Whenever its time to face a Sponsored Links Ads campaign in AdWords, it is important to stress out that not everything is a matter of bids & keywords prices, and not always the one who pays more will be the first.
Let’s look at some elements of SEO and usability to take into consideration when building our site, that will help us to improve individual performance of each of our keywords within the campaign. Being able to eventually get the same performance at lower cost by up to 30% at best.
Bounce Rate: Is when a person after enter our site, automatically leaves if he didn’t find the information he sought or it isn’t interesting for him.
Google takes into account this process, and rate the ads that are related in content to the site in promotion. In other words, what that means is that is expected to see a travel Ad in a travel page.
Even fulfilling with Google expectation our bounce rate can have a high percentage, in which I will review some factors to consider in destination pages or most known as Landing Pages.
- Flash: Pages with a Flash intro or Flash content generate incompatibility with certain percentage of potential users, also it represents a heavy load when viewing the site, which generates rejection in many navigators, and users prefer to search somewhere else than waiting for finishing the site loading.
- Clear information and quick access: It is very important that our site is clear and to the point, usually in a Landing Page visitors should not exceed the limit of 2 or 3 clicks to get to the information that we are promoting. The Internet user has little or no patience, and the attention our site tend to get is very superficial, that is why having clear icons and large headlines, will help them to find the information faster.
These factors will clearly have an impact on the results of your site and with a few modifications you may observe important changes.
Display Ad Builder Demo: Content Network Optimization University
You have probably heard a lot about Google Adsense but you may not know what it is. Well, one thing for sure, it’s one of the hottest way to make money online if you own a website. You can add Google Adsense to your blog.
Google Adsense is a fast and absolutely easy way for people with websites of all types and sizes to put up and display relevant ads on the content pages of their sites and make money online.
Because Google adsense ads relates to what your visitors came to your site to read about, or because the ads match up to the interest and the characteristics to the kind of people your content attracts, you now have a way to improve your content pages and make money online off them.
So what type of ads do you have to put? That’s the good part, you don’t have to decide. Google does it for you. Adsense always delivers relevant ads that are precisely targeted, on a page by page basis to the content that people find on your site. For example, if you have a page that tells the story of your pet fish, Google will send you ads for that site that are for pet stores, fish food, fish bowls, aquariums … you get the picture.
If you decide you want to add a Google search box to your site, then Adsense will deliver relevant ads targeted to the Google search results that your visitors’ search request generated.
What can Google Adsense do for you? In three words, make money online. More relevant pages on your ads translate into more clicks and make more money online for you. Because when users click on an ad, Google pay you.
It is important that you create ads that really integrate into the design of you website seamlessly. Take off borders and create the background color the same as the background color of the particular webpage.
How to Make Money With Google Adsense About Google Adsense
Whirly Popcorn divinity. Powered by Google, AdSense is a high quality advertising idea that relies on the conjunction between ads besides site content. Visit herehttp://googleadsenseguide-ebook.blogspot.com
The great part about this figure is the follow to make profit offered to minor businesses on the only condition that they lap up immensely informative sites. The advantages of the system are manifold, but from the perspective of the Internet surfer, the ads incorporated hold the page playfulness are more balmy and less scurrilous than banners for instance. Moreover, the ads are always related to the website domain, also so far, the pages showing additional updated delight earn most.Web masters use a intentional type of software for the insertion of the ads in the site content once the relevancy of the two elements has been proverbial. A brief script is applied to the pages of the website to complete the Google AdSense program discover. The income generated hole up this advertising program can impersonate significantly supplementary if you take care of several aspects applicable to web promotion besides traffic genesis. known is a close connection between the Google AdSense an Adwords programs, thus advertisers use the latter to shakedown on the keywords and they mazuma for the clicks on the ads, while the matching ad clicking pays the websites displaying ads with Google AdSense.
Google AdSense will bring additional money to a site that is well optimized further managed to generate traffic. Searchers are looking because information, not just for commodities or services, further the access to high quality content enhances the chances of ad clicks.The openwork site elation becomes a useful ground that convinces the visitors to act on the site. Although it is forbidden to pillar messages like – Click on My Ads – web masters gem ways to appeal to readers by means of sponsored links. When integrated in the trellis page content, such links or ads have 50% more chances of receipt accessed.Another innovative metier empowered by Google AdSense is the examine tale of the form that is available to all the web sites that profit the system. With Google AdSense, item web site can manifestation a Google examine box to play ball the visitor to navigate anywhere instance still remaining on the precise property. Google shares the advertising profit generated by the clicks resulting from this kind of searches with the web site owner. One fresh time we yearning to stress out that AdSense allows as payment if advertisements are clicked on during the respective searches. Visit herehttp://googleadsenseguide-ebook.blogspot.com
Google Adsense :pay-per-click Ads on Your Web Site
Google AdSense is the Google program where you can host pay-per-click ads on your Web site. When someone clicks an ad, you earn money. Simple as that. Is it really as easy to make money with Google AdSense as many would lead you to believe? Now that I’ve become heavily involved with managing Google adsense programs for my clients, I can see it’s not all play and no work. Unfortunately, a lot of people bought into the idea that there was a lot of easy money to be made and they are now finding out they aren’t making nearly as much as they thought they would. Additionally, Google has a lot of prohibited practices when it comes to AdSense, and too many Webmasters are finding out they violated Google’s policies after the fact – often because they never bothered to read the AdSense policies in the first place. Webmasters must not only comply with AdSense policies, but their web sites must also comply with Google’s webmaster policies. Prerequisites for Making Money with AdSense. To make money with Google AdSense you need plenty of traffic coming in to your site or there won’t be anyone to click the ads. Web site promotion techniques, especially search engine optimization and article marketing will bring more traffic to your site. You also need to have content that will attract the ads with the highest Pay Per Click (PPC) rate that are relevant to that content. Then, you need to lay out your web pages so the ads blend in with your Web site. Studies have revealed that people who visit sites that contain ads that use colors that are not in harmony with the actual Web site tend to develop “ad blindness”. Meaning no matter how much traffic comes into your site, chances are no one will click the ads because they’ll be ignoring them. If no one clicks, you make nothing. Dealing with Competitors If you offer products or services on you Web site, the first thing you’ll notice when you begin hosting PPC ads is that many of the ads are coming from your competitors. Therefore, you’ll want to put ads on pages that aren’t earning you any money, or do like I did and not put ads on your site until you’re so busy anyway you’d rather make a few dollars off of your competitors than to continue turning business away with nothing to show for it. Google AdSense allows you to specify up to 200 URLs for sites you want to bar from placing ads on your pages. The problem is that most times you won’t know the competitors are out there until their ads appear. Google Money Making Ad Options Google offers three ways to make money from them: Google AdSense for Content – A variety of size and shape ads for placing in your content is available. These can be text or image ads or both – you specify what you’ll allow. Ad units are full ads. Link units are simply a strip of text links that your visitors might want to click. Google allows you to put up to 3 Ad Units and 1 Link unit on each page of your Web site, provided you follow its policies – both for AdSense and for Webmasters. Google adsense for search – This places a search box on your Web site. When a user enters a term and conducts a search, a search results page opens, that hosts more pay-per-click ads. You can customize the color scheme of the search results page to harmonize with your web site. Google Referrals – Here you make money by referring visitors to use a Google product, like adsense, AdWords, the Google Toolbar and other Google software. Just like Google AdSense for Content and AdSense for Search, Google generates the code that you paste into the desired location on your web page. You can choose from a wide variety of buttons and text links of different colors. As an example of how Google Referrals works, if someone goes to your site and clicks the link and signs up for an AdSense account, when that person earns a $100 from Google AdSense and receives a payout from Google, you’ll also receive $100 for referring them. This is a great idea to me, because you can be the world’s worst Google AdSense advertiser, but if an ad dynamo happens to visit your site and uses your referral link, you can make money anyway! Google adsense payments Google will not issue an AdSense payment until your earnings exceed $100. Unfortunately, there are loads of Google AdSense Forum entries about Web site operators who accumulated $90 or more in click through earnings only to get banned from Google and not get paid anything at all before they ever reached $100. This may be because Google doesn’t take a close look to see if you’re complying with their guidelines until it comes time to pay you. So yes, there’s a lot more to the story than meets the eye. Did you find this article useful? For more useful tips and hints, points to ponder and keep in mind, techniques, and insights pertaining to Adsense, do please browse for more information at our websites.
3 Things You Should Never Do with Your AdSense Account
Starting as a new AdSense publisher would not be easy, there are lots of things you should be aware of, here are three most important things that you should never do with your AdSense account:
1. Signing to AdSense without fully understanding Google AdSense’s Terms Of Services agreement
Unlike many other agreements you sign while browsing the Internet, you simply have no other option but to read and understand AdSense’s Terms of Service or risk receiving a ban. As it usually happens after a few months, you risk losing hundreds of hours of your work (as well as thousands of dollars paid for promotion and SEO) simply because you haven’t read the agreement carefully enough.
Why is that? The common myth is that every webpage can display adsense ads. That’s not true. First, there are several categories of websites that Google forbids to take part in the AdSense program. Some of the categories are obvious – racist websites, those promoting illicit drugs or pirate software – but some are not. For example those advertising beer or hard alcohol-based products are also prohibited, so forget about opening an AdSense site about Russian vodka.
Another thing is that the AdSense’s Terms of Service describes several specific activities you must not perform on your website if you are to avoid banning. Among others they include such things as excessive use of keywords, lack or minimal content on your site or adding misleading labels of Google ads. For example Google may ban you even for using “Click the ads” phrase!
The bottom line: Without learning what is and what isn’t a viable AdSense website, you can’t really start your business. Terms of Service agreement sets strict boundaries you have to keep yourself within in order to do business with Google. If you have any doubts about the rules, contact Google and ask them what they think about your problems. You keep to their rules AS THEY UNDERSTAND THEM or you’re out of business within hours.
2. Asking your friends or relatives to click on your ads
Surprisingly there are still many people who think that they can make money on AdSense by asking their friends or relatives to click on their ads. This scheme is both ineffective and very short-sighted, but nevertheless there are people who think they can do business this way.
The problem is that no one can become a successful AdSense businessman by using this method to create the artificial clicks. First, there are practical reasons: in order to make this scheme work, you must have at least two thousand clicks a month. What is more, they must come from different computers and different people! There is no way you can do that – getting thousands of people to click on your ads in any other way than by creating a decent website and/or a SEO campaign is simply not cost-effective.
Then, as such practices are expressly forbidden by Google, asking anyone to click on your ads increases the risk of banning you from AdSense. If the system detects multiple clicks from a single source, it raises the alarm and this usually ends in banning the website in question. Even if you ask your friends are relatives to use different computers or IP numbers, it is next to impossible that everyone will remember about it all the time. And you would need A LOT of people to make it worth more than an additional dollar or two a month (see above).
In short, any using method of creating artificial clicks – ie. those made by anyone but people who visited your website and were really interested in the ads – is pointless. It won’t pay off and sooner or later will bring you a ban.
3. Clicking on your own ads
Never click on your own ads. Never! This rule seems to be obvious, but surprisingly this is one of the most common mistakes done by the beginning AdSense website owners. Clicking on the ads you have on your own site is the quickest way to get irreversibly banned from AdSense – sometimes even a single click is enough to alert the system. What’s worse, you will have nothing for you defense – clicking on one’s own ads is expressly forbidden by the AdSense’s Terms of Service.
At times, clicking on your own ads may be tempting – but this is both immoral and ineffective. In short, it is not worth your time but may get you deeeeep in trouble.
Banner Advertising Secrets – Discover How to Send Tidal Waves of Traffic Using Banner Ads!
People are very un educated about banner advertising and how immensely profitable it can be, but only if done right. So what is banner advertising? Simply put it is the system of placing banners which promote your promotions on websites which offers lots of traffic. If done correctly it can be a very consistent source of potential customers for you.
Here is how you can place simple banner in return for huge amounts of traffic:
Step #1: Build Your Banner Creative
For this to work clearly you require a classified ad which works! The greatest classified ads are not in fact graphic ads in – but text ads. Build a graphic, but only place text within it! People are conditioned to ignore graphic ads; however as soon as they notice a prominent text link, they will click it. So do you really want ads which are pretty much guaranteed to succeed? Use copy from other places online where you are receiving first-rate results (like your signature file within forums, pay per click ads etc), and then simply plug the exact text into your advertisement!
Step #2: Unearth Banner Networks To market within
Now you need to find networks to publish your advertisement in. I like to use AdBrite, however there are a lot of other networks such as Tribal Fusion, Blue Lithium and of course Google AdWords classified ads! Google’s Image Ads simply works like standard AdWords ads, apart from you get to publish banners to work with your text classified ads.
Step #3: Track And Test Your Results
Consistently track and test your Banner campaigns. Design alternative banners to ‘compete’ alongside your own banners, so that you will find out the classified ad which works best for you. Spend extra money on campaigns which work, and less on those that don’t!
Discover the Secrets You Can Use to Take Your Affiliate Marketing to the Next Level Using Effective Pay Per Click Tactics! -If you are thinking of entering the world of pay per click affiliate marketing. You first need to do a little research before actually creating any PPC ad campaigns.-Walking blindly into an Adwords campaign, or whatever pay per click service you decide to use, can be hazardou…
Unleash the power of Twitter and WordPress to multiply your traffic!Discover the tools and tips to maximize your traffic from these two great tools* Increase your blog readers* Use Twitter to know what content your readers are craving* Leverage the power of these tools through automation to save you time…
PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click – a popular advertising technique on the Internet. Found on websites, advertising networks, and especially on search engines, PPC advertising involves sponsored links that are typically in the form of text ads. These are usually placed close to search results, where an advertiser pays a particular amount to visitors who click on these links or banners and land on the a…
Mass Adwords Product Ads Takes the Advertisement to the Next Level
Search engines like Google, Yahoo!, AOL, and others are used by Internet users to find the information or products they are interested in. When a user searches Google’s search engine on www.google.com (or the relevant local/national google server [e.g. www.google.com.ua for Ukraine]), ads (also known as creatives by Google) for relevant words are shown as “sponsored links” on the right side of the screen, and sometimes above the main search results.
AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads. The AdWords program includes local, national, and international distribution. Google’s text advertisements are short, consisting of one title line and two content text lines. Advertisers specify the words that should trigger their ads and the maximum amount they are willing to pay per click. – Wikipedia.org
Now if you are Store Manager for osCommerce user you can create separate Google AdWord ads for EACH product in your store with the help of Mass AdWords Product Ads. It is an addon for this osCommerce Store Manager application, providing you friendly windows interface to create your adwords campaigns in time, eliminating possible problems.
If you own a large store with hundreds or thousands of products it’s quite complicated to make an advertisement for every product, which would include manufacture name, product name, price, etc. A separate person would have to do this, and she would’ve done it for days. With Mass AdWords Product Ads you can make ads for all of the products in your store automatically, creating hundreds or thousands of ads or just select one or few products. When people search on Google using one of your keywords, your ad will appear next to the search results. Now your advertising is going to be even more efficient!
Let’s say a customer is looking for MP3 Player Sony NWZ-A815 Walkman. Enter this inquiry “Sony NWZ-A815 MP3 Walkman”. Searching for this product on Yahoo! he gets the following results:
Buy Sony NWZ A815 Sony NWZ A815 on Sale Save on MP3 Players. www.company1.com
Sony NWZ A815 Buy now – $89.96 only! www.company2.com
Buy Sony MP3 Accessories Online High quality and cheap prices. Buy Mp3 & Accessory now! www.company3.com
It’s quite clear that the second advertisement will be chosen, as it coincides the most with customer’s inquiry. So the customer won’t have to waste his time clicking on other advertisements. Mass AdWords Product Ads chooses the most exact keywords, which most accurately coincide with the inquery. It greatly decreases cost per click, usually higher competition concerns more general, popular words.
Mass AdWords Product Ads offers you wide range of features and advantages you will benefit from: … This addon allows you to create separate ads for each product in your store – you can create separate ads for each product, including product name, model, price, manufacturer, store name and more then 20 other macros right into the ad. … This tool automatically finds proper keywords for each product – you have control over keyword selection process, including product variables only (product name, product model, product manufacturer (and other product-specific fields) only – for laser-targetted campaigns), keyword matching options (broad match, exact match, phrase match) and more. … It gives you the opportunity to create multiple ads for each product by template – you can use built-in predefined templates or add your own ad templates! Just create multiple ad variations for each product and let AdWords Optimizer find out the ones, which work best for you automatically. … Another feature of Mass AdWords Product Ads is the ability to preview which ads will be created. Before you generate anything – you can preview and disable ads, which you think won’t work for any reason.
Actually Mass AdWords Product Ads has even more to offer. This addon allows you to create laser-targeted advertisement and economize on context advertising. It saves your time, attracts more customers and increases your sales. Most operations are automated. All you need to do – make only key decisions. Better targeted and relevant ads bring more sales and more profits. Save your time – let the professionals do some work for you!
Discover the Secrets You Can Use to Take Your Affiliate Marketing to the Next Level Using Effective Pay Per Click Tactics! -If you are thinking of entering the world of pay per click affiliate marketing. You first need to do a little research before actually creating any PPC ad campaigns.-Walking blindly into an Adwords campaign, or whatever pay per click service you decide to use, can be hazardou…
Unleash the power of Twitter and WordPress to multiply your traffic!Discover the tools and tips to maximize your traffic from these two great tools* Increase your blog readers* Use Twitter to know what content your readers are craving* Leverage the power of these tools through automation to save you time…
PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click – a popular advertising technique on the Internet. Found on websites, advertising networks, and especially on search engines, PPC advertising involves sponsored links that are typically in the form of text ads. These are usually placed close to search results, where an advertiser pays a particular amount to visitors who click on these links or banners and land on the a…
Mastering Google Adwords – How To Lower Your adwords cost per click By Getting A High Quality Score
It’s undeniable that Mastering Google AdWords is the fastest and most effective way to drive targeted traffic to your website or offer. The problem with pay per click, especially AdWords, is that your AdWords Ad, your site content, and the fact that if you are promoting an affiliate offer, your URL most times would be the same as 1,000′s of other promoting the same offer; if there are other people promoting the same offer and the same destination URL, your cost per click is going to be higher.
You need a unique URL, among other things, to stand above the rest when promoting via AdWords pay per click marketing.
Ok, so you’ve decided to start a Pay Per Click campaign with Google AdWords. Depending on what keywords you are targeting and how competitive they are, there are certain key factors that you need to take into account when setting up your campaign, and they are:
1. Ad URL - this is the URL that is displayed in your ad. It should be as relevant and closely related to the actual URL that a person is taken to when they click on your ad, or the destination URL. It doesn’t have to be the same as the destination URL, but it can be.
When you are advertising say, an affiliate program, and using the same URL that everyone else is using to promote the same offer, there are already 1,000′s if not 10′s of thousands using that same URL, and depending on the quality of their landing page, and the density of the relevant keyword content, they will have secured a certain cost per click for their ad. You should strive to be relevant and unique. This is a key factor in Mastering Google AdWords and lowering your AdWords cost per click..
2. Destination URL - I know, you’re thinking that if you are promoting an affiliate offer, you have no choice but to use the affiliate link that they give you; not true.
What you do is, go to your affiliate page, click the view tab on internet explorer and then click source, save that as an HTML file to your PC. Then you can save all of the image files to your PC, upload them to your server. Open the HTML file in an editor, even notepad and use the edit button, click find and replace; make sure you look for the line(s) in the source code that link to the images.
Paste that in the “find what” field, and in the “replace with” field, you put the path to the respective image on your server. If you can’t download all of the images, you can ask the merchant if it is ok to link to the images on their server. Generally they won’t have a problem with this because they are incurring bandwidth anyway with every affiliate page that is served.
3. Landing Page Keyword Relevancy and Density – The keyword density and corresponding relevancy of your landing page need to match the keywords of your ad title and copy. Google assigns a higher quality score to those whose landing page is VERY closely related to their ads and keywords
Track your conversion rates, and pay attention to the tips that Google gives you about your ad(s) and how to improve them. These are the first steps to Mastering Google AdWords, effectively lowering your AdWords cost per click.
4. Negative Keywords - You should make a list of negative keywords, ie. keywords that you don’t want your ad displayed for when the word, or term is searched. Why?
Because, let’s say that you are promoting an affiliate offer that is a FREE Traffic Generation Guide, meaning that it teaches you how to generate free traffic; it does however, not mean that the guide itself is free. If you don’t add the negative keyword “free” then anyone looking for a free guide to free traffic generation, or traffic generation in general, will see your ad and could click on it, but most likely won’t buy because they were looking for something free. Get it?
If you learn the secrets to Mastering Google AdWords Marketing, optimizing your AdWords cost per click, and other effective methods of promoting your website, you will get a high quality score, lower your cost per click, and drive unlimited amounts of fast, targeted traffic to your site.
make money online the easy way with tremendous value and no sign up fee’s
Help iwth New Users Registering on My Blog ,blogger script error ,The photo button in my dashboard has gone dead
Help iwth New Users Registering on My Blog ,blogger script error ,The photo button in my dashboard has gone dead. in the middle of writing a blog entry, my ‘upload photo’ button has gone totally dead – I click on it and nothing happens, no window pops up, so I’m unable to choose and upload a pic. Only a minute before, I had uploaded 3 photos! Strangely, the other buttons are working (windows pop up), just not the photo button. Any help would be appreciated!i’ve a distorted blogger start up page , namely at the Posting Settings Layout Monetize View BlogNew Post Edit Posts Comment Moderationlinks I’m getting e-mails from new users on my blog.The e-mail body states: “New user registration on your BLOG Trade with Wisdom.com” followed by a User Name and then followed by an gmail email address for that person.
My blog is not set up to require registration. The e-mail is being sent from .Successfully linked my mobile device to my blog last night, and sent a post via MMS with no issues. Tonight, MMS posts are not getting through. (There’s no confirmation sent back to phone, and the posts do not appear in my drafts list.)just logged in to my Blogger account, and the blogs that I’ve been following, that I searched out and added to my list, have all disappeared. What happened and how can I get them back?You can still see them on my profile, but not until I went to a blog I used to follow and signed into it, then they all appeared on my profile again. But not a darn one of them are showing up on my dashboard so that I can click and read the new posts. Why?
have ensured that when I try to insert some text into the description that it is within the 500 character limit, but it still gives me the bX-iqb1lt error.Please help!A few days ago I did custom domain for my blogspot. But after two days ago I can’t access my new custom domain, please help me.I have set DNS from my cpanel domain, but something happen suddenly. Please, help me for blogger support team got the links gadget on my blog but it won’t allow me to add any more links to it. I can’t add a new links gadget because that won’t allow me to add links either. I cannot click on the ‘add links’ button. Please help! blog [ is displaying a Search box & text in its header area. This box is an overhang from a 3rd party Template I used previously (from BTemplates) but I now just use a standard Blogger template. It’s as though the previous template has left this behind. But I have scoured the HTML and there is no mention of it anywhere. If it’s not in the HTML where the hell can this thing be? It’s driving me crazy.
Can somebody please help? When you look for the code, are you checking the Expand Widget Templates box at the top right of the template editor?
It’s not a widget, so it may become visible. Of course, it could also be Header widget data, and remain hidden. Here’s the complete code that produces the search box:Before making a change:Template modifications require a Full Template Download first.Dashboard > Layout > Edit Html > Download Full Template and you will have a backup on your computer.Changes are made right on that page, in the template editor.
Another option would be to revert your template widgets.
After backing up the template, on the Layout > Edit Html page the Revert widget templates to default is to the left of the Clear Edits button.
Click that after making sure you are on the right link. The other revert link will do very bad things.Since all of your widgets appear to be normal ones, that should work with no change to the blog, except for the search box. But, if you get a delete warning, look the list over carefully.
If anything undesirable happens, immediately use the Upload a template from a file on your hard drive: line on that page to browse for and upload the saved template.After posting, my post doesn’t appear on my blog. Yesterday the scheduled one didn’t appear until many hours after it was supposed to. Could my blog have a virus?
Can someone help me with this? Is there a place to talk to blogger? I can’t seem to contact them. My posts are on my blog somewhere because they update on otehr people’s blogs who are linked to mine but they are not on my blog page. I have deleted all browsing history and cookies and restarted the computer but nothing is working tried opening with Firefox and it is still the same. It’s like the blog is stuck on a post from two days ago. There are two other posts after that that do no appear on the blog but you can get them from other people’s pages and they have appeared on my Facebook page since I have my blog linked to my Facebook
WordPress is simply the best blogging platform on the planet! Being open source software, developers around the world have produced hundreds of plugins to enhance its basic functionality, as a result blogging has never been easier, and the search engines love it!
Blogging with WordPress offers two huge advantages:
1. It’s FREE to download and use
2. The Search Engines, in particular Google, love WordPress blogs
WordPress is open source software, which means it’s free to use. When you choose a hosting account, try and choose one that uses a control panel called “CPanel”, because installing WordPress becomes as easy as clicking a handful of icons, it really is simple!
So you’ve bought a domain name, found a hosting company with CPanel and installed WordPress on your new domain! In theory you’re ready to make your first post! But before you do, read on!
Before you post, you need to configure your blog and optimise it for the search engines, doing this before you post makes life a lot easier for the future.
As WordPress is open source, developers around the world have written literally hundreds of plugins that enhance the functionality of your blog, and again the majority are free to install. Take a look at WordPress.org where you’ll find hundreds of free plugins. Ones I recommend are:
- Installer (install this one first, simplifies plugin installations)
- Google XML Site Maps (creates a site map for your blog)
- Ultimate Tag Warrior (essential plugin for managing tags)
- Sociable (assists with social bookmarking)
Next, within your dashboard, select Options in the menu and then Permalinks. You need to change the settings on this page in order to optimise your post’s url for the search engines, this change will ensure your keywords appear in the url. In the Custom Options box, insert the following text:
/%category%/%postname%/
Typing this will optimise your posts, but you must be careful only to ever select one category per post in the future, and not change a post’s category after you’ve published it!
When you post with WordPress, it automatically notifies (known as pinging) blog directories of your new content, they index it based on the tags you assign. The search engine robots regularly visit these directories, and as a result your new post will be indexed by them very quickly. Rapid indexing is one of the huge advantages of blogging!
In your blogs configuration, you should add as many directory sites as possible to ping, in addition to the default url. Simply search on the web for “ping list”.
Finally, you need to optimise the appearance of your site. You don’t want to use the basic template that comes with WordPress. If you do a search online for WordPress themes, you’ll find hundreds to download for free.org again in their themes directory. Whilst there are hundreds of free themes around, I never seem to find one that perfectly meets my needs, so I often end up buying one!
Once you’ve installed the theme of your choice, activated all of your plugins, and made the configuration adjustments I’ve recommended, you’re ready to post, so what are you waiting for!
