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Beginner’s Guide

A Beginner’s Guide to WordPress Basics

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If you’re a new blogger, you might want to check out the entire Beginner’s Guide series we’ve been doing here at the BlogWorld blog, which, to date, includes guides to Twitter Basics, SEO Basics, Podcasting Basics, and Blog Monetization Basics. Today, I wanted to cover another common challenge for new bloggers: using WordPress.

WordPress is the blogging platform used by most major bloggers who have their own domain names. Of course, it isn’t the only choice for bloggers, but I personally find it to be the best option based on the community of people developing for it, the ease of installation and use, and the various options to customize your blog and the way you use it.

Before you continue reading this post about using WordPress, head to their site to read installation instructions so you can get WordPress set up on whatever domain name you own.

Adding a Theme

The first thing I do whenever I install WordPress on a new blog is look for a theme I like so that I’m not using the generic out-of-box theme that comes with WordPress. The theme is basically the look of your blog – colors, fonts, sidebars, etc. If you know CSS, you can pretty easily make changes to any theme you see, but even if you don’t, there are thousands of choices, so you should be able to find something you like. If you’re willing to pay for your theme, check out Thesis and Genesis, two of the most well-known and easy-to-customize options out there. Want a free theme? There are tons of those available too – just do a quick search and you’ll find lots of options.

When you download a theme and unzip the file, you’ll want to add it to your site by uploading it to the themes folder. When you log into your WordPress dashboard, you’ll be able to access all of the themes under “Appearance” on the sidebar. From there, you can preview how the themes would look on your site and choose which one to make live.

Adding Plugins

Plugins are awesome. Basically, they add additional functions to your blog based on what you personally need for your community. Personally, my favorite plugins are:

  • All-In-One SEO – perfect to for simple SEO on all of your posts
  • Zemanta – helps you interlink posts on your own site, find related posts to recommend, and add tags to your post
  • Livefyre – my personal comment plugin of choice is Livefyre, though you can also make a case for Disqus (what we use currently here at BlogWorld) and CommentLuv with the generic WordPress comment system, which simple adds a person’s more recent post to the end of their comment

In addition, though there are several individual plugins that perform each of these functions, I recommend using plugins for:

  • Creating a mobile version of your site
  • Adding buttons for social sharing (on individual posts, in a top/bottom bar, along the side of the post, etc.)
  • Adding contact forms to your pages or posts (if you don’t want to list your email address)
  • Building galleries of your pictures
  • Creating tables
  • Backing up your site (SUPER important – check out BlogWorld speaker Peter Pollock’s post on protecting your blog)
  • Adding your author profile to the top or bottom of a post

This is not the end-all list of plugins you can add to make your blog more functional for you and for readers. Spend some time browsing through the available plugins to find those that make sense for your blog.

Setting Up Your Sidebar

After you’ve installed WordPress, added a theme, and set up plugins, your next step is to set up your sidebar. I recommed you include the following things on your sidebar:

  • Links to your most recent posts
  • A sign-up box for your mailing list (I use Aweber)
  • A link for people to subscribe to your blog via RSS
  • Links/buttons to your social network profiles
  • A list of your categories or other navigational tools
  • Polls
  • A calendar of events or posts

You can also consider adding a list of your most popular posts, advertising, a blogroll, a search bar, your Amazon wishlist, Youtube videos, links to products you’re selling or affiliate products, a list of the most recent comments on your blog, a tag cloud or list of popular tags…and much, much more. If you want to add it to your sidebar, there’s a way to do it – and most of what you’ll add to your sidebar, you’ll do so with widgets.

You install a widget much like you’d install a plugin. Under the “appearance” tab on your dashboard sidebar, you’ll see a link to show your widgets, so you can simply drag and drop them onto your sidebar. Easy peasy. There’s also a text box if you want to get all HTML-y and add your own code instead of using a widget for something you want to display.

Configuration

Next, head into your profile (under “Users”) on the sidebar and update it as necessary for your blog. You should pay special attention to your display name (go with a name or nickname rather than “admin”) and your biographical information if you include a theme or plugin that adds your bio to each post.

Remember to go to Gravatar to upload an avatar associated with your email address if you don’t have one already.

Under the “Settings” tab on your dashboard sidebar, you’ll also want to do some more configuration work on your blog. Here’s what you should do, at minimum:

  • Under General: Add your blog title and a tagline (or at least delete the default) and change the blog to your timezone
  • Under Permalinks: Change the permalinks structure to something better than the default numbering system

I recommend going through each page under Settings and considering your various options. While the defaults work for many bloggers, you might want something different.

Adding Content

Congrats – you’re finally ready to add content! There are two different types of content you can add via WordPress (and most blogging platforms):

  • Posts: the general articles you want to add to your blog day by day
  • Pages: content that is more informative to help the user understand more about your blog or you

Posts are linked to both categories and tags. Categories give a broad, general topic while tags are more specific topics. Most bloggers have categories are a main navigational function and choose to include 5 to 15. You can also include a few main categories and then several subcategories under each main “parent” category. Tags tell your reader what an individual post is about. There’s no limit to the number of tags you use on your blog, though most recommend that you don’t use more than 10 or so on any one post.

Pages include things such as About Me, Contact, Archives, About the Blog, Best Of, and more. They’re typically included on the navigation bar of a blog so people can find them quickly.

WordPress Pointers for Beginners

Here are some more tips and tricks for using WordPress if you don’t have experience with this platform.

  • You can change the permalink for a post of page under the main title box by clicking on the “edit” button. This is helpful for SEO in many cases and can also help you create a permalink that is easy to remember.
  • You can work in a WYSIWYG editor or HTML editor – whichever is more comfortable for you.
  • Most of the editing buttons are self-explanatory, since they’re similar to what you already use in word processing programs. Some that you may not know: to the right of the link buttons you’ll see one called “insert more tag” when you hover. This adds “read more” to the post on your homepage which is beneficial if you write extremely long posts and don’t want the whole thing displayed. Beside the spell check, you’ll see a blue box called “toggle full screen” which can be beneficial when you’re writing posts. Beside that, you’ll see a button called “show/hide kitchen sink” which, when clicked, gives you even more editing options.
  • You don’t have to publish a post immediately. You can also schedule it to go up at a specific time in the future by choosing the “edit” option in the publish box.
  • You can move boxes around on your dashboard to make it more functional for you. Simply drag and drop!
  • At the bottom of your edit post page, you can see previous revisions and auto-saves of a post.

If you’re a WordPress user, I want to encourage you to leave your own tips in a comment below!

A Beginner’s Guide to SEO Basics

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Earlier this year, I wrote a post called “The Beginner’s Guide to Twitter Basics” about how to use Twitter if you’re brand new to the platform. Month after month, it is one of the highest-trafficked posts here on the BlogWorld blog. You know what that tells me? It tells me that sometimes I forget that a lot of people have no experience with blogging and social media and are craving 101-level posts.

So today, I wanted to tackle another topic that seems difficult from the eyes of a newbie: search engine optimization, or SEO. If you want to learn SEO from the experts so that you have the top rank on Google for any keyword you choose, this is not the place for you. However, I think that if you’re a blogger that doesn’t know a darn thing about SEO, you’re doing yourself a great disservice. If you just take a moment to learn the basics, you can get your blog in front of a lot more eyeballs! And no, you don’t have to jeopardize your content to do it.

What is SEO? Why Should I Care?

One of the first things I did as a new freelance writer back in 2005ish was google “What is SEO?” I had no clue, but a lot of my clients were asking if I was skilled in that department, and I wanted to be able to say yes! If you have no idea what SEO is or why you should care, don’t worry. We were all in that boat at one time.

Think about  how your website gets traffic. Some people come to your blog when others retweet or like or otherwise share your links through social media sites. Some people come to your blog when it is linked in another blogger’s post or sidebar. Some people are regular readers or perhaps even subscribed to you RSS feed. But chances are that a large percentage of your traffic comes from search engines. SEO (again, that stands for search engine optimization) is your way of making your blog as visible as possible on search engines so that the people who could most benefit from or who will most enjoy what you write actually find you.

You’ll hear the word keyword thrown around a lot when talking about SEO. This is essentially the word (or words) someone types into a search engine when looking for something. So, think about the keywords your target audience are using. When they search for those keywords, you want your site to pop up as high as possible on the results list. Makes sense, right? The higher you are on the results list, the more likely readers will click through to your site.

As an example, let’s say you blog about movies and you were writing a review of Toy Story 3. You might want to optimize your post so that people searching for “Toy Story 3 reviews” and “reviews of Toy Story” and maybe even “Pixar movie reviews” see your site on page one of their search engine results list.

Good SEO can mean a lot of traffic to your blog. Even just the bare minimum can mean that you show up in the search results on page one whereas before you were on page 17.

Fact: SEO advice is always changing.

One of the most annoying things about SEO is that it is forever changing. What worked back in 2001 isn’t going to work today, ten years later. Heck, what worked last week might not work today. Search engines change the way they rate sites (their algorithm) constantly because if they didn’t, people would just game the system as much as possible.

So if you’re reading this ten years from now…sorry, dude. I suspect the information here is a little outdated! The same might be true a week from now. But I’ve tried to include tips that are as evergreen as possible. These are the basics, the building blocks of good SEO. It’s the bare minimum you should be doing if you want search engine traffic.

Making Your Website SEO Friendly

First and foremost, make sure that your overall website is friendly for search engines. Have you ever seen what the code of your website looks like? If you don’t know HTML, it looks like a mess, right? Well, essentially, that’s what a search engine sees. Kind of like the matrix, but without Keanu Reeves. In other words, a search engine doesn’t see pictures or your fancy site design. Those things might be great for your users, but you want to make sure search engines can index your site as well.

If you use WordPress or another popular blogging platform, chances are that you don’t have to do much to ensure your site is visible and easily picked up by search engines. Make sure your navigation makes sense (something you want to do anyway for your readers) and avoid too much javascript or a silly flash intro that search engines can’t understand. Create a few static pages to serve as anchors on your website, include some sitemap options (like an archives page or menu), change your options so that your permalinks are “pretty” (i.e., not just a bunch of random letters or numbers), and update often. Pretty easy, right?

Oh, and when picking your domain name, think about SEO. Branding is important too, of course, but if the URL of your homepage has nothing to do with your site’s topic, SEO will be a little more difficult. There’s a reason why RealEstate.com is higher on the list than Zillow.com for the keyword real estate, even though both sites are extremely relevant to someone searching for that term.

Individual Post SEO

The easiest way to make sure your individual posts are optimized for search engines is to download a free plugin to help you do just that. I like the All in One SEO Pack for WordPress, but there are lots of options. Some themes also have an SEO option built in. These plugins help you easily change the meta information for the post – basically, what a search engine sees rather than what the reader sees. For a title, you want to write what the post is about in as few words as possible, using a keyword that makes sense for the post if you can. For a description, type just that – a description of the post about the length of a Tweet, that uses keywords. For keywords…type your keywords. That’s pretty easy too, right?

So, going back to our example of a post with your review of Toy Story 3, even though you might think up some kind of clever title for the actual post, you’d probably want your SEO options to be something like:

  • Title: Toy Story 3 Movie Review
  • Description: Movie review of Toy Story 3 with discussion of Tim Allen as Buzz and Tom Hanks as Woody. Should you see Toy Story 3 with your kids? Read Toy Story movie opinions.
  • Keywords: Toy Story 3, Toy Story, Toy Story 3 movie review, Pixar movie review, Woody in Toy Story, Buzz in Toy Story, movie reviews

Essentially, your keywords can be the same as your post’s tags. Make sure you include tags and also categorize your posts well, as this will help with overall site SEO.

As you’re typing your post, be conscious of the keywords someone would use to find your post and sprinkle them as it makes sense. You don’t have to change your writing style much and you definitely shouldn’t stuff your post with keywords (this could actually hurt you), but as you’re writing, just keep keywords in mind and use them where they make sense. People have written entire websites and books about how to best use keywords; but again, I’m not an expert and the rules change a lot, so unless you’re passionate about SEO and have the time to invest in learning it, start with the basics of just “using keywords where they make sense.”

A few other quick tips:

  • Name your pictures. Nobody is searching for “IMG1290812” but lots of people are searching “Woody in Toy Story 3.”
  • If the title of your post is something crazy that is interesting but does not include your keywords, consider changing the permalink. Instead of yoursite.com/super-awesome-kids-movie-that-is-lightyears-ahead-of-the-rest, change it to yoursite.com/toy-story-3-movie-review.
  • Link to old posts within your new posts. When you add the link, do so with a keyword that makes sense, not just “click here.” Don’t overdo this and link to dozens of posts in the matter of a a single paragraph, but try to link to yourself at least once a post.

SEO and Links

One of the best things you can do for SEO is something you should be doing anyway – write awesome posts. If your content is awesome, people will link to you within their own posts, on social media sites, in comments, and more, and links are extremely valuable. When a search engine sees a link on someone else’s site to one of your post, they think, “Oh, so that blogger found this post interesting/informative/worthy enough to add a link on their own site? It must be good!”

That’s how I imagine computers think, anyway, if we could hear their inner monologues.

Basically, it’s a vote for your site, kind of like a thumbs up on Facebook. The more “votes” your site has via links, the better! And if you write great content, you’re naturally going to have more people linking to you. So if you do nothing else, blow us away with what you have to say so people share your link as much as possible.

Hope that gets you started with SEO. If you’re experienced with this topic, I hope you’ll leave your best top for beginners below as a comment to help us newbies learn more!

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