WordPress

WordPress is the Application of Choice to Create Webpages

Using WordPress and a free theme is the easiest way to get a website up and running in less than ten minutes. You can literally get a website in front of your clients and viewers in just a few minutes. Now it might not be optimized or configured perfectly, but it is a good start.

How To Install WordPress?

There are a few ways to install WordPress. The easiest way is with your CPANEL from your host provider. Normally there is an area in your CPANEL that will have an icon named Fantastico. This is where you can find the Worldpress installer.

Click on the WordPress Tab and begin the installation. Choose your domain name in which you would like your website installed upon. There are a few fields you will need to fill in to help the installation along.

A database will be created automatically and your website will be linked to that database. After the installation is complete, you will be prompted to log into the site.

WordPress Dashboard

Once inside the dashboard area, you will want to immediately go to your WordPress plugin tab and download your favorite SEO plugin. My favorite is ALL in ONE SEO, but there are others that do just fine. Set this up first before doing anything with your privacy settings.

The next thing you want to setup are your post categories. The categories should be on the same topic as your website. Try to keep everything focused on the main theme of the website.

Now setup the links. Create a minimum of 10 out-going links and use the widget feature to show them on your sidebar. This is going to give you a little boost in the search engines.

Deeper Inside WordPress

The three next pieces to focus on are the PAGES, POSTS and PRIVACY areas.

The privacy tab allows the user to make the site available to the search engines. There may be times when you don’t want your website indexed right away. Usually sites that have little content on them are normally ignored by Google during the first pass. So many internet marketers choose to not set the privacy setting to “public” until they have a considerable amount of content.

The PAGE tab is where all static pages are created. These are the pages that will show up in your top navigation bar or sidebar page listing. They are the most important content if you are focusing on SEO.

The POST tab is where you will create all your daily posts. They can be very short and blog style. They do not hold as much weight with the search engines as do the pages.

Make It Pretty

Although there are many plain sites that do very well on the internet, it is always best to give yourself that little edge on your competition. Having an eye pleasing website will give you that little bit of extra help to push your site forward.

“Time on site” is important when working with Google. Google likes to see viewers staying on a site for two minutes or more. When you have a nice looking site, viewers will stay on the site longer. Often times things like images, videos, colorful backgrounds and even some animations will work really well to keeping viewers on your website.

I tend to do a little bit of everything and it tends to help. Now, presentation alone will not be your saving grace. A website needs content and a lot of content. When a reader finds something they like, they may search your website deeper for other information that pertains to the content they are reading.

This is where categories come in as a way to guide your reader to similar content. A WordPress site can literally lock in a reader for thirty minutes or more with a combination of good content, a site that is easy to navigate, detailed and relevant categories and presentable layout.

What To Watch Out For With WordPress

Although WordPress is very easy to use and extremely helpful in SEO. It does come with its limitations. One big limitation is no backup software. There are many plugins to assist with this effort, yet none will automatically do this for you. To create an automatic backup of your website, you either need to be savvy with cronjobs and such or purchase an inexpensive backup service for WordPress.

For the few cents it costs a month to keep your site backed up and easy to restore, you will have saved yourself a lot of effort and heartache from having to recreate the website from scratch. This will become unmanageable on your own once you have reach one hundred pages or more. The free plugins can put a heavy load on your hosting service.

Free backup plugins can slow down your website or make it unaccessible. No matter what kind of script you are using to do the backup, it will need to execute extra processes on your server. Every new process takes away from the performance of your website. It can and will slow it down to a crawl. Let a service do the back up for you and leave your worries behind.

I use the back up service called MyRepono. It will completely backup all my WordPress sites for about two dollars a month. If anything happens, I can easily find my backups and press an easy restore button to go backward to any point in the past. Within a few minutes my site is available again.

Avoid the worry of your website being hacked, your hosting service making a mistake, deleting files, misconfiguration and more. This by far is a must for any WordPress website.

The other thing you want to do is cloak any links that are consider affiliate links. WordPress cannot do this for you and they also do not allow masking plugins to be listed in the WordPress plugin directory. Yet this problem can easily be solved.

Google the words “WordPress link cloaking plugin” and you will find a number of plugins and services that can take care of all this for you. There are free and paid services, applications and plugins available. I use a combination of paid and free to get the job done. There are even WordPress themes that can do this for you.