Setting up WordPress Blog WP blog and database Launching a
Word Press Blog EBook
This is for people who are using their own domains or sub-domains,
and as well as covering the setting up of a WP blog and database, it
outlines the basic SEO elements needed to start off a blog the right
way. All that is left then is to write your titles, slugs and
content with an eye on keywords, which does not take that much
effort... and thereby all the hard work is done at the beginning and
you just have to continue to write interesting blogging pieces for
your intended audience.
Prepare your blog before you start with some simple SEO steps.
Friendly File Names - Permalinks
1. Go to Options | Permalinks and under Common Options, select
"Custom, specific below" then paste in the following: /%postname%/
This sets up your file names as friendly SEO file names, such as
/hello-world.php instead of /?p-123
Configure your categories
2. Configure your categories, and make sure they use good keyword
file names such as expression-web-tutorials instead of all your
posts ending up in the default Uncategorized category. Use parent
categories much the same way as you would use folders within a site.
Always use dashes and lower case for file names with any kind of
site or blog on the net, do NOT use spaces or underscores, search
engines don't see either and your file name will be truncated. e.g.
expressionwebtuturials which has neither keywords nor a phrase.
Set Word Press Preferences
3. Set your Word Press Preferences, in the Options | General
preferences you can set who is allowed to post comments to your
blog. With the advent of plugins such as Akismet it has now become
safer to not require your visitors to register to join your blog in
order to make a comment. So that users are more likely to leave you
feedback. If you are using Akismet you DO NOT need to tick the
'Users must be registered and logged in to comment' radio box.
Akismet is a plugin which identifies and blocks comment and
trackback spam by checking the content of the comment anonymously
with an online server, to determine whether it is spam or not. It is
included by default with Word Press 2.0 and later. If you don't have
it for some reason, you can download it from the official page.
http://akismet.com/download/
You will need a API key to use Akismet, upon obtaining an account
with Word Press, your API will be sent to you via email. If you
already have an Word Press account you can find your API in your
Word Press Profile.
Go to http://wordpress.com/ and sign in, then click on the Profile
tab you can see your API key on the right
Friendly SEO Post Titles in Word Press
4. Make friendly SEO Titles of your posts. Word Press by default
creates your titles so that they look like this. i.e. so your Site
Name comes before your Article Title. My Word Press Blog >> Hello
World. This occurs on all the posts of your blog, so that means your
titles all look the same for the first part of the title. Which is
not good for your SEO implementation.
The Optimal Title plugin will fix the problem of SEO Friendly Titles
within Word Press by swapping the order around. There are two
selections of code available. The first does the title before Site
name job and the second not only does it check that the plug-in is
installed, when you're viewing the home page (not an individual
article), it will display "Site Name - Tagline" rather than "Article
Title - Site Name". If you have this plugin already update it as it
has some security issues fixed.
Word Press Do Follow Plugin
5. By default to stop spammers using comments and benefiting by the
search engines following their external links Word Press installed
the No Follow Attribute which stops search engines following
external links. This is not a good idea SEO wise, and there should
be a turn off switch within Word Press so the plugin is not needed.
There isn't but fortunately there is a Do Follow Plugin that allows
us to disable this feature. Once again
Each of the above basic SEO implementations compliment the other,
used in part they won't have as great an effect as if used as a
whole, and some should not be implemented unless others are.
