The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Money Making WordPress Blog

Welcome to my tutorial on starting a optimized WordPress blog. Whether you want to set up a mini-site, a niche blog, a social blog, or online marketing website, this guide walks you step by step through setting up your site with WordPress. Using screen shots and detailed descriptions, this tutorial provides you with everything you’ll need to get started. And once you’ve mastered these steps, it will only take about 10 minutes to set up a new site. So let’s get started.

Table of Contents

1. Choosing a Domain
1. SEO advantages of a keyword rich domain name
2. Branding
3. Top level domains: .com versus .net versus .org
4. Buying an existing domain
2. Web Hosting
1. Selecting a web hosting service
2. Hosting your domain
3. How to Install WordPress
4. Selecting an Optimized WordPress Theme
1. What to look for in an Search Engine Optimized WordPress Theme
2. Free SEO WordPress Themes
3. Premium SEO WordPress Themes
4. Installing a WordPress Theme on BlueHost
5. How to install a WordPress plugin on Bluehost
6. SEO WordPress Plugins
1. Google XML Sitemaps
2. HeadSpace2
3. Related Posts
4. SEO Slugs
7. Seven More Plugins Every WordPress Blog Needs
1. FeedBurner FeedSmith
2. Full Text Feed
3. Maintenance Mode
4. SRG Clean Archives
5. Who Sees Ads
6. WordPress Automatic Upgrade
7. WordPress Database Backup
8. Configuring WordPress for Search Engine Optimization
1. Update Services
2. Custom permalink structure
9. Installing Critical Addons
1. Google Analytics
2. Google Webmaster Tools
3. FeedBurner
10. Getting Indexed in Google

1.0 Choosing a Domain

Choosing a name for your site is the most important and time consuming step in the process of starting a blog. The name of your site will live with you forever, and the name you choose can have a significant impact on your search engine traffic. And every day thousands of domains are registered, so finding a good domain name can be a real challenge. Nevertheless, profitable domains are still available, and here are some factors to consider when selecting the name of your new site.

1.1 SEO advantages of a keyword rich domain name

Keywords are the word phrases we all type into Google, Yahoo! or other search engines to find information on the Internet. When selecting a domain name, consider what keywords are relevant to your site and include theme in the domain name. There are at least two separate SEO benefits for having a keyword rich domain name.

First, the URL of a page is one factor Google’s search engine algorithm considers when ranking pages. If your site is about mortgage loans, having those keywords in your domain name will help your site rank well for those and related keywords. Second, you will find that most sites that link to your homepage will use your site’s name as the anchor text of the link. Having links to your site that use keyword rich anchor text can mean a huge boost in the search engine rankings for your site.

A keyword rich domain name is the approach I took with Credit Card Offers IQ. As you might imagine, the keyword credit cards is highly competitive and highly valuable, which typically go hand in hand. Credit card offers is not as competitive and not as valuable. Obviously I’ll be targeting other keywords on the site, but the domain name contains important keywords and describes what the site is all about.

1.2 Branding

If you are promoting an off line business, a domain name that matches the name of your company is obviously critical. But even if your business is entirely online, a memorable domain name can help you build reader loyalty and trust. This is the approach I took with the Dough Roller. Exactly how well I accomplished that goal I’ll leave to you, but the people I talk to say its catchy and memorable. That’s the goal if your focus is branding.

1.3 Top level domains: .com versus .net versus .org

Does it matter if your site ends with .com, .net, .org, or some other TLD? Yes and no. Domain names with .com extensions are more valuable than other TLDs. It’s as simple as that. In addition, most folks assume that a website is a .com, so they can have trouble finding your site if it ends with a different extension. I have no doubt that some have had trouble finding the Dough Roller because it ends in .net. I think that’s why I get a handful of visitors each day who find through the search term the dough roller.

From an SEO perspective, it doesn’t matter. I’ve seen nothing suggesting, for example, that the search engines favor one TLD over another. So my view is to get the .com if you can. But if you find a great keyword rich .net or .org, grab it.

1.4 Buying an existing domain

I’ve never bought a domain name, but I expect that I will shortly. Cost is the obvious downside. To register a new domain costs $10. Buying a domain name will cost more, and a lot more depending on the value of the name. One of the key benefits of buying an existing domain is its age.

When I started The Dough Roller, I got almost no search engine visitors to speak of. Part of the reason was that I didn’t know what I was doing. But another part was that I had a brand new domain. At the six month mark, after my domain name had age, I saw a noticeable spike in search engine hits. Many have reported the same thing at around the six month mark. We won’t go into what is called the Google sandbox at the moment, but the point is that the age of a domain is an important SEO factor.

Availability: So you have a great domain name in mind and want to know if it’s available. There are a million places on the net to find out if a domain name is available. I use GoDaddy. It’s easy to use and will give you alternative suggestions if the name is not available. You should expect to try a lot of domain names before you find one that you like and that is available. I’ll repeat this many times, but remember, this is not rocket science, but it does take a lot of hard work and perseverance. If you are not prepared to work at it, forget about making money blogging.

2.0 Web Hosting

2.1 Selecting a web hosting service

There are many hosting services to choose from. And if you ask five bloggers which is the best, you’ll get five different answers. You’ll also hear horror stories about every single hosting company out there. I use three hosting services: Bluehost, Dreamhost and Proud Domains. Why do I use three, you ask. Absolutely no good reason. Of these, Bluehost is my top pick for one primary reason–tech support.

I can reach a live tech support person at Bluehost inside of 60 seconds almost every time. At Dreamhost, I was told that live tech support doesn’t come with their basic package. Their hosting is fine, but without live tech support, forget it. So throughout this tutorial I’ll be using Bluehost in my examples. Most hosting services work pretty much the same way, but the user interfaces are different.

You can get Bluehost for as little as $6.95 a month and can host an unlimited number of domains for that price. I currently have about 20 or so sites hosted with Bluehost. if you’d like to sign up with Bluehost, you can by
clicking here (and you can also check our my Bluehost Review and Special Offer ). And if you’re just starting out, the Bluehost package comes with a free domain name.

There are, of course, other web hosting options. If you want to host just one domain, Hostgator
offers a hosting package for $4.95 per month. GoDaddy.com
is another option with low cost hosting plans.

2.2 Hosting your domain

I purchase my domains directly through Bluehost. It’s easy, costs $10, and I can have the site up and running in minutes. Assuming you already have a Bluehost account, here’s what you do. After you log in to Bluehost, it will take you to what’s called the cPanel, which looks like this:

During the signup process with Bluehost, they will walk you through registering your first domain. To purchase another domain name once you’ve already signed up with Bluehost, in the cPanel scroll down to the Domains panel, which looks like this:

In this panel, select “register domain.” This will take you to an easy to follow set of screens to enter the domain name you want and register it through Bluehost. Now comes the part that trips some folks up. Registering the domain and hosting the domain are two entirely different processes. You’ve registered the domain, but now you have to host it. Bluehost calls this an “addon” domain, and it’s easy to do.

From the cPanel, go back down to the Domains panel and select the Domain Manager. This will take you to a listing of all of your registered domains on Bluehost. Mine looks like this:

Of course, I’m just showing you a couple of my domains. But you’ll see that two of them are “unassigned” and one is “parked.” Don’t worry about parking domains for the moment. I redirect that site to the Dough Roller. If you want to host a domain name you’ve just registered, find it on your list of domain names and click the “unassigned” link. This will take you to a screen with four steps:

Step #1:

With step one, you want to select the domain name you want to host. In my example, I’m going to host the domain name, smartmoneytools.net.

Steps #2 and 3:

if you’ve registered your domain name through Bluehost, there’s nothing to do with step #2. For step #3, we want to select the addon button. This will enable you to host your new domain name as a separate, stand alone site.

Step #4:

Finally, choose to setup a new directory with the name of your domain. These settings are the default on my system, so all I really need to do on this page is click the “Add Domain” button and I’m done. Note that setting up the hosting after you click the button can take a few minutes, so be patient. Once that’s done, you’re ready to install WordPress.

3.0 How to Install WordPress

Installing WordPress takes all of about 60 seconds. From the cPanel, scroll down to the Software/Services panel and click on the Fantastico De Luxe button:

This will take you to the Fantastico page where you can click on the WordPress link in the left sidebar underneath the “Blog” heading. Here’s what the WordPress installation page looks like:

From here click the “New Installation” link to go to the WordPress installation page. In the dropdown box at the top, select the domain name where you want to install WordPress. In my example, I’m installing it in the coolmoneytools.net directory:

After that just work down the page inputting primarily the password you want to use and email name. Once you’ve filled in the required fields, click the “Install WordPress” button and Bluehost takes care of the rest. The next page will allow you to email the installation details to an email address of your choosing. This is very important, as you’ll want to save this information.

So that’s it. Pick your domain name, host it on Bluehost or some other hosting service, and install WordPress. You’ll be up and running inside of 10 minutes. In fact, picking the domain name is the most time consuming part of the process. Once you have that, hosting the domain and installing WordPress should only take a few minutes.

4.0 Selecting an Optimized WordPress Theme

Before diving into php and html code, let me just say that you can ignore this section for now if you want. But in the long run it’s important to understand what makes a WordPress theme SEO friendly, so I’ve included this section in the tutorial. If you want to just get started with an optimized theme, you can skip to the free WordPress theme section below.

4.1 What to look for in an Search Engine Optimized WordPress Theme

Rather than give you some grand theory about SEO, I thought the best way to introduce this subject is to walk through some of the SEO elements I look for when evaluating a WordPress theme. So here they are—

SEO optimized h1 tags: WordPress and the blogging world use lots of tags. You have the WordPress tags you can enter for each post, there’s technorati tags, and there are html tags such as h1, h2, h3 and so on. I’m talking about html tags, which serve at least two purposes.

First, html tags when styled with cascading style sheets (CSS) define how the text between html tags will look. You can define for yourself what your html tags will look like, including font size and color.

Second, and important for our purposes, html tags communicate to search engines the relative importance of the text on your page. The h1 tag conveys the most significance and should be used once and only once on each page of your site. The h1 tag typically appears in the header.php file of a WordPress theme because most themes mark the name of the blog with the h1 tag. (if you’re new to WordPress, click on Design–>Theme Editor–>Header.php, which you should find along the right hand side of the window containing your theme’s php code.) Here’s an example of code you’ll find in many WordPress theme header files:

<h1><a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>/" 
title="<?php loginfo('name'); ?></">
<?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></h1>

Note: Ignore the line breaks; they are necessary to properly display html and php code.

The above code does two things. First, it displays the name of your site as entered in the Settings of WordPress (Settings–>General). Second, it links the name to your home page, which is why clicking on the name of most blogs takes you back to the home page. Recall that last week we discussed the advantages of having your keywords in your domain name. If you do, then surrounding your blog’s name in an h1 tag is a good SEO start. For the Dough Roller, however, my keywords aren’t in my domain name, so I’ve modified my header file with the following code:

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<div id="headliner">
<h1>Smarter Money Management
<?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> | <?php the_title(); ?><?php } ?>
<?php if ( is_page() ) { ?> | <?php the_title(); ?><?php } ?>
</h1></div>

As with the code above, ignore the line breaks, which I’ve added to make the code more readable. Also, I’ve added the line numbers so we can break down this code easier. So here’s what this code does:

Line 1: The “headliner” id comes from the Stylesheet file (CSS) and defines how the text will appear (font, size, color, etc.).

Line 2: Opens the h1 tag so that everything following it until the closing /h1 tag is identified by search engines as very important. Following the h1 tag, I’ve added the keywords that are important to my site. Actually, I should probably move the word “smarter” to the left of the h1 tag since I’m really focused on “money management.” In fact, I’ll make that change soon. On the home page, “smarter money management” is the only text within h1 tags.

Line 3: When a single post is being displayed (in contrast to the home page, category page, and so on), the title of the post will be added to the h1 tag. If I’ve written my title to include keywords as I should, then adding them to the h1 tag will help with SEO.

Line 4: This does the same thing as line 2, except for WordPress pages.

Line 5: This line closes the h1 tag and the div.

Now, I’m not suggesting that this is the only or even best approach. I first learned it from Court’s Internet Marketing School, a site I’ll talk about and link to in a minute. Alternatively, for single post pages you might put the category and post title in the h1 tags. The key is that you want your top keywords in the h1 tag. And in my opinion, you don’t want the same h1 tag for every page of your site, although there are good exceptions to this rule.

SEO Optimized h2 and h3 tags: Unlike an h1 tag, it’s ok to have more than one h2 and h3 tags on the same page. The key problem I see with many WordPress themes is that they use the h2 tag to mark the headings in sidebars. The result is that Google thinks the words “popular posts,” “categories,” “blogroll,” and the like are really important keywords to your site. So if your theme uses h2 tags for the sidebar headers, change them to h3 tags. You may need to make changes to your Stylesheet file to change the way the h3 tags look; that will just depend on your theme and what look you’re after. I tend to reserve h2 tags for keyword rich headings in my posts.

Changing the sidebar tags from h2 to h3 is easy. Simply open the php file(s) in your theme editor that contain the sidebar code, and look for the headings that appear in your sidebar. You should see them surrounded by an h2 or h3 tag, most likely. If it’s an h2 tag, simply change it to h3.

Loading content before sidebars improves SEO: This is a simple one, and it amazes me that WordPress theme designers get this one wrong. You want your articles to load before your sidebar. Why? Two reasons. First, you do not want readers surfing away from your site because they got tired of waiting for the content why your sidebar loads. Sidebars often contain ads and javascript that can take some time to load. Second, search engines generally give more weight to the content higher up on the page. So why tell the search engines that your blogroll is more important than your articles?

So how do you tell whether your content loads before your sidebar? You can load a page of your site in a browser, go to the “view” menu and click on page source (in Firefox, please don’t tell me you use IE). Look at the html code that comes up and see if your post content is above or below your sidebar content. You can also look at the “Single Post” theme file and see which comes first, php the_content() or the code that calls your sidebar(s).

Remember that the location of your sidebar has absolutely nothing to do with whether it loads first. The sidebar can be to the left of your content and still load in the browser after the content is loaded. If you find that your sidebar loads first, you’ll need to move the code that calls the sidebar to come after the code that loads the content.

Using excerpts to avoid duplicate content: Google hates duplicate content. And unfortunately, a WordPress blog can have tons of duplicate content. For example, a single post can show up on the home page, the single post page, multiple category and tag pages, an author page, and an archive page. There are several ways to address this problem. One is to use a robots.txt file to keep Google and other search engine bots from indexing all of these pages. But I prefer a different approach, which is to just show an excerpt of the article on all of these pages (except for the single post page, of course).

The problem is that many themes aren’t built that way. The Grid Focus theme I use for the Dough Roller, for example, doesn’t even come with a category.php file. So when a user clicks on a category like credit cards, what theme file displays the content? If the theme doesn’t have a specific file to deal with the category view, it simply uses the index.php file. In my case, that currently displays the entire post, so the category page also displays the entire post. As I wrote this article, however, I fixed this problem in literally about 60 seconds. I’ll show you how, and you can then apply this fix to other pages such as tags and archives if you want to.

In Bluehost (or whatever hosting service you use), go to the file manager. You can refer to my post last week on how to install WordPress if you are unsure how to do this. In file manager, navigate to your theme files, which you find in wp-content–>themes–>[name of theme you are using]. With Grid Focus, my theme files look like this:

Find the index.php file, highlight, and select the “copy” button toward the top left of the screen. When you copy the file, name it “category.php”. This is important, because WordPress searches for this file when a user navigates to one of your categories. Once you’ve copied the index.php file and renamed it category.php, it will show up in the theme editor of WordPress.

Cautionary Note: You should not modify the production environment of your site, particularly without first making sure you have EVERYTHING backed up. Confession: I modify the production code of my sites all the time, but it’s a really, really bad idea.

Now from WordPress go into the new category.php file you’ve created (which currently is identical to your index.php file), and search for the following code:

 
<?php the_content('Read the rest'); ?>

Your code may or may not have the “Read the rest” in the parenthetical. (The text in the parenthetical is displayed if you insert the “more” command in a post.) You’ll then replace the portion of this code that reads “the_content(’Read the rest’)” with “the_excerpt()”. Save the file and you’re done. Now your category pages will all show excerpts of the posts rather than the full posts. Not only is this better for SEO, but I think users prefer this approach, too.

One last thing. When you write a post, one of the boxes within WordPress is for excerpts. if you fill in this box, the content will be displayed whenever the excerpt of the post is displayed. If you leave this box blank, WordPress instead shows the first four lines or so of the post. It’s really a good idea to complete the excerpt box for each post, but I’m guilty of neglecting this step.

Links in the theme’s footer are critical to search engine optimization: When I first started blogging, I didn’t give much thought to the footer. I figured nobody ever read the content in the footer anyway, so why bother. It turns out, adding the right links to the footer can be a big SEO plus. We’ll talk more about that in the weeks to come, but for today, the important point is to note what links the theme author requires you to leave in the footer. What you want to avoid are themes that come with 3 or 4 links in the footer, including paid links to spam sites. One link back to the author’s page is fine, much more than that and look for another theme.

And this brings us to the next topic. . . .

4.2 Free SEO WordPress Themes

The thought of significantly modifying a WordPress theme may not be your idea of a fun time. In addition, you may just want to start off with a well optimized theme to save time. Fortunately, there is a great resource that offers free optimized Wordpress themes. Court’s internet marketing school is a great resource if you want to make money blogging.

One of the things Court has done to promote his site is to create WordPress themes optimized for search engines. And in addition to offering these themes for free, he also offers a great lesson in internet marketing. Question: Why is Court going to all this trouble to build themes and then give them away for free? Is he just a great guy? Well, I’m sure he is a great guy, but there is some self interest involved. Each theme includes a link in the footer back to his site. So every time somebody uses one of his themes, he gets a free link. He has even purchased themes, modified them as necessary to improve search engine optimization, and then made them available for free. In fact, one of the themes he now owns is the one used by JD at Get Rich Slowly.

So if you are looking for a well optimized WordPress theme, check out what Court has to offer.

4.3 Premium SEO WordPress Themes

There are premium WordPress themes that you must pay for. If you are just starting out, I highly recommend using a free theme at first. As you learn how to work with themes and what you want for your sites, you can then consider a premium theme. Most bloggers probably never pay for a theme. The theme I use here at The Dough Roller is free, although I have bought a few themes for other sites. But one thing to remember is that premium does not necessarily mean better or SEO friendly. Premium usually means that the theme comes with a lot of bells and whistles that add a lot of features to the site. They also add a lot of complexity, which is why I suggest starting with a free theme.

4.4 Installing a WordPress Theme on BlueHost

For those just starting out, let me quickly walk through how to install a WordPress theme. I’ll use Bluehost in the example, but the process is generally the same for any hosting service.

Step 1: Select your theme and download the zip file to your hard drive.

Step 2: Log into Bluehost and open up the File Manager.

Step 3: In the File Manager, navigate to the WP-content–>Themes folder.

Step 4: Once you’re in the theme folder, click on the “Upload” button toward the top left of your screen:

Step 5: From the upload screen, select the “browse” button and find the theme zip file you downloaded to your hard drive. Once selected, Bluehost will automatically upload the file into your theme folder.

Step 6: Go back to your theme folder and find the zip file you just downloaded (you may need to refresh the screen). Check the box next to the zip file and select the “Extract” button near the top right of your screen:

Follow the prompts to confirm the action, and you’re done. Now when you go into your site’s WordPress Design–>Theme, you should see your new theme as an option. Simply select it by clicking on it, and you’re ready to go.

5.0 How to install a WordPress plugin on Bluehost

Installing a WordPress plugin is similar to installing a theme:

Step 1: Download the plugin to your hard drive.

Step 2: Log in to Bluehost (or other hosting service) and from the cPanel, select the File Manager. Navigate to your domain folder –> wp-content –> plugins.

Step 3: Once you are in your plugins folder, click the upload navigation icon. This will take you to a screen where you can browse your hard drive and upload the plugin file.

Step 4: Find the plugin file in your plugins folder and extract the files.

Step 5: In WordPress, navigate to the Plugins page and activate the plugin.

There are two shortcuts to this process you should know about. First, when I set up a new site, I quickly copy all of the plugins I use from one of my existing sites on Bluehost to the new site. In File Manager, you can select multiple files and then select the Copy icon to copy the files over to the plugin folder of the new site. It literally takes me 60 seconds to upload all the plugins I need for a new site.

Second, you can use FTP (file transfer protocol) software and other methods to transfer files from your hard drive to the Bluehost servers without manually logging in to Bluehost. I’ve not covered that here because I think it’s important to understand how your hosting interface works. But eventually you’ll move to FTP.

6.0 Must Have SEO WordPress Plugins

6.1 Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps: Sitemaps tell search engines like Google and Yahoo! what pages are available on your site for crawling. They give search engines a road map to your most important content. With the Google XML Sitemap plugin, generating a XML-compliant sitemap is a snap.

After you download the sitemap plugin, upload it to your site’s server (see below), and activate the plugin from the plugins page of your WordPress installation, you can configure the plugin from the “Settings” page of WordPress. This plugin is rich with features and resources. I’ve found that the default settings typically are all that you need. Once you’ve generated your sitemap, it will be accessible at http://www.[yourdomain]/sitemap.xml. At that point, you can upload your sitemap to Google’s Webmaster tools. Google’s Webmaster tools provides a rich set of information about your site, and we’ll cover it in more detail next week.

6.2 HeadSpace2

HeadSpace2: The functionality of HeadSpace2 could fill 10 articles. It does everything All in One SEO does and more, and gives you more control of the settings. For example, you can set a single page or post to use a WordPress theme other than the one you’ve selected for your site. You can set global meta keywords that get inserted into all of your site’s pages. You can insert your Google Analytics (more on this next week) id into HeadSpace2 to track your site’s traffic.

I highly recommend this plugin if you have the time to understand how to use it. If you do, you should read the HeadSpace2 plugin page. In addition, WebHelperMagazine has published two great posts that you can read here1 and here2.

I do want to highlight one feature of HeadSpace2 that is particularly helpful if you already have a WordPress site with lots of posts. From the Manage tab click on the Meta-data sub-tab. This brings up a screen that lists every post and page on your site. Here’s what the screen looks like (click image to enlarge):

This feature allows you to edit or add meta tags/keywords, titles, descriptions, more text, page slug, site name, and site description. The drop down box lets you chose which one of the meta tags to change. If you click on the green arrows to the right, HeadSpace2 inserts suggested keywords and descriptions. One great benefit to this screen is that it’s an easy way to find old posts where I’ve forgotten to add keywords, tags, or meta titles.

6.3 Related Posts

Related Posts: This plugin automatically inserts related posts at the end of each post. This gives your readers some additional articles related to the topic if they want to keep reading. But the plugin also has a big SEO benefit. Internal links, that is links from one part of your site to another, are absolutely critical for SEO purposes. I’ll even go so far as to say that they are more important than back links. And the related posts plugin ads relevant internal links to all of your posts.

6.4 SEO Slugs

SEO Slugs: In older versions of Wordpress, the write post and page screens included a SLUG input field. This field was automatically populated with the post or page title to create the page URL. SEO Slugs plugin removes from the SLUG common words such as a, an, and the to improve the SEO benefits of the URL. In the current version of WordPress, you’ll find no mention of the SLUG. Instead, you’ll see a Permalink line immediately below the title. SEO Slugs works the same way for both new and older versions of WoredPress.

7.0 Seven More Plugins Every WordPress Blog Needs

Whether you are setting up a mini-site, niche blog, or a social blog, there are certain plugins that can really make your life easier and your blog better. Over time you’ll find that a well written plugin will save you a lot of time and add great functionality to your site. While different sites require different plugins, here are seven that almost every blog should have.

7.1 FeedBurner FeedSmith

FeedBurner FeedSmith is a simple plugin that detects all the ways to access your site’s RSS feed. It then redirects them all to FeedBurner (see below) so you can track all of your subscribers. Without FeedBurner FeedSmith, your FeedBurner subscription number will not account for all of your site’s subscribers. After you have created a FeedBurner account, which I’ll describe below, simply activate the plugin and navigate to Settings–>FeedBurner. Under line item number 2 you’ll type in your feedburner feed address, which will look like this–http://feeds.feedbuner.com/[your feed's name].

7.2 Full Text Feed

To reduce duplicate content, it’s a good practice to show the excerpt of a post on the home page of your site. This is accomplished by use of the “more” tag in WordPress. The problem is that before version 2.5, WordPress would only show the excerpt of the post in your feed. Most people reading your articles through a feed want to see the entire post; they don’t want to have to click through to your site to finish reading the article. With the full text feed plugin, you can show the entire post in your feed even if you use the more tag.

In the newest version of WordPress 2.5 (which you should be running), this plugin is no longer needed. Simply navigate to Settings–>Reading and select “Full text” next to the “For each article in a feed, show” option.

7.3 Maintenance Mode

The maintenance mode plugin allows you to take your site offline while you perform upgrades or maintenance. When activated, anybody coming to your site will see a screen stating that you are performing maintenance on the site. You can also indicate when your blog will be back up (e.g., 15 minutes, 30 minutes and so on). Once installed and activated, you’ll find the plugin in Settings–>Maintenance Mode.

7.4 SRG Clean Archives

SRG clean archives allows you to create a page listing of your site’s archives by day and month. By default, the most recent month’s archives will be expanded to show each individual post’s title. A user can click on earlier months to expand that month’s titles. An excerpt can also be shown for each post. You can see the plugin in action by checking out my archive page. Once installed, you’ll find the settings for this plugin at Plugin–>SRG Clean Archives.

NOTE: Once installed, the tab for a plugin can generally be found in the Settings, Manage or Plugin main tabs of WordPress. The location is up to the plugin author, and sometimes you have to hunt around for the plugin after you have activiated it.

7.5 Who Sees Ads

Who sees ads is a great plugin that allows you to set who sees adsense and other ads on your sites. For example, you can set an ad to display only to search engine visitors. You can also restrict ads on any given post or page. This plugin takes some time to fully grasp, and I highly recommend that you read through the instructions on the plugin page. If you still have questions, feel free to contact me.

7.6 WordPress Automatic Upgrade

The WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin does just what it’s name suggests, upgrades your WordPress installation to the newest version. With this plugin, the upgrade literally takes about 60 seconds and requires just a couple clicks of the mouse.

7.7 WordPress Database Backup

The WordPress Database Backup plugin downloads a backup of the content of your site (but not your theme files). You can have the backup emailed to you daily.

Configuring WordPress for Search Engine Optimization

After you install WordPress, there are certain configurations that are a must. For example, you’ll want to make sure that your Blog’s title and tagline are correctly entered in Settings–>General. You’ll also want to make sure the correct time zone is selected (also in Settings–>General). But there are in addition to important settings for SEO–the Update Services and Custom Permalinks.

Update Services

When you publish a post, WordPress has the ability to notify various update services to tell them you’ve just added new content. This is a quick and easy way to broadcast your new posts. You can edit the list of update services by navigating to Settings–>Writings and scrolling to the bottom of the page:

WordPress, however, comes installed with just one ping service listed. So one of the first things you want to do is update this list with other Update Services. For a complete list of services, check out the WordPress Codex, which lists Update Services you can cut and paste into your WordPress blog, along with links to other Update Service lists and related plugins.

Custom permalink structure

Setting the correct permalink structure is one of the most important things to do when starting a new blog. The permalink is the URL that will be associate with a WordPress post. By default, WordPress uses URLs with question marks and numbers that are not very search engine or user friendly. Fortunately, at Settings–>Permalinks, WordPress allows you to customize your new site’s permalinks:

As you can see in the screen shot above, I use the following custom structure: /%category%/%postname%/. This permalink structure results in post URLs that look like this: www.domain.com/category_name/post_name. If you use keywords for category name and place your keywords in post titles, the result of this custom structure is a keyword rich URL.

9. Installing Critical Addons

After configuring WordPress, there are several third-party services that should be added to the blog.

9.1 Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a tool that tracks information about visitors to your site. This information includes whether a visitor came to your site from a search result, and if so, what keywords they used for their search. This is incredibly valuable information and makes Analytics a must have tool for any blog.

Analytics is free and signing up for an account is easy and requires only a valid email address. Once you’ve signed up, you need to add your site to your Analytics account. From the main Analytics screen, you’ll see a link at the bottom left to add a new website:

Clicking on the link takes you to a page where you can enter the domain of your blog. After pressing the Continue button you are presented with a choice as seen on this screen shot:

You should select Analytic’s New Tracking Code to insert into your blog. This new code was released in December 2007 and is required to take advantage of future advanced features that Google plans to release. So having clicked over to the New Tracking Code, copy the code and navigate back to your blog.

There are two ways to insert the code into your site. First, you can access the footer file in Design–>Theme Editor. You’ll want to paste the code just before the < /body > tag in the footer file. Here’s what the code looks like on my site:

Alternatively, you can insert the code into the HeadSpace2 plugin. Simply navigate to Settings–>Headspace–>Modules and scroll down to the Site Modules panel. You’ll see Google Analytics on the list, check the box, click the edit icon and insert your Analytics ID and paste the code into the window provided. The advantage of using HeadSpace2 to hold your Analytics code is that if you ever change your theme, the code will go with the new theme. If the code is in the footer, you’ll have to cut and paste the code into the new theme’s footer.

9.2 Google Webmaster Tools

Goolge’s Webmaster Tools are a set of free tools that provide a ton of information about your how google sees your site. It shows you things like the top 20 search queries used to visit your site, how frequently Google’s bot crawls your site, and whether there are any errors with your sitemap. In fact, it is through Webmaster Tools that we upload our sitemap to Google.

Once you sign up, simply add your site in the box provided. Once you do, you’ll be taken to a screen where you’ll need to verify that you own the site. There are two ways to do this. I always verify my sites by adding a meta tag to my site’s header file:

The process is very similar to inserting the code for Google Analytics, except this time the code goes in your theme’s header and it must be placed before the and tags in the file.

Once you’ve verified your site, the first thing you should do is upload the sitemap you created with the XML sitemap plugin. Simply select your site from the Webmaster Tool’s dashboard, go to Sitemap, and upload your sitemap. Remember that your sitemap URL will be www.domain.com/sitemap.xml.

9.3 FeedBurner

The last addon is to burn a feed with FeedBurner. Here just sign up with FeedBurner, which is free, and then type in your sites URL in box to burn a feed:

FeedBurner will now manage your feeds, and you can display the number of subscribers to your site with a FeedBurner widget. FeedBurner offers a lot of features that are beyond the scope of this tutorial. But for setting up a site, I just burn the feed and worry about the other features as needed. For my mini sites and niche blogs, I typically don’t do much with FeedBurner other than managing the feed.

10. Getting Indexed in Google

Having set up your site, you now want to get indexed in Google as quickly as possible. Google has a means for you to submit your site’s URL for indexing. DO NOT SUBMIT YOUR SITE! Let me repeat that. DO NOT SUBMIT YOUR SITE TO GOOGLE! Sorry for yelling, but this is one of those “but it don’t make no sense” moments in life. Submitting your site to Google for indexing will delay your site being indexed for four to six weeks in my experience.

All you have to do is get a site that is already indexed to link to your new site. How? Leave blog comments linking to your site on blogs that follow the links. Submit your site to a couple popular directories. When I’ve linked to one of my new sites from The Dough Roller, it’s usually indexed that day or the next.

I hope this tutorial has been helpful. If you have any questions or would like me to cover something I’ve missed, just send me an email to dr [at] doughroller [dot] net or leave a comment.