Setting Up Your Blog

Setting Up Wordpress & Optimizing Your Blog

 Now that you've purchased a domain name and hosting, it's time to set up WordPress and get the ball rolling!

What is WordPress, and why should you use it?

WordPress is a CMS (Content Management System) and blogging platform that is extremely flexible and easy to use. Total newbies can learn how to use it without any problem and more experienced web programmers will delight in its flexibility. It is extremely customization.

It also has a “ping” feature and lots of cool plugins that make it easy to rank in the search engines. Simply put, Google loves WordPress blogs, and most bloggers love WordPress too.

So how do you set it up? By far, the easiest method is by accessing your C panel given to you by your hosting company. Most C panel interfaces have a feature called “Fantastico”.

Using Fantastico, you can install WordPress in only a couple minutes with a few clicks of the mouse.

Another method is to install WordPress manually, which you'll have to do if you don't have access to Fantastico (or if you don't want to use it).

We won't go into manual WordPress installation here, but it's not really hard either. It just takes a bit more time and might be a little intimating to “technophobes”. Do a Google search and you'll find plenty of tutorials.

So, now that you have WordPress installed, there are a few things we can do to optimize our blog. First of all, get rid of that boring Kubrick default theme. It's ugly and plain, and we want our blog to look nice. There are thousands of free WordPress themes available.

Take the time to browse and choose one that really stands out and suits our blog's niche. You can even invest in a fancy premium WordPress theme if you want, but it's definitely not necessary.

Next, go to the “Settings” tab. Under “General”, make sure that your blog title contains the keyword phrase.

Next do a Google search for “WordPress ping list”. Copy and paste this list into the “Update Services” text box located on the “Writing” page.

This will “ping” a wide variety of services every time you publish a post, thereby increasing your exposure on the web. It will also lessen the time it takes Google to index your site and your individual blog posts.

Finally, go to the “Permalinks” page and choose something other than the Default link structure. I prefer to select “Custom Structure” and put %postname% in the box. This makes it so your links look like this:

www.myblog.com/my-blog-post/

Instead of:

www.myblog.com/?p=176

This will help with your SEO as well.

Now we'll move on to plugins. Here are some of the best plugins for WordPress:

Askimet -- Blocks spam comments. Very useful plugin that will save you a lot of headaches.

Google XML Sitemaps -- Builds a sitemap of your blog and submits it to Google. Basically, a sitemap is a list of all the pages on your website. Having one makes it easier for Google and other search engines to crawl the pages and index your site faster.

SEO-All-In-One-Plugin – This is a great tool for your blog. It allows you to customize the meta tags for each individual blog post, so you can optimize them for their keywords.

Pretty Links – (optional) This is one of my personal favorites. It turns your ugly long affiliate links into something like this www.myblog.com/my-product/

These are the plugins that I use the most. However, there are tons of plugins available for just about everything, so take the time to browse through them. Don't go crazy and install 20 or them or anything though, because that will drastically affect the load time of your blog.