Blogging platforms make the most novice of internet marketers look like professionals. But, we need to get people to our blogs so they can see our content. Here are 5 tested methods that work every time:

1. Article Marketing. Your blog is full of content. Basically, those blog posts are articles. The power of article marketing comes in taking advantage of the high PR’s of certain article directories to get your content in front of more people. Sites like www.ezinearticles.com and www.articlebase.com are my two favorites, with www.buzzle.com a close third. Simply write an article. Submit it to EZA first. Once it is accepted by EZA, you can submit the same article to the other directories (or change them for uniqueness).

2. SEO. Yup. Creating SEO’d content with proper SEO plugins will help your content rank high in the search engine rankings. That way, your blog is found by people searching for your topics on places like google. For this strategy, you need to dedicate some time in both on site and off site SEO strategies. But, it is the best long term traffic strategy out there.

3.  Forum Marketing. I am not talking about spam. I am suggesting joining forums within your niche and providing helpful content to the community. You can place a link to your blog in your signature, so that people can click through to your blog. Building a reputation for yourself within your niche will help solidify your expertise. This is a great way to generate highly targeted visitors to your site.

4. Social Bookmarking. Social bookmarking works great for bloggers. Create an account at the various social bookmarking sites or use www.onlywire .com or www.socialmarker.com to help speed up the submission process. Do not spam the social bookmarking sites. When you make a post, simply submit it to each social bookmarking site. By doing this, you are submitting content across the web and building backlinks for your SEO efforts.

5. RSS Feeds. RSS feeds are great for keeping your readers updated on new activity within your blog. For this blog, I am not to concerned with that. But with my niche blogs, I have a very prominent RSS subscription button at the top of my pages. I want people to know when I post new content.

Obviously, there are more ways of generating traffic, but these basic strategies will provide you the best long term solutions. Perfect them, and spend some time working on them, and you will see great returns.

What is a micro niche site? A micro niche site, the way I build them,  is a small website that targets one keyword phrase per site. Most people are used to building a 5 page website that attempts to target multiple keywords per page. Or, they setup a blog and try to target one keyword per post. In every niche, I can compete with these types of sites by targeting on keyword per website.

Research

A micro niche site begins with research. You want to look for keywords within a niche where there is a demand, and the keyword is a buying keyword. I use the google keyword tool, and look for keyword phrases that get 300-1200 exact searches per month. These keywords are usually low competition. Also, these longer keywords are also more likely to be buying keywords.

Buying Keywords

Micro niche sites are successful because they have great conversions. They get less traffic, but the visitors to that website are highly targeted. I did a test with a non buying keyword. I found a two word keyword phrase that gets 16,000 searches per month. I found the exact domain name, and built the site. The site is on the 1st page of google with two million competing sites. I have not made one sale with this site! The keyword is “kindergarten toys” and the website is www.kindergartentoys.org

That site doesn’t convert, despite the traffic, because it isn’t targeting a buying keyword.

Domain name selection

I actually wrote a book on this subject. Micro niche sites have become so popular that nearly every good .com domain is taken. What is a good domain? I only register exact keyword phrase domains. How do I overcome the lack of .com’s? I don’t need them. I can outrank .com’s using .org’s. And now,  can use .net’s.

With proper keyword selection, you can find an exact keyword domain. Just forget the .com. You see, back when the internet was young, people started buying up every available .com domain out there in hopes of selling them for millions. Google caught on to this. These domains are just parked, and if you do some research you will find that none of the parked exact keyword domains rank on the first 10 pages of google.

Select the .org or .net. Also, you can look at hyphen keyword domains, as well. The key is to have your exact keyword phrase in your domain name.

Content

I use Wordpress for all my micro niche sites. I create a static front page, and a page for my product feeds. I use the static front page to optimize my onsite content. I made a series of four posts on page optimization. Go back and read those.

Make your category the keyword. For instance, if you did research and found that people were searching for “sprinkled cheese playhouse” and your micro niche site is sprinkledcheeseplayhouse.net, you would want your category to be the exact keyword phrase again. This is important because we are going to change our permalinks to highly optimized URL’s. In Wordpress, go to permalinks and select custom. Enter /category%/%postname%/ This will make your site look like this: sprinkledcheeseplayhouse.net/sprinkled-cheese-playhouse/acme-model-3

With that URL, you will find that you are ranking for all kind of little secondary terms.

Backlinking

You don’t want to go overboard on backlinking micro niche sites. You don’t have to. I do a few simple submissions and wait. Here is all you need to do in the beginning:

• www.digg.com Submit your site to Digg
• www.mixx.com Submit your site to Mixx
• www.feedagg.com Submit your feed to feedagg
• www.feedburner.com submit your feed to feedburner
• Verify your site on google webmaster tools
• Ping your site

That is all you have to do in the beginning. If you did your research and built your site correctly, those few backlinks should get you to debut on the first page of google. Micro niche sites are really easy to build, they convert like crazy and they are a great way to get started in internet marketing.

Do we need to waste our time building nofollow backlinks? The answer is yes. A backlink is a backlink, whether it is dofollow or not. The importance of the nofollow link doesnt come in increased page rank, the importance comes in your motives.

The lack of nofollow backlinks to your site shows search engines that your site is only getting backlinks from websites that are dofollow. The lack of nofollow backlinks exposes you as a link builder.

We all know that backlinks are supposed to appear natural. Wouldn’t a site with natural backlinks have both dofollow and nofollow? Of course they would. That is why it is so important to throw in a few nofollow backlinks in your backlinking efforts.

This could be looked at as a test. The whole dofollow vs. nofollow issue could all be a test designed by search engines to expose sites that are building backlinks in a “spammy” way. If you want your site to grow in the SERPS and stay there, you need to have those natural looking nofollows in the mix.

Structure takes on many forms:

• URL’s
• Links
• Pictures
• Content
  

Content

We discussed content earlier, but I thought it was best to save one final aspect of content for the structure post. That aspect is keyword placement. It does appear that the placement of your keywords does has a substantial effect on your on page SEO. Stay calm, this is simple stuff. Your keywords should already be naturally sprinkled around the body of your content. However, there are two places your keyword should be in every piece of content you write.

Make it a habit of including your main keyword phrase in the first sentence of the first paragraph and in the last paragraph. In my tests, it seems google loves this format. You might have to think a little harder about how to write your first sentence to make sense, but it is worth it. In the last paragraph, I don’t see any significant placement of first sentence or last, but for offsite content I like to use the keyword phrase in the last sentence as anchor textto the page I am SEO’ing.

Also, I link my internal pages back to my main page using the keyword in the last paragraph. You will see this in every post I write. This is called internal linking, and we will discuss that a little later.

URL’s

Your URL’s do have an effect on your rankings. Long url’s do not perform as well as short url’s. I use optimized URL’s for my sites.

A good example of a SEO’d URL is yoursite.com/keyword. Pretty simple, huh? Again, SEO isn’t rocket science. I prefer a little longer URL, but one that is highly optimized. I use Wordpress. Wordpress comes with standard permalinks (URL’s) that are ugly. This page URL would look like writtenstyle.com/p=153 or something like that. Notice there are no keywords? How would search engines know what your URL was about?

I set my sites up to use the category and post name in the URL. So, this URL is writtenstlye.com/seo/on-page-seo-content-structure. Notice, it is a little longer. However, it has SEO in the URL twice, and it has the targeted keyword for which I am targeting. If you are just starting out, go for the shorter URL. sitename.com/keyword works GREAT! If you are using Wordpress, go to permalinks. Choose custom, and enter this /%postname%/ Assuming your posts are short and keyword rich, that will give you short SEO’d URLS. I use /%category%/%postname%/

 Links

Links within your site also carry SEO weight. In the past, links in the sidebar navigation and footers have been standard on page SEO. Things appear to be changing. A lot of black hatters use the footers of websites to stuff links (especially with Wordpress). It appears that links in the footers of websites are actually having a negative effect on SEO. As such, it makes sense that links in the sidebars also have less weight than they once did.

I have always been a proponent of links within the content. Look at wikipedia. Where are their links? They are in the body. (See what I did there?) Taking them as an authority on how to get ranked, it would serve the rest of us well to study what they do.

In my affiliate sites, I always use links with in the body. Outbound links are important, even though they send visitors to other sites. My outbound links are usually affiliate links, but I throw a regular link in every once in a while. Outbound links with in a site are important. The best way to do this is to have the links open in a new browser window. That way, your website is still open if they click on the link.

The HTML for that is <a href=”http://www.yoursite.com” target=”_blank”>Click here<a> Always link your outbound links with that structure.

Inbound links for SEO are up for grabs. They don’t hurt your site, but the verdict is still out as to whether they help. I use them. All of my internal posts on this website link beck to my main site. I do this in the last paragraph. I believe it helps. In my micro niche sites, I have great success getting favorable rankings, and I always include internal links.

Pictures

Pictures also need to be formatted correctly. The best way to do this is by using this HTML <img src=”yourpic.gif” alt=”Keyword” /> This allows you to optimize the picture to the keyword. I was shocked with some of my niche amazon sites. Every listing on my sites has pictures that are optimized with the keyword. I get 40-50 visitors a day to some of my sites from google images.

If you take the posts on page SEO and start implementing them on your site, you will see immediate SEO benefits. On page SEO is important, and it isn’t real difficult to put into action. It seems like a lot of work, but once you start doing them you will find that they will come natural to you. 

Pictures also need to be formatted correctly. The best way to do this is by using this HTML <img src=”yourpic.gif” alt=”Keyword” /> This allows you to optimize the picture to the keyword. I was shocked with some of my niche amazon sites. Every listing on my sites has pictures that are optimized with the keyword. I get 40-50 visitors a day to some of my sites from google images.

If you take the posts on page SEO and start implementing them on your site, you will see immediate SEO benefits. On page SEO is important, and it isn’t real difficult to put into action. It seems like a lot of work, but once you start doing them you will find that thy will come natural to you.

Content starts with the title. The title of this post is “On Page SEO: Content. This title needs to be  in <H1> tags. I use Wordpress, so this is done for me. Your keywords need to be in <H1> tags, or “Heading 1″ if you are using a blog, a maximum of one time in your content. Since your title needs to stand out, it makes perfect sense to make it a habit of making your title <H1> every time.

It is also helpful to have your keywords in the <H2> tags at least once. Again, if you are using Wordpress, just select “Heading 2″ from the drop down menu. <H2>’s are best used as subtitles. If you look back at my meta tag post, you will see that I used <H2> tags for my keywords one time about half way through the page.  In fact, I am about to use them to setup the rest of this post. Only use <H2> once per keyword.

On page SEO begins with great Content

The <H1> and <H2> tags are very important, but the body of your content is going to be crucial to your rankings. It can have a positive affect or a negative affect on your site ranking. So, pay attention to what you do here.

Keyword density is going to play a huge role in your on page seo. I generally go for 2%-4% keyword density. Anything more, could be seen as keyword stuffing by the search engines. If you are a www.ezinearticles.com fan like I am, you know that they now only allow your content to have a 2% keyword density. Since they are the leading article directory, I tend to take their guidance and also shoot for 2%.

Bold and italic keywords also carry a little weight in search engine algorithms. For me, I don’t care how much weight a certain aspect of SEO carries. If it carries just a slight miniscule significance, then I want to include it on my pages. I always bold the keyword once, and if needed, I will use italics. Again, we are going for a complete piece of SEO’d content, so why not include all SEO aspects?

All the SEO in the world is useless if your content is not high quality. All the above aspects of on page SEO in dealing with content are assuming that your content is unique, compelling and full of great content. Once you get to the point where you can provide the quality content with the proper SEO, you will see your backlinking efforts boost your site in the SERPS like crazy.

To review, write high quality content and employ all the little pieces of the SEO puzzle. If you are optimizing your website properly and building backlinks, you will see your site moving up fairly quickly in the SERPS. High quality on pages SEO ‘d content is key to a high ranking website.

We all know the importance of optimizing our websites for favorable rankings in the SERPS. I think that just knowing we are dealing with google makes the whole aspect of trying to get ranked with them a little intimidating. It’s OK to feel intimidated, but once you create a system of writing SEO’d content and pages, you will find that you can do it as naturally as having a conversation. 

The Building block of on page SEO is the Meta Tags. The dinosaurs of SEO, these tags are still relevant and should be included in every page of your website.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are our first line of defense. Although not the most important factor of SEO all around, they are the building blocks of good on page SEO. There are three main components:

• Title -use the title to include the main keyword for which you are optimizing.
• Meta Keywords are the keywords for which you are trying to optimize
• Meta Content is the content you want google to list in your search engine listings

Pretty straight forward, right? The main thing to be aware of is, make sure you are not keyword stuffing your meta keywords. I believe in micro niche pages. I optimize each page of my sites to one or two keywords max. For instance, I am only optimizing this page for ON PAGE SEO and META TAGS. That way I can laser target my content. It also allows me to write more content to target other keywords, creating a site full of unique content.

The format of your meta tags is really simple. If you are new to SEO, use the formula below:

<TITLE>On Page SEO: The Basics</TITLE>
<META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”How to properly format your content with laser focused on page SEO”>
<META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”on page SEO, meta tags”>

The title, meta keywords and meta content all have the main keyword phrase in it. As you can see fro mmy meta tags, I am optimizing this page for “on page SEO ” and “meta tags.”

Like I said, just because this should be the first SEO task you perform to your new web page, it is not the most important. Every search engine works differently, but you want a page that will be indexed by all of them. Get your meta tags in order for proper on page SEO  that will help you rank favorably in the SERPS.