If your goal is to make money with a niche blog or website you have to have traffic. The adage from the movie, “Field of Dreams” that “if you build it, they will come” does not apply to the internet. You can have the world’s best looking website and features galore, but without traffic, you will not sell anything. There are a lot of ways to get traffic to your site but in this post we are going to discuss enhancing your website, specifically your Wordpress blog, for search engine traffic.

Search engines employ “bots” to crawl websites. What does that mean? Search engines companies visit your site. Why? They do this periodically in order to update and improve their index. One of the keys to good search engine traffic is to make sure search engines know EXACTLY what your site is about after they visit. You don’t want any doubt n the search engine about what your site’s content is and how relevant it is to your target keywords.

Let’s put this into plain language. Let’s say your website is about sandpaper. When Google, Yahoo or Microsoft send their bots to your site you want to make sure you have your pages or posts optimized so that those search engines know exactly how to classify and index your page. You want your site appearing in the top search engines results for sandpaper and related terms. So how do you do this?

1) Make sure you employ Search engine friendly URLs.

A URL is simply a website address. It is what appears in your internet browser’s address bar. It is important that this address is friendly for both your human website visitors and computer website visitor’s.

If you are using Wordpress to power your website. The easiest way to enhance your URLs is to employ proper use of your permalink structure. You can modify this by going to Options – Permalinks in your Wordpress Administrator backend. I recommend the following custom structure:

/%category%/%post_id%/%postname%.html

Paste this in the custom field. Make sure you click save settings. Wordpress will then create and place a .htaccess file in your default Wordpress folder on your server. That file will tell the visitor’s browser how to render the URL in the browser’s address bar. It will also do the same to the bot from Google, Yahoo, etc when it comes to check on your site. That information will help Google classify and categorize your site with relevant search keywords.

If you are using Joomla, I recommend a plugin called JoomlaSEF. You find more information about this plugin by visiting this link:

http://extensions.joomla.org

Notice. This is NOT a search engine friendly (or human friendly) link.

2) Use SEO plugins.

Every blog or CMS has SEO plugins. A great free Wordpress plugin is All-in-one SEO. You can find more information about this plugin here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

This is a great plugin because 1) it’s free 2) it handles a lot of the SEO work for you.

3) Submit Sitemaps

A sitemap is just that, a map of your site. It basically helps guide the search engine to show them where your content is. It can also help tell your human visitors where relevant content is.

You can tell search engines about your sitemap by making a file called robots.txt on your server. In that robots.txt file insert a line like this:

Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap_1.xml.gz

Here you are telling the search engine where to find your sitemap. But how do you generate a sitemap?

If you are using Wordpress, I recommend this plugin:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

This plugin once installed and activated will generate a sitemap automatically for your site which is great. You can find similar plugins for Joomla at (http://extensions.joomla.org)

This would be a good time to also introduce you to Google Webmasters. (http://www.google.com/webmasters) There you can submit a sitemap to Google for your site and get a jump ahead on directing the Google bot where the sitemap is. Stay tuned to this blog for more information about Google Webmasters and how it can help you sell to your niche.