Shortly before heading to a New Year Party to celebrate this "intense" year that gave us all so much I wanted to share a few tips with all people that are starting a blog going in 2010. Whether it is your business or your personal interests these tips apply and do give proven results.

They are based on the success of my wife Ina blog about trendy outfits. Started roughly 1 year ago from 0 visits today google analytics measured 40 000 visits,Google Webmasters - 1121 backlinks. While for many this might be minute, I am sure there are a lot of businesses and individuals who will get very excited on the idea of how to lay additional 40K sets of eyes on their content next year.

Here is the plan:

1. Chose Blogging Platform - We chose Worpdress for its ease of use and output code favoured by the search engines. While this is a great "out of the box" tool here is a list of handy plugins that will enchance search engine presence. Installing and configuring those is one click away. A catchy website template is very important. We chose a free one and looking forward to changing it. There is so much choice out there, its incredible.

 2. Decide on a topic - Using Market Samurai and Wordtracker, I found some keywords that have moderate traffic such as "trendy women's clothing" which we started out as our main keyword. The key is to target a keyword that has moderate competition and high enough traffic to target.

3. Post, Post, Post - We came up with a list of topics connected to the keyword thay would be valuable to the reader such as trendy women's clothing for the office, for work, for going out, for special occasions and etc. / see the topics in relevant blog category /. Then tried to do a post each other day. It is very important when you launch a new website to post regularly in the first 3-4 weeks so the search engine can get used to the fact this website constantly provides good content. As people say, first impression is key.

4. Fish for Links - I've mentioned this many times but I cannot stress how much 30 day challenge program has helped me and people I have worked with. The basics of getting backlinks to your site - so important for traffic and rankings, explained in a friendly and intuitive way. All for Free. Visit www.thirtydaychallenge.com. I took all the tactics the course provides and applied. Social Bookmarking, Article Sites, Hubpages and Squidoo, commenting on fellow blogs helped gather links and get a ranking boost.

6. Research - Looking at other blogs' backlinks using Yahoo Site Explorer and getting involved in commenting on their posts helped tremendously in identifying bookmarking services that are vertical specific and give good quality backlinks and traffic ( for clothing that would be stylehive.com ). As seo experts will say a link is as good as the traffic it brings.

7. Social Media - Building your blog presence on different networks helps bring more awareness because some people like hanging out on Facebook (period). Having a fanpage about your blog would not do anything by itself but combined with a little marketing it definitely helps. Ina did a small giveaway and I did a Facebook advertising which brought 30 new fans in as little as 3 days and $50 advertising spend. You can expect results only from the networks you put effort into.

8. Tweak, Tweak, Tweak - The great thing about google improving on their infrastructure is that once you get their attention your changes are applied very quickly. My-vogue.com posts are indexed within 1-2 hours of posting. We can make title changes to target new keywords in a matter of a week. This is the beauty of having well indexable blog.

9. Reflect and improve - your dream of getting a lot of traffic is clouded by the myriad of other bloggers online. In order to succeed you need an edge. While this would come naturally to some and they would become overnight viral celebrities, for majority of us it is a very difficult and long lasting process. Buy a book, read problogger.net, mashable.com, sphinn.com or find your sources of inspiration and information. And I promise if you are dedicated, the edge will come to you and you are off to being super successful online. The web is getting huge but so does the number of people that have access to it. So no worries, you have plenty of fans out there, you just need to help them find you.

Happy New Year!

It is always fun to work on improving local search.Everything related to local search is so logical and obvious and the results are significant. A great asset is working with an actual business location rather than a floating website provides which adds a lot more credibility and chance for success. Search Engines are trying to be all about the real thing first - brands, reputable websites, nearby locations.

The key about optimizing for local search is very simple: CONSISTENCY. Relevant, consistent information across all websites. This is it - throw some reviews in and you are Done!

Here is an example:

I have the chance to optimize for a a luxury Plano Spa - The Spa at Willow Bend. The owner had done a lot of video and submitted it to video sites. Which was a great head start. So what did I do next? Well, I always follow one and the same path and it has proven successfull every single time. Here is my list of action items.

1. Agree on entry details which will be consistent across all sites:

Business Name - if you could sneak in main keyword and or location, great. If not, I guess we'll work with what we have.

Contact Details. - address, phones, emails, website, people - all the same every time, on every website.

Categories and Keyword Tags - all targeting your primary keywords and market.

2. Create Action Plan - list the websites aboveinformation has to be submitted and a create a spredsheet with login credentials. NOTE: This step is extremely important.

Imagine you have to change office or phone number you need to change this information across all websites to keep you rankings. If you don't have the credentials and the list, it will be a total waste of time to recover those.

You can find a great List of websites for local search here. It recommends handling Google, Yahoo and Bing inclusions on your own, which is a the best way to go in my opinion too.

3. Submit, Submit, Submit - Submit in all websites in a span of 2 -3 weeks. Do not do it all ot once. It's boring and its better to be done throughout a period of time.

4. Evaluate - now when you have submitted everywhere and a week has passed check if you are included in Yahoo, Bing and Google Maps for your business name.

5. Reviews - a very important component for local search. Find a way to inspire your customers to comment on websites like insidepages.com and citysearch.com and on your google, yahoo and bing map entries. Over time, having a lot of review will help you business signifficantly.

Once this is all done and a strategy for customer reviews is in place, you can relax and watch the results.

Although not directly related yet to the local search algorithm - linking all this with your social media accounts is the proper way to go. Interacting with your customer and prospects via Facebook, Twitter and other social networks builds a stronger relationship and increases brand exposure. Nobody will be surprised when realtime search kicks in. Whichever business has a greater social media presence the better.

For some very competitive areas and categories where local search optimization is needed it might be more difficult to make it on the 10 map results right away. In such cases you just need to pursue local linking from nearby businesses and area related websites.

This sounds like a lot but it is not meant to be done in a week. A good local search campaign should be 6-8 weeks and local links should be major part of your linking campaign.

Remember - for this stuff to work you don't have to strive your online presence to be lightning years ahead of your competitors - just a lil better.