Share your blog posts with others when others whenever possible. People who are already interested in your niche are more likely to visit your blog and follow it if they find the content to be useful and interesting to them.

• Make References to Previous Blog Posts and Link to Other Posts as Well

Make references to other posts in your blog when appropriate. This will increase readership of your other blog pages with your visitors and can also have some very good benefits when it comes to search engine optimization. Readers are more likely to come back to your blog if they find that it provides a complete explanation of the topics covered by having links to posts that are related to the current one that they’re reading.

Linking to and referencing other blogs is also recommended. While it may seem counter productive to send traffic to other websites without making any direct profit from it, remember that this is a blog and not a landing page for a product that you’re selling. In the blogging community, it is frequent for bloggers to link, quote and reference contents on other blogs and websites. It all comes down to sharing. Other blog owners frequently look at where their traffic is coming from and they’re likely to check out your blog too. This will give you opportunities to have your content shared and possibly even get you links on blogs and related niche websites too.

Blogs are increasingly being used by businesses, who are making it an important part of their overall internet marketing strategy. Thus, blogs are not only a tool for individuals to share some information with their friends, but can also become a very effective business tool. Even though they can be effective for business, there are certain things that you need to keep in mind before you put together a blog with the goal of promotions your website or your business.

The primary advantage of using a blog is that it will serve to give your business some personality as well as originality. Unlike a website where the primary purpose is to sell the product or service that you are offering to the visitor, a blog gives you the chance to connect more with your visitors and provide them with some useful information about your line of business. So, let’s say that you own a web hosting company. In that case, you can make a blog and make posts about the various types of web hosting, the differences between them, providing web development and online advertising advice, etc.

This will give you the opportunity to better connect to your audience and not sound like you are trying to sell them things all the time. Your blog should also feature images, graphs and videos where applicable. Don’t choose a bland template as a design for your blog and simply make it a wall of text. Many readers would be turned off by this and even though the content may be very interesting, they will not be very inclined to read it if it is not presented in a good way to them.

Another important point that every webmaster needs to keep in consideration when building a business blog: don’t start a blog with the simple intention of advertising your products, services or websites. While you can include links to your website and your offerings, don’t make blog posts whose only purpose is to promote what you have without adding any real value for the reader.

The rise in popularity of affiliate marketing and CPA offers has had the effect of also increasing the number of fake blogs or “flogs”, which are websites that are designed to look like a normal blog, but where all the posts are actually thinly disguised advertising. If a user is web savvy, chances are they have seen such pages a few times before. So if you make your blog look too much like a flog, readers will assume that it is one and will simply move on to another site. Obviously this is not something that you want.

The best thing to do is to create a blog that is informative to the users, friendly and does not contain too much advertising material. Your site visitors will be more likely to find interest in it if the blog looks attractive to them and provides them with information that they find useful.

One of the most discussed areas things people talk about (after social media nowadays probably) is search engine optimization or SEO. The most popular CMS in the world is WordPress and so it is important for us to discuss SEO in regards to WordPress.

WordPress does a great job with SEO from a standalone perspective, but there are a lot of other things, such as plugins that can make it better. Using just WordPress you can add meta tags, insert keywords, optimize images for SEO via titles and captions, and change the permalinks structure of the website to use full titles as the URL.

But there are some limitations, which could be for simplicity sake and to not confuse new users, or it is because for most people it simply isn’t necessary.

Luckily for power users and fanatics about SEO WordPress has a huge set of available plugins, both free and for pay that can enhance your websites search engine ranking.

Check out these 4 plugins to start on your search engine ranking journey!

All-in-One SEO
This is considered THE SEO plugin for most people. The plugin sits on the post and page editor and provides users with options for title, description, keywords, and more allowing you to customize what shows up in the Title (rather than just using the default title). An extremely handy plugin and best of all it is free, so there is no reason to not have this installed and working for your blog.

WP Google Analytics
Site metrics aren’t normally talked about when talking directly about SEO plugins, but having a Google Analytics plugin that allows you to track where your traffic is coming from and from which keywords is a great way to refine your strategy and thinking about SEO. Seeing the real results will help motivate you to continue your SEO campaign. There are a few plugins to help with Google Analytics setup so make sure you search the plugins on WordPress.org to help you out.

Google Sitemap XML
This plugin allows you to generate a .xml sitemap to submit to Google Webmaster Tools to help Google crawl your site when it visits. An easy one time thing the plugin serves the purpose great and is a must have for a new or established site.

WP Auto Tagger

Everyone knows that SEO, or search engine optimization is important for the content on their site. That’s fairly common knowledge at this point. What a lot of people don’t realize is that your images can bring you a great deal of search traffic too. People are constantly searching for images for many different reasons, and if you can optimize your images to take advantage of those searches, you can bring more traffic to your site.

The first thing you should do is be sure that your images are all named correctly. Give your images names that reflect what is pictured in the image. For example, the picture above of the JPEG icon is named “jpeg icon.png”. If you are using a photograph, make sure the image name describes what’s going on in the picture. For example, a photograph of two guys playing with a Frisbee should have a name along the lines of “two guys playing Frisbee in a park.jpg” Don’t be afraid to have a long image name. It’s more important that the image name be descriptive than short. Try to include spaces between the words in the image name. If your content management won’t support spaces, put dashes instead. It’s important that the words be separated so that search engines can easily recognize them.

You should also take the time to fill out the alt tags for your images. whenever you mouse over an image, you will see some text displayed. That text is dictated by what is written in the alt tag for an image. Again, be descriptive in your alt tags. Include a little more detail in the alt tags than you did in the image name. In the example above the image name was “two guys playing Frisbee in a park.jpg”. In this example you might want your alt tags to contain the text “two guys playing Frisbee in a park on a bright summer day” That way, there is more text relevant to the contents of the image associated with it.

Remember, search engines can’t see your images. They’re relying on you to describe the images in a way that they can understand. Giving your images strong names, and including relevant information in your alt tags makes it easy for search engines to understand what is going on in your pictures so that they can do a better job of placing them in search results. By taking the time to optimize your images for search, you are ensuring better search traffic to your site over time.

If you’re reading this site, you’re probably at least familiar with the terms SEO and SEM, but do you know the difference between the two? Let’s take a look at the two, and what circumstances you should be using each under.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is the process of organizing the content on your site, and tweaking the site itself so that it will appear higher up in search results. There are two basic steps to making a site SEO friendly. The first is to optimize the site itself by using the right keywords in the site’s code, and the site’s copy. Make sure the title of each page is relevant to the topic discussed on that page, and that the copy contains keywords relevant to the topic at hand. You should also be sure to give your images descriptive names, and take the time to fill out the alt tag for each image. Once your site is optimized, be sure to update it on a regular basis with relevant content. Search engines look at how often a site is updated, and how long it’s been since the last update when determining where that site shows up in search. Try to update your site with interesting, or entertaining content. The more incoming links you have, the better your search rank. The more entertaining the content on your site is, the more incoming links you’ll get.

SEM, or Search Engine Marketing is the “buy your way to the top” strategy. By buying pay per click ads on a search engine, you’re ensuring that a link to your site will show up in the “sponsored links” section of the search results, which usually appears at the top of the page. It’s important to do some keyword research before diving into SEM. Broad terms, like science tend to be very crowded, and as such, you will have to pay a higher CPC (cost per click) to get your ad to appear more often. By picking a more specific term to place your ad on, you can lower the amount of competition, and consequently, the CPC you’ll need to pay.

Now that you know how they work separately, it’s time to put the two strategies together. When you first launch a site, it’s a good idea to invest some money in SEM. A brand new site, even an SEO friendly one, probably isn’t going to show up on the first page of search results for your keyword of choice right away. By spending some money on SEM, you can ensure your site will receive traffic until the benefits of SEO kick in. By using the two together like this, you can get steady traffic to your site from day one.

It’s no secret that you need to figure out what keywords apply to your content in order to create an SEO friendly website. The challenge comes in figuring out exactly what to do with your keywords. We’re going to show you a few uses for keywords that will help you create a SEO friendly website.

The first (and one of the most important) place you should be using keywords is in your title. If you’re using a CMS like WordPress, you should try to use as many keywords as you can in the title of the post you’re creating. If you’re building a website using an editor like Dreamweaver, or just hand coding it, then try and use your keywords as part of the title of the page, in between the title tags. It’s important not to make your title awkward by overusing keywords. You have to remember, your visitors see your title too, it’s not just there for search engines.

Descriptive meta tags, and keyword meta tags aren’t as big a part of how search engines rank sites as they used to be, but that doesn’t mean they should be overlooked. Description meta tags should contain as many keywords as you can manage, while remaining coherent. It’s important not to make your description awkward or overly bulky just to squeeze in a few more keywords because search engines often use those descriptions as a snippet about the site when it shows up in search results. As for the meta keyword tags, don’t exceed 20 keywords when using them. Search engines view excessive keyword use in the meta tags negatively, so you could actually wind up doing more harm than good if you overdo it.

A visitor that comes to your site through an image search is no less valuable than a visitor that comes through a regular search, so make sure to handle your images correctly. Be sure to take the time to name your images carefully. Be as descriptive as you can, and don’t be afraid to give the image a somewhat lengthy name. Be sure to use the alt tags to describe the image in detail as well.

All of the uses for keywords covered above are important when building an SEO friendly website, but they’re all supplemental to keyword-rich content. Search engines are putting a greater focus on the actual content on a site, and h ow it relates to the keywords in your niche. So be sure to use keywords effectively in your code, images, and content, and you’ll see your search rank rise before you know it.