20 Basic Steps To Set Up Your Wordpress Blog
For those of you who are still confused with Wordpress as I was 4 years ago, here are the 20 basic steps to set up your first Wordpress blog effectively and the way Google wants.
1. Login your C-panel with your username and password.
2. Go to Software/Services. Underneath, look for that smiling face icon and click on it.
3. When taken to the white dashboard, select Wordpress.
4. Fill in the details as instructed like Your Website title, url, brief description of your site, username and password.
5. Click Install.
6. Once you successfully installed your Wordpress into your domain server, login with your username and password.
7. Go to Profile under Users and fill in your name, domain email and how you want your name to be displayed on your blog.
8. Go to General Settings, select Permalinks and look down all the way to custom url. Then type /%postname% in the blank box.
This is to optimize your page for SEO so that it looks like yourdomainname.com/topic-or-title-of-your-article-or-blog-post and NOT yourdomainame.com/?=id1234.
Google does not like that.They see that as spam link and delay your site rankings without even looking at your page content until you make changes to it.
9. Activate Akismet plugin which is already installed with current Wordpress interface by filling in the code which you can get by signing up.
10. Select your favourite theme. Different themes have different option settings. You might want to play around it before deciding on the one you feel most comfortable with.
11. Install all the necessary plugins. Some of you more experienced marketers have different ideas but normally I installed these 6.
A. All In One SEO Pack,
B. CK Editor For Wordpress,
C. Exclude Pages From Navigation(for your free report download page not to be seen in navigation menu),
D. Google XML Sitemap,
E. Pretty Link (to cloak your long ugly spammy looking links especially from Clickbank),
F. WP Super Cache(for my site to load faster).
12. Update your category under post. Please note that categories are what should be placed on main navigation menu besides homepage post, about and contact pages.
Category is another word for topics. So if you are creating a blog say internet marketing, you might want to create a series of 4-5 categories like Tips, Resources, Strategies, Software and Tools.
Then grouped your articles according to those categories.
For your info, Google is now ranking sites more relevant to topics rather than keywords now.
You can also create sub-categories which will appear as sub-pages under the main menu.
13. Go to Menu under Appearance. Look for Categories on the left side, select View All and selected all the categories you created. Drag and drop into the main interface.
You can also sort by dragging up and down the categories besides home, about and contact pages.
14. Once you got all this foundation set up, you are ready to make your first post.
15. Unlike most marketers, I don't delete sample page nor post. I just overwrite them in the main title and permalink right below it by clicking Edit, type the same words as my main post or page title and then click Ok.
16. For posts, I also go to Categories on the right side and ticked on the ones most relevant to my posts.
17. Last but not least, I go to activate All In One SEO Pack which will appear underneath every post and page.
18. I will fill in the blanks of post or page title, description which should be the first paragraph in brief of 160 words or less and relevant keywords related to what I write.
19. I also filled in the Tags on the right and inserted the same image in my post or page and under Featured Image on the right.
20. Then I clicked Publish and my first post is ready.
1. Login your C-panel with your username and password.
2. Go to Software/Services. Underneath, look for that smiling face icon and click on it.
3. When taken to the white dashboard, select Wordpress.
4. Fill in the details as instructed like Your Website title, url, brief description of your site, username and password.
5. Click Install.
6. Once you successfully installed your Wordpress into your domain server, login with your username and password.
7. Go to Profile under Users and fill in your name, domain email and how you want your name to be displayed on your blog.
8. Go to General Settings, select Permalinks and look down all the way to custom url. Then type /%postname% in the blank box.
This is to optimize your page for SEO so that it looks like yourdomainname.com/topic-or-title-of-your-article-or-blog-post and NOT yourdomainame.com/?=id1234.
Google does not like that.They see that as spam link and delay your site rankings without even looking at your page content until you make changes to it.
9. Activate Akismet plugin which is already installed with current Wordpress interface by filling in the code which you can get by signing up.
10. Select your favourite theme. Different themes have different option settings. You might want to play around it before deciding on the one you feel most comfortable with.
11. Install all the necessary plugins. Some of you more experienced marketers have different ideas but normally I installed these 6.
A. All In One SEO Pack,
B. CK Editor For Wordpress,
C. Exclude Pages From Navigation(for your free report download page not to be seen in navigation menu),
D. Google XML Sitemap,
E. Pretty Link (to cloak your long ugly spammy looking links especially from Clickbank),
F. WP Super Cache(for my site to load faster).
12. Update your category under post. Please note that categories are what should be placed on main navigation menu besides homepage post, about and contact pages.
Category is another word for topics. So if you are creating a blog say internet marketing, you might want to create a series of 4-5 categories like Tips, Resources, Strategies, Software and Tools.
Then grouped your articles according to those categories.
For your info, Google is now ranking sites more relevant to topics rather than keywords now.
You can also create sub-categories which will appear as sub-pages under the main menu.
13. Go to Menu under Appearance. Look for Categories on the left side, select View All and selected all the categories you created. Drag and drop into the main interface.
You can also sort by dragging up and down the categories besides home, about and contact pages.
14. Once you got all this foundation set up, you are ready to make your first post.
15. Unlike most marketers, I don't delete sample page nor post. I just overwrite them in the main title and permalink right below it by clicking Edit, type the same words as my main post or page title and then click Ok.
16. For posts, I also go to Categories on the right side and ticked on the ones most relevant to my posts.
17. Last but not least, I go to activate All In One SEO Pack which will appear underneath every post and page.
18. I will fill in the blanks of post or page title, description which should be the first paragraph in brief of 160 words or less and relevant keywords related to what I write.
19. I also filled in the Tags on the right and inserted the same image in my post or page and under Featured Image on the right.
20. Then I clicked Publish and my first post is ready.
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