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The Ultimate Checklist to Setting Up a New WordPress Blog

December 1, 2012 by 64 Comments

Blogging has evolved over the years to becoming a cultural thing. Each blog represents the voice of someone passionate (at least I hope that each blogger is passionate about what they do) about what they like to write about. However, it is no longer just open up a new blog and write away. There are tools that bloggers should use that can help their site. Here is an ultimate checklist to setting up a new WordPress Blog.

Please note that this checklist covers several areas for a blogging and not directed toward a singular blog niche. The areas of the checklist are separated into the following areas.

  • Focus of Site
  • Branding and Design of Site
  • Security
  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Social Media

Focus of Site

Without a focus, why bother having a website? Your readers would be confused on what to expect on your site. It is okay to have a blog that has random topics, but focus boils down to several areas.

  • What the site is about?
  • Who are you trying to reach? (your target audience)
  • What do you want to do with your website? (your goals for your site)

Each one of these areas are what you will always turn to as it is much like a business plan. You want people to do something on your site whether it be share, comment, subscribe, or buy something. Without establishing the answers to each of these questions, you cannot master how to convert your site’s visitors to the areas of your site that you truly want them to visit.

So, in a way, this is where you do your brainstorming.

For this area, please feel free to read more on site focus in the other articles on my site:

Branding and Design of Site

People connect and remember brands that have done something to get them to react. Aside from the obvious products or services that a brand may provide, with online blogs, it can be done through:

  • Site Name
  • Design / WordPress Theme

Your site name is of course going to say something about you or the services you provide. Whether you are focusing on optimizing it for search engines or in the case of this site, Blondish.net, you are wanting something memorable for people to associate you with, it all ties into branding. Once you have chosen a name that fits what you do, you need to be consistent with how your brand is portrayed. For example, if you provide internet technical services, obviously, you do not want people to confuse you with fashion.

The design of your website is definitely factor with branding. It IS a virtual business card. People should be able to come to your site and within the first minute, get a clear gist of what you are about. Design can be from the actual graphics of the site and logo, to even how your site is organized or viewable in multiple browsers including mobile devices.

In this section for branding and design, some of these articles may help you.

Security

Billions of people are online, and some of them are not very nice. Your blog can be at risk if you do not take serious action to prevent your site being hacked. The number one piece of advice when running a WordPress powered blog is to make sure it is up to date. After that, your plugins and theme need to be up to date. This is the first line of defense.

Of course, you definitely can harden you WordPress site’s security with hardening techniques or even security and anti-spam plugins. I normally suggest Growmap Anti-Spam Plugin and Akismet (which is provided by default with each WordPress installation) for handling comment spam. However, Akismet tends to produce false positives, which means that you may be missing comments from people who are really not spammers. There are other plugins out there, but I have found them to be a bit bulky and therefore, not really a viable option for larger blogs.

Hardening the security of your site usually involves placing code snippets in the htaccess file of your web hosting account that prevent spammers or other people from accessing specific areas of your WordPress blog or even the backend administration area.

Feel free to check out my article on hardening or securing your WordPress site.

Another issue with security involves with who you allow to use your website. If you have a multi-author website, you will need to pay attention to what roles you are giving them and furthermore, what they can do on your site through that role. Role Manager plugin does a great job of specifying in detail what a person can and cannot do.

Another great plugin is Login Lockdown. Please note that from the time this article has been published that the plugin has not been updated in 2 years, so use at your own risk

Search Engine Optimization

A lot of people use to believe search engine optimization was based on just backlinking and tweaking your content. It is more than that. It involves:

  • Keywords
  • Linking from within your site and outside of your site
  • You site’s design and organization
  • How much engagement and syndication is going on about your site.

When you planned your site, you have to know what keywords you want to focus on in order to make sure that it is listed correctly. For example, if you have a site that focuses on technology, you do not want it to be listed with fashion sites. Your articles should also reflect this by keeping true to your site’s focus.

You do want to take advantage of linking to other resources both within your site and from other websites to build links and even more so, your site’s authority. Don’t be afraid to refer to other articles or have a plugin like YARPP (Yet Another Related Post Plugin) to try to keep your readers interested in staying on your site, which decreases your website’s bounce rate.

As for themes, no matter if you use a free theme, a premium paid theme, one that you designer, or perhaps a theme designed by someone you hired, you definitely want it to be clean, loads decently, is flexible for you to work with, and is easy to use. Because of mobile use, it is definitely a good thing if you want to have a mobile version of your site, but please note, that if you are trying to go for valid coding, HTML5 blows that concept out of the water.

You can still check your site at the W3 Validator, but you will want to ignore the errors for code related to your mobile theme.

A really good WordPress plugin to assist with your site’s SEO is WordPress SEO by Yoast. You can customize your search engine listing down to the pages and posts on your site. The WordPress SEO plugin also has RSS feed enhancements, breadcrumb navigation options, and even can build your site’s XML sitemap. So in a way, it almost does it all.

However, if do not use an SEO plugin like WordPress SEO for Yoast, it is important to have a valid sitemap for your site. You can certainly try Google XML Sitemaps which is a nice alternative XML sitemaps plugin that even notifies search engines about your site.

Remember, even though WordPress comes SEO ready out of the box with its well written code and fewer database tables versus other content management systems, you still have to write unique and quality content. Plugins just add a little more help.

Here are some related articles to SEO:

Social Media

Social media has become a big dog in how blogs bite the dust or succeed. Google has even come to recognize that even having a site and relying on a computer to crawl your site, does not mean your site will become popular. The answer is that despite the fact that “Content is King”, our real people are the queen… or as I say – “While Content is King, Visitors are Queen.”

We all know the queen has a lot of power, even in chess, and marriage. :)

For your new WordPress blog, you should focus on the following arrows for your social media strategy:

  • Plugins
  • Where you want to have a presence
  • 3rd party resources

You can write all day, but really, you need to make it easy for people to share your blog’s articles. There are many social share plugins. I normally recommend Digg Digg or even Sociable, which add social share buttons on your site. Both give different ways you can display the icons on your site for the best impact for converting your visitors to sharing.

You need to tell people about your site, so obviously, just sitting at your computer looking at your site is not going to do anything. You need to go outside of your site and find people that are interested in what your site is about, and perhaps even other interests you have. You cannot be shy about it, but you certainly cannot just spam the crap out of people as soon as you introduce yourself.

There are millions of blogs, thousands of forums, and hundreds of social networking websites. Of course, you do want to have a presence with big players like Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter. However, there are also places that may be specific to your niche. That is where you need to be.

WordPress can do many things, but you do not want to overload your hosting account’s data resources. You might want to try using 3rd party resources for pinging your site, or automatically sharing posts across several networks. This saves you time and not having to install another plugin on your blog. One of the 3rd party resource sites I like to use for publishing my articles is Dlvr.it. Another resource I like is the Facebook App called RSS Grafitti that you can put your blog’s RSS feed in and allow posts to publish to your Facebook fan page OR your profile.

Of course, there plugins like Tweet Old Post and Twitter Tools that can be installed in WordPress to publish to Twitter. Tweet Old Post actually allows you to re-share articles to Twitter, so all those evergreen posts will not stay dusty.

Please note that you may want to install other type of plugins based on what functionalities you need for your website. You may need to even make a new plugin or hire someone to make it for you. WordPress can do it! :)

When you are starting off with a new blog, you do not need to overdo it. You are still learning the waters, trying to pump out content, and even trying to engage with people that you hope become regular readers that help syndicate your site.

What type of WordPress blog do you run? What plugins do you use for your site? Any other advice you might like to share with newbies that are setting up a new WordPress blog?

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The Importance of Sitemaps

March 10, 2012 by 54 Comments

Sitemaps are important because they allow the search engines like Google and Yahoo! to index your entire site and leave it available for other internet users to find. A sitemap is defined:

A site map (or sitemap) is a representation of the architecture of a web site. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion.
From Wikipedia. Original definition by Peter Morville, Information Architecture on the World Wide Web, Feb 1998, pp:58

A sitemap allows search engines to crawl your site more efficiently and index fresh material from any website. If a webmaster has move or deleted material, the search engine would recognize and change the search engine results to reflect the website change. Although having a sitemap eliminates most of the work that a webmasters takes in submitting a website to search, it does not totally eradicate the effort.
Sitemaps accepted by search engines are general coded in XML format, not HTML. However, a webmaster may create a sitemap structure with HTML for their visitors. For WordPress users, this can be easily done with the installation of Dagon Design Sitemap Generator. (Of course there are plenty of other sitemap plugins too.) Currently, the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator plugin is not an accepted sitemap, however, there is a great plugin that Google recognizes, which is the Google XML Sitemaps plug-in. Once one or both of the plug-ins mentioned have been installed, it is best to go to Google Webmaster Tools to inform them where to find the sitemap.

Sitemaps are not another new fad as they have been around for years. It was not until 2006, that search engine moguls like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN got together to create the guidelines behind a proper sitemap. Since then, sitemaps have been used as a vital technique for search engine optimization. Why? Well, as said earlier in the article, a sitemap would tell the search engine how fresh the content of a page is on any website and post it so internet users can find information they need. Sitemaps would recognize new material and direct crawlers to the information for indexing.

Outside Related Links:

Do you have a sitemap for your site? Any other benefits you can think of when having a sitemap for your site?

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Blondish.net Podcast: Guest Blogging 101

March 2, 2012 by 9 Comments

Episode 3 of the Blondish.net Podcast is a little over twenty minutes and all on guest blogging basics. This Guest Blogging 101 podcast covers strictly basics as there is a lot more to it that needs to be split into a series. The reason for this is that there are a lot of things to cover for both the blog owner and also the guest writer, so I had to make a decision to start with an intro-like basic episode on the subject.

This podcast on Guest Blogging will cover:

  • What is guest blogging?
  • Some tips for the blog owner on preparing their site for guest bloggers
  • Some tips for the guest author when applying and submitting articles
  • A couple ways to find places to guest blog at

This podcast is not for blog owners running a community blog where they have many contributors. This is for the individual blogger that wants to brand themselves and retain blog purity without using guest blogging as a crutch. Some of this can be helpful to community blog owners, but it is not intended for those who are.

Please feel free to ask questions and I hope you enjoy this podcast on Guest Blogging 101.

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Pingbacks And Trackbacks: Using Them Successfully

February 10, 2012 by 33 Comments

A lot of times when I go to my WordPress administrator panel, I look at the trackbacks. Sometimes it may be someone referenced a post in twitter, or another person’s blog.

According to Wikipedia,

A trackback is one of three types of linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents.

Same can be said of pingbacks. Pingbacks are more of a request to alert sites that you linked to them. It is different at the trackback is not what you send like a pingback, but what you received- an acknowledgement of sorts. In pingbacks there is no content sent, but only an alert. For a better understanding, you can read about it in the Managing Comments section at the WordPress Codex.

This can be great SEO for you and other bloggers who bounce ideas back and forth over similar topics. While you could definitely use the person’s comment system, in blogging about the conversation and sharing your point while including a reference to the original source will allow your visitors to not just respond to you, but also possibly respond to another.

I find that a lot of times when I have written articles filled with opinion based on another’s article, that I often receive feedback. It is in no way an underhanded tactic. As said, it is a way to share the conversation with other people and encourage more interaction on a topic. This is one way to use trackbacks successfully.

However, it can also backfire and seem like an underhanded and obvious search engine optimization tactic if I were to just blab out a bunch of related subject links without tying them together with valuable thoughts. I would just have to make my site some type of robot that published random stories within a certain niche.

Although posting frequently can create more possible pingbacks, it could prove tiresome and also look to be a desperate SEO tactic. The point is to try to entice quality trackbacks. Those will be sites that have people who are looking to give more feedback on a particular subject if the original article only says so much.

Above all, make sure to give appropriate anchor links when credit original sources. Sometimes listing the article’s full name or specific keywords will do, but if those keywords are quite vague. For example, when I blog about Google webmaster tools, I put ‘Google’ in front, instead of just ‘webmaster tools’. Webmaster tools can be quite vague as there are plenty of sites – in fact millons listed in Google when searching for webmaster tools. Although the link it listed at the top, with ‘webmaster tools’ only the first 2 listings on the first page list what I am exactly looking for while the other lists more relevant links.

Do you like to use pingbacks and trackbacks? How do you use this linking method successfully? Got any pointers?

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The Best Permalink Structure To Use In WordPress

January 26, 2012 by 60 Comments

I wrote Mastering Pretty Permalinks in WordPress with the intention to introduce the concept of the best permalink structure for WordPress powered websites. This was a call to try to encourage people to organize their website, but beware of how the permalink structure might be overrode if you have a file folder name the same as a post and you are using the post name permalink structure.

It is obvious that I am going to say that the post name (formerly known as pretty permalink) structure or the /%postname%/ option in your WordPress Permalink General settings is the best structure.

However, I am going to go a step further. Search Engine Optimization is fun to play with in regards to your domain’s URL structure. It can be a way to optimize what your article is, other than just organization.

What we know in basic WordPress use for structure purposes are as the following:

Permalink Structure for Posts

We can control how our permalink structure can look whether by post ID, month and date and more. We can even designate tags and categories to these posts and call them to pages using custom WordPress queries. For example you can call a category and show only tags and a certain number of many posts.

The reason why the post name structure (/%postname%/) works best for a post is because it shows the post title closest to the domain, showing how important it is to the site. The structure within the web page itself will also emphasize this using heading tags (h1, h2, h3, h4, and so on.) Now, if you listed by category (and I have seen people recommend that), depending on how your category is labeled, you are telling the search engine that the category is far more important to crawl than the actual title of the post.

WordPress naturally has the base “category” as a name and you can group posts under those categories. It is okay to display your posts on your site in a category. Most people believe including categories makes your posts duplicate content. NO! It is only if you are posting the same thing again on your site or the same exact thing on another site (like if you do guest blogging.) The search engines are not dumb.

Now, here is the fun part as well as the tricky part. What if you do use the category structure? How can you make it clever enough to draw more attention to your title. WPCandy actually exercises this clever way by naming the category’s slug an action. Yes, just the slug as you can designate a different name pointing to a different slug.

Just some examples:

News is reports
Opinion is thinks
Tutorials is teaches

Pretty cool, huh? As a note, the posts do group under the general “category/category-name”.

In this, we are telling (using the WPCandy example) that WPCandy.com reports such and such title, giving it an actual sentence. And you know, it nearly makes this former English major cry happy tears. (Oh I am such a geek!) ;)

Permalink Structure for Pages

Pages are kind of fun and since WordPress 3.0′s menu addition, your control over pages has increased with several options. You can use the older hierarchy structure with parent and child pages. Remember, pages in WordPress are normally known for being used for static content.

The older hierarchy structure adds the slug of the parent page into the URL structure. SO, if you have like a parent page and then three deep into children and grandchildren, your URL structure might get a bit long. That might not be a good idea for search engine optimizing as it takes away the importance of that page.

However, the hierarchy structure is not the only way. You can use the WordPress menu option in your WordPress administration (Under Appearance>Menus) to organize your website and keep your URL structure for your pages simple. You can publish a page without using the hierarchy and use the WordPress 3.0 menu to organize your website without adding more length to your page’s URL structure.

Now, both methods can be used and Google will pick up and group areas of your site that have been optimized as a group. For example, if you have defined that your main sections of your website are your ‘About’, ‘Contact’, and maybe… as an example say ‘Resources’, like I have here in Blondish.net, Google will pick up that structure if you do have a set up pages that are relevant to that main area.

As a note, We can also apply these techniques to custom posts types since WordPress 3.0.

In Summary

Your permalink structure is both a way to organize and help search engines, but can also be great in helping your visitors navigate your website. The best permalink structure to use in WordPress is one that is the most coherent for search engines to deliver the best results to potential visitors. Play around with your site and see what is best for you.

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WordPress Pages Versus Posts, Which to Choose

January 21, 2012 by 57 Comments

So you have content, but you are not sure you want to go with pages or posts. Well, it really is not that difficult. A lot of people put together a site completely in posts without few pages. Or they make a page and enable comments, depending if their theme has that coded into the page template.

Even you can customize individual pages, since WordPress 3.0, you can customize individual posts. You also have the ability to adjust your menu from your WordPress admin panel to whatever you like if you have the wp_nav_menu php call into the theme itself.

Posts are normally considered an area of your website that will be updated frequently, while pages are more considered to be static. The difference- while both pages and posts are included in a sitemap (if you have a sitemap plugin installed… and you should), only posts are included in your RSS feeds (RSS- really simple syndication.) With the RSS, you can feed it into social network aggregation tools that will publish your posts to your social network handles.

However, you have to ask yourself – do you want comments on a page you will rarely update? What type of content are you putting up and how much of it? Remember for those internet marketers who like to use landing pages, enabling comments on a squeeze page might not be ideal.

If you like to put up mass quantities of items, for example, pixel images where you have a lot of images, you may want to use a page. Or you could release a few at a time in posts.

This is really something you have to decide on how you want to organize your site. If you make a page, you will have to announce the page somehow, especially if you want to drive attention to it.

Navigation is a big part to most sites. It is often the source of a visitor’s problem if your site is confusing to go from one area to the next, and back again with ease. Both posts and pages allow you to implement elements like breadcrumb navigation (a navigation you put at the top that tells you the path from that page you are on, and gives you a way to go back to the home page), links for next and previous post, navigation with numeral navigation (instead of older or newer post links), WP 3.0+ navigation menus, subpage navigation (you can have whole sections as a parent page and then children pages related to that section) and more.

It boils down how you want to organize your site. In fact, your sites organization has pull on your SEO. If search engines see that you have sections of your site that are grouped, they will list those under you
I usually put posts for what I am going to talk about and pages for things I may not update a lot.

Here is a good example of what I was talking about:

How have you organized your site by using pages and posts in WordPress?

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Blondish.net Podcast: Blogging and SEO

January 17, 2012 by 19 Comments

Episode 2 of the Blondish.net Podcast is a little beginner coverage on blogging and SEO. I wanted to cover basics on SEO for the content and design. I do recommend in this post the plugin WordPress SEO by Yoast.

I go over some advice for writing the title and the content of a post as well as a few tips for designers. As a reminder, this is a basic SEO. I will cover some advance SEO in future podcasts.

The episode is a little over 15 minutes.

Blogging and SEO

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Impact of Google+ Brand Pages

December 29, 2011 by 39 Comments

Google+ quite recently launched a new feature called Google+ brand pages. This was quite similar to the Facebook pages. The feature also provided certain other perks to the companies as their profile could be searched directly from the Google search bar by adding a ‘+’ before the brand name. Also, the brands can use the Google+ brand badge, which can be put up at the main site to directly connect to the brand page.

Though these are still early days, these brand pages have already had some impact on the search engine’s result pages. Here is quick look at how companies have used these brand pages and how it has affected their internet marketing campaign.

Brands present on Google+

Brightedge recently conducted a research and found out that the number of companies present on Google+ through brand pages was 77 in December 2011 and this number has increased from 61 in November 2011. The number of people who add these brand pages circles has also been increasing considerable at the rate of 50% per month. As of December 2011, there were 222,000 people who had added at least a single brand to their pages.

The picture is a bit bleak when you compare it with Facebook but that is due to the fact that Google+ has not had enough time in the market. When all the top brands were compared on both Facebook and Google+ it was found that Facebook brands had 300 million fans, and the same brands on Google+ had 148,000 people who had added these brands to their circles. There were a few companies like Google, IBM, and Vodafone that were not present on Facebook but had their page on Google+.

Combining the social and search elements

When Facebook launched the Open Graph, its main aim was to combine sites, search and social networks. Google is trying to do the same thing by incorporating various features of its social networking platform into its other services. Many of the brands have realized that Google in fact may offer them something completely different in terms of internet marketing as it has control over internet search like no other company.

The impact is visible already, as a lot of Google+ brand pages have started coming up in the search engine result pages because of search engine optimization. One such example is T-mobile. This gives companies an extra incentive to join Google+ and spend more time on making the brand pages. The move also makes a lot of sense when you consider the fact that 34% of Facebook’s traffic comes from Google, Bing and Yahoo searches.

Legal aspects

Some people are of the opinion that by including the brand pages in search engines Google is acting a bit like Microsoft when they included Internet Explorer in Windows during the 90′s. In fact, two US senators have asked the Federal trade Commission (FTC) to carry out an investigation on Google as they believe the company is taking unfair advantage of the dominant position it has on the web today.

What are your thoughts on Google+ Brand Pages?

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