Setting Up a Word Press Blog

Setting up hosting and installing Word Press

There are many good hosting companies around, I personally use hostgator and they provide excellent hosting for less than $9 per month which includes unlimited domains and bandwidth and is ideal for a new marketer They have online live support second to none and in depth video tutorials covering every aspect of setting up your account including setting up name servers to point at your new domain and installing your word press blog.

Installing essential plug ins for SEO

There is a lot written about setting up your blogs and websites to get the maximum benefit from on page Optimization.

In the good old days it was possible to rank for a keyword just by applying the correct on page optimization, unfortunately this is not now possible. Recently Google have intimated that on page optimization accounts for less than 15% of the overall factors considered when deciding search engine ranking. I have therefore provided the following FREE plug ins I use and I recommend installing on every single blog you ever set up.

Whilst there will always be paid plug ins that do a slightly better job or provide more detailed functions this group will do the lions share to ensure you have the main requirements set up and you can focus on the main job in hand, getting indexed and listed in the shortest possible time.

Akismet
Platinum SEO Pack
Google site map
Contact form 7
SEO Smart Links
SEO Friendly images

Important Settings

Permalinks

Permalinks are the full url of a post or page and it is from these links that the search engines find our posts.  The plug in is set to its default setting which provides no benefit form a SEO perspective.  The URL for instance in its default setting will look like this for this post,

http://onlinemoneyclub.co.uk/?p=335

It is very important to get the keyword in to your title and URL where ever possible, creating a custom permalink allows you to achieve this and provides a couple of options, you can add the category and the keyword to the URL or just the keyword, ideally your keyword should be your category also so you can get your keyword in to your URL twice.  This is a typical URL with the permalink changed to a “custom” setting.

http://onlinemoneyclub.co.uk/word-press/setting-up-word-press

We do this by clicking on the permalinks link on the left hand side of the blog under settings. Click on “custom setting” and enter this into the box /%category%/postname%/ and click Save Changes. If your hosting allows this change the permalink will change as required, if you click on the link and you get “page not displayed” it means that your hosting doesnt allow this type of permalink structure. (Hostgator allows this pemalink)

In this instance the code to be typed into the custom box is as follows /index.php/%category%/postname% and the URL will look like this,

http://onlinemoneyclub.co.uk/index.php/word-press/setting-up-word-press

Writing

You need to add the following Site Update Services to the service in as dafault.  This automatically sends notifys the services listed of your new post and so it can be picked up by readers and RSS feeds.  Simply copy and paste this list and click update and all is set.

http://api.feedster.com/ping

The following pages should be always be added to a blog and the relevent information added to each page.

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Please take some time to read each of the plug ins set requirements and ensure you set up the plug in exactly as per the set up guides and you will have a fully optimized blog in less than 30 mins.

About David Henry