Once you have your site well underway, you may need to take a good look at your theme.  There are some well established very popular blogs that utilize very simple themes.  That may be the right choice for you.  But there are so many great looking themes available for WordPress that you might want to take a look and see what is available.

When I am checking out themes there are a few things that I look for:

• Attractive
• Functional
• Ease of use
• SEO Minded

Some themes look great, but they are so hard to install that it makes them unusable.  Other themes set up pretty easy, but don’t adhere to basic SEO principles.  Some of these themes can be made SEO friendly, but again how much work it takes is a factor.  I have a couple of themes that I use that are “Premium Themes”, which means that I paid for them.  They were relatively inexpensive and I like the way they look.  They really wouldn’t work for a niche site because they take some effort to set up.  I have been working with a new free theme that I like.  It’s called Massive News and it is available at www.wpelements.com.  It is one of the easiest magazine themes I have worked with.  It is worth checking out.

I also just stumbled upon some free themes that look promising.  They are located at www.wp-magazine.se/free-theme-wp-pixels/ I haven’t had a chance to check them over to see if they are workable or not, but they have promise.  If you get to them before I do, let me know how they stack up.

What is Google bombing? Here is the definition from WikiPedia:

A Google bomb (also referred to as a ‘link bomb’) is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions. Because of the way that Google’s algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb is created if many sites link to the page in this manner. Google bomb is used both as a verb and a noun. The phrase “Google bombing” was introduced to the New Oxford American Dictionary in May 2005. Google bombing is closely related to spamdexing, the practice of deliberately modifying HTML pages to increase the chance of their being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned…

Whenever we use SEO to improve the rankings for our site we are trying to figure out the Google algorithms that are controlling the results. Anchor text figures in to the algorithm in a significant way. But the algorithm is touchy and if you overdo one keyword you can get penalized for Google bombing. One of the results is that your keyword quits being returned in the results. The best answer is to balance between 3 or 4 keywords so that you don’t push one to hard.

If you read the article on Google Bombing in WikiPedia you will see how the process is sometimes used for humor. (I apologize to anyone from France who reads this and is offended but it is an interesting example of Google bombing) One example is a keyword search for French Military Victories. The result looks like this:

If you open the first result on page 1 this is what you get:

The result is part of the SEO process. Using keywords and links in a such way that the site that you want to have returned is what is returned. The idea is that if it can be done with a joke it can also be done for your site.

I was checking out some stats and search engine results for My Newbie Blog today. I started by spending some time at StatCounter.com looking at my recent keyword activity. I am pasting the most recent keyword activity here:

Most of the traffic comes from the keywords how to create a blog. I have been working to get a better return for my site with this keyword. If I can get the site to a page one return from Google for this keyword search the traffic will increase dramatically. Right now I am getting a 46 position on page 5.

I am also working on another keyword that will bring traffic if I can get in on to page 1. The keyword is starting a blog. Right now I am not getting any traffic from the keyword but I am returning a 76 position on page 8.

I get a little traffic from the word scratch used in certain phrases. Initially I was targeting the keyword starting a blog from scratch. I get a position 6 and 7 (double return) on page 1 for the keyword but not much traffic.

I also get a good return for start a blog from scratch, again page 1 this time in position 4, also a double return.

All of this is to demonstrate how important good keywords are. You might get a good search engine result for a keyword but if doesn’t bring traffic it isn’t very helpful. Spend your efforts on your best keywords. One of the ways you will know which keywords work in the beginning of your blog is by the traffic you get from MSN. They seem to add new sites faster than Google. The major traffic comes from Google, so if you are getting traffic from MSN you will get a lot more traffic from Google. Keep writing article using your best keywords and the traffic will come.