After going through part 2 and the keyword research you now should have constructed a main blog title out of primary keyword phrases. You should also have selected the keyword phrases that you believe are optimally related to your main blog topic, and also optimally related to each other.

The best thing in all of this is that you’ve automatically chosen the correct keywords for yourself to facilitate the your goals. Maybe you’ve selected a certain keyword phrase to represent a topic and you are planning to use that topic only as an ‘entry point’ in order to flow a reader to a different place on your blog. You wouldn’t have been able to to make the right decisions if you wouldn’t have written a mission statement or a as I like to call it, an online business plan.

As far as the keyword phrases that you selected go, the combination of keywords that you’ve selected out of the lists most probably includes some hard to rank for keywords and some medium hard keywords. Most of the time the highly competitive keywords are used in the main blog title. This is ok because we are laying the foundation, or building a ‘frame work’ that will suit our long term aims in regard of search engine placement. Remember that even though these keywords are hard to rank for now, there are ways of benefiting from those keywords right now (remember how we talked about ‘flowing’ your reader through the internal topical network from a long tail post to a competitive keyword article ?).

Another note on long tail keywords and why we haven’t played with them now
Long tail keywords have been excluded from this procedure at this point in time because it’s better to focus on them during the phase of content writing. It’s not a good idea to put long tail keyword phrases as our main blog or idea title because they won’t umbrella many other related keywords (that represent your topics). This is the reason why working backward, going from competitive phrases (main title) down to medium and easier (categories and content) is the correct order.

Where is the ‘formula’ that you promised me ?
What we’ve done so far is try to include as many ‘variables’ that we believe are relevant to the success of our blog and made them a part of the reason why we choose certain keyword phrases. In other words, we have been putting together a combination of keywords into an ‘optimal formula’ which we believe will maximize the chance for our success.

Every combination of keywords will be different based on the idea that you have for your blog, according to the mission statement you’ve written (what your goals are) and according to the selections that you’ve made based on your own capabilities (knowledge of topics for instance).

Your formula started building itself from the beginning, when you decided to put your ideas and goals into description. This is one of the most vital parts of starting any project. Be it a blog, or web business venture in any form. A ship without a sailer isn’t headed anywhere, but with your mission statement in hand, you’ve forced yourself to be clear with yourself and have a reason to choose topics that you choose, in the correct order.

The same idea goes for the keyword research process. You started it with a clear goal. You’ve dissected that idea into niches and correctly selected them while trying to think about everything. In the process you’ve built your optimal keyword attack formula. Just because we didn’t write it down on a board like in math class doesn’t mean that it isn’t there.

It’s time to set up and structure our blog according to the formula that you’ve built !

Step #4 - setting up and structuring your blog according to your optimal keyword attack formula
This is where things become less ‘abstract’. Imagine how a search engine like Google determines the structure of content when it crawls it. We know the title tag is very important. We know that the H1 is less heavy then the title tag, but its more heavy then the H2, H3, etc. If you don’t know about these search engine ranking factors, then visit the seomoz search ranking factors.

You need to find a way of putting all your selections that are part of your optimal keyword attack formula into position. This isn’t very hard to do,

Just the same as you would structure a single web page , or blog article with the elements TITLE, H1, H2 and so on, you must see your complete blog in light of this principle. You must think hierarchically. The main blog idea title is on top, next come the topic ideas and finally the post ideas.

Your blog’s main title is the title that you constructed out of primary keyword phrases. The topics of your blog are actually the secondary keyword phrases that represent the topics you write about.

The post titles and ideas are selected by going through another session of keyword research, in which we can search for ‘openings’ or good ideas for writing about and are in good demand.

All together, the blog’s main topic title umbrellas the categories, and the categories umbrella the post titles.

By structuring your blog in this hierarchy you create a foundation for an internal topical network represented by correctly chosen related keyword phrases. The points in this network can be interconnected by writing your content smartly and linking between articles.

The next thing to do is set your blog title title to what you’ve constructed out of the primary keyword phrases. In wordpress you can do this on the ‘options’ page under the ‘general’ settings in the administration. The categories, which are the secondaries, can be added through the ‘manage’ -> ‘categories’ page.
This is as much specific information on the wordpress administration that I will provide. For more information on how the wordpress administration works you may visit the wordpress web site and search for a user guide. Of course, the same procedure goes for any other blogging software that you might be using.

See you in part 4, where we’ll take a closer look at how to effectively write content based on the formula that you have constructed !