Get Your Blog Up & Talk a Little About SEO vs VEO - Day 8 COWpetition

We always hear about how we need to use SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in order to dominate the search engines but for the last couple years the term VEO has surfaced which says to focus on the visitor and not the search engines.

Which one is right?

In our opinion, they both are and we made reference to this is an early post in this cowpetition.

You see with the new evolving dynamics of the web, things have changed. No longer are you just focused on trying to get traffic from Google but now you have hundreds and sites to also take advantage of that can send you equal and often times more traffic then Google. Because of this if you end up on focusing on just one aspect of your site optimization then you are missing out on the entire potential.

Our recommendation is you first set up your site for the human visitor and then once that is done, optimize it for the search engines. This is no different then focusing on your content, you want the reader to be satisfied and then you can tweak it to make the search engine bots happy too. In our experience trying to first optimize for the search engines and then for the human visitor is a more difficult task.

The process that we go through for this and the one that we followed for the GamerzReviewz blog is…

1. Install your blog, theme, and plugins
2. Create a “Link Bait” page and Opt In with site navigation emphasis on the “Opt In” and “Link Bait” for both the search engines and the visitors and update the graphics and color of blog to match theme
3. Manually test all links and ensure all navigation is pointing exactly where we want it to, install a robots.txt file and then submit your sitemap to Google webmaser tools to verify the blog is clear of errors
4. Start contacting JV partners and start your initial promotions

The great thing is while the keywords from the previous lesson are running in Affiliate Elite, we can get all this other important work done and when they are ready we can already be getting loads of traffic thanks to our Link bait page and viral incentives.

In todays post we are going to focus on point 1 and then in the next post it will focus on 2 & 3 and then after that 4 (or so that is the plan right now).

The following may seem basic to you but we are sharing it anyway and so pay attention

Part 1 –> Installing WordPress:

There are two “main” ways to install a Wordpress blog. The first is to manually download the files from…

http://wordpress.org/download/

The second is to use a free installation script, called Fantastico,that is standard with many hosting accounts. If your hosting account does not come with “Fantastico” or something similar, then the manual install is relatively easy to perform and WordPress provides a detailed guide at…

http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress

…to help you through the installation.

Yes we realize there are more ways to do this and there are new tools for this popping up all the time, but for the sake of simplicity these are the two we are referring to.

For this post we are going to walk you through the steps to install WordPress using the “Fantastico” service, which is what we did.

Step 1: Log into your hosting account control panel and locate the “fantastic”icon.

Step 2: Once inside the “fantastico” control panel, you will see on the left hand side, a list of different php scripts that you can install on your server. Click on the “WordPress” link.

Step 3: On the right side of the screen you will now see a summary of current WordPress installations on your server. If you have not installed WordPress already, under “Current Installations:” it will simply say “None”. Click on the link that says “New Installation”

Step 4: Now you will have the WordPress set up form on the right hand side of the screen. If you have installed your domain as a subdomain or addon domain, then make sure you select the correct domain location in the drop down box. If you are installing the blog in the root directory of your domain, you will leave the “Install in Directory” blank. Enter an administrator user name and password and your email account password.

The email account password can be anything you want as you will not use it anyway and the rest of the fields will all be updated later on. Now click on “Install WordPress” and then on the next screen click the “Finish Installation” button. On the final installation page, you can also enter your email address to have all the installation information (user name, password, and more) sent to your email address.

Congratulations, you have successfully installed WordPress!

Part 2 –> Getting themes and what to look for and what to customize

When you first install WordPress on your domain, it will have the default template. Personally I recommend you do not use the default template, as it is in my opinion, very boring, and there are loads of nicer free templates available.

We used out own custom theme that you can learn more about at http://www.johncow.us/milkit/

If however you want to use one of the free templates available from WordPress then…

Step 1: Log into your WordPress admin panel at http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin

Step 2: Click on the “Design Tab

Step 3: This is your “Template” management area and WordPress makes it extremely easy to update your templates with just a few clicks of the mouse. To find some great templates, you are going to want to scroll down on the “Design” page and click on the link called “WordPress Theme Directory”. Make sure to right click and open in a new window so you do not leave your admin area.

Step 4: You will now find a directory of thousands of free WordPress”Themes” (templates) that you can use on your blog. We recommend that your first choice in the sorting options, on the left side of the page, the “Widget Ready” option, as this will make modifying your blog a lot easier later on. Now select a theme that you like and do not worry if you are not sure, you can easily change the theme later if you wish.

The sorting options are not guaranteed and so a word of warning is to install the theme and check that tit is widget compatible before you do any image changes or anything like that.

Note: Widgets are a feature in WordPress that allows you to easily drag and drop different features into your blogs sidebar.

Step 5: Once you have the theme that you like, click on the “Download” link and save it to your desktop. You will want to unzip the file and save the folder to your computer.

Step 6: Now open your favorite FTP software to upload your theme to the correct folder. If you do not own a FTP software, download the free open source solution called FileZill, which can be downloaded from http://filezilla-project.org/

Step 7: Locate the folder on your server called “themes”. To find it, go to your root folder where your index page would be and click on “wp-content” –> “themes”

Now upload the entire contents (folder and all) to the themes folder.

Step 8: Go back to your WordPress admin area now and if you are still in the “Design” area, refresh your page. You will now see the downloaded template included. To install the template, simply click on the template picture and it will automatically get installed.

You can now right click on the “View Site” button and open in a new window, to see how the new template looks on your blog.

Part 3 –> Plugins… what they are and which ones to use

Plugins are basically scripts that can be easily added on to your WordPress installation to add extra functionality and since WordPress is an open source project (all the source code is open for anyone and everyone to use with a few restrictions) there are literally thousands of programmers constantly creating improvements and new plugins for WordPress.

The problem with plugins however, is WordPress is always evolving and with new improvements, often some plugins stop working with the latest version of WordPress. Thankfully however, there are always new plugins being created and 95% of them are all free.

The majority of plugins are more for fun functionality, meaning they are more just “cool to have” type of features. There are a few plugins however that in our opinion are very important to use and help from both an end user and an optimization point of view. These plugins are not the only plugins to use and if there are others you like then feel free to use them. We also make no guarantees that the next time WordPress updates, that any of these will continue to work.

To find plugins, click on the “Plugins” tab…

…and then scroll down to the bottom the page and right click on “WordPress Plugin Directory” and open in a new window. This site has thousands of plugins to choose from and provides some important information. The most important thing to look at when looking at plugins, is the compatibility, you want to ensure that the plugins work with the version of WordPress you are using. To check this, simply click on the plugin title in the directory, then on the Plugin Details page, check the “Requires WordPress Version:”

To find out the version of WordPress you are using, simply scroll down to the bottom of the page in the your WordPress admin area and it will mention it.

If the plugin is compatible, then click the download button and save the file to your computer. You will then want to unzip the contents of the zip file. Now open your FTP software and navigate to “wp-content” –> “plugins”

Simply upload the the unzipped plugins file to the plugins folder. Now go the plugins page in your admin area and you will see the list of uploaded plugins. Plugins that are NOT activated will be white and once activated will turn green. To activate a plugin, simply click the “Activate” link.

Akismet–>
(http://akismet.com/) This comes standard with WordPress and is in my opinion the most stable of all “Spam Filter” plugins. The only draw back to this plugin is you need to have a WordPress API but these are very easy to get. Simply register at http://www.wordpress.com and then you will receive an email with your API key in it. Then you activate the plugin and click on “Akismet Configuration” and then enter the API key in the provided field.

All In One SEO Pack –>
(http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/) WordPress out of the box is not optimized well from a search engine perspective. This plugin helps with improving how each post and page is optimized and also helps to prevent your blog from showing duplicate content.

Google XML Sitemaps –>
(http://www.arnebrachhold.de/redir/sitemap-home/) Google site maps are fantastic ways to help improve the complete indexing of your blog. This ensures that all posts and pages are properly linked to for Google (and the other search engines) to find. You can also block certain pages from being found, ping the search engines when your sitemap is updated and best of all the sitemap will automatically update every time the blog updates.

Related Posts –>
(http://wasabi.pbwiki.com/Related%20Entries) This plugin helps to provide better related internal linking on your blog. Once activated, this plugin will find which posts are similar to each other and interlink them. This is good for both the search engines and human visitors.

Sociable –>
(http://www.joostdevalk.nl/wordpress/sociable/) This plugin will automatically add links to your posts to popular social bookmarking sites so that your posts can be easily added to them.

Brian’s Threaded Comments –>
(http://meidell.dk/archives/2004/09/04/nested-comments/) This plugin will automatically organize your page commentsin a more structured pattern so replies can be made directly to specific comments.

Enforce www. Preference –>
(http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/enforce-www-preference/) This plugin will help preserve your permalinks by enforcing your no-www or yes-www preference (http://example.com/ vs. http://www.example.com/) and will strip off index.php from the ends of URIs.

Homepage Excerpts –>
(http://www.dailyblogtips.com/homepage-excerpts-wordpress-plugin/) This plugin gives flexibility to people that want to use both full posts and excerpts on the homepage.

Subscribe Remind –>
(http://www.trevorfitzgerald.com/2007/03/subscribe-remind/) This plugin will automatically place text and a link at the end of each of your posts inviting your readers to subscribe to your RSS feed.

WWSGD –>
(http://www.richardkmiller.com/blog/wordpress-plugin-what-would-seth-godin-do) Treat new visitors different then new visitors

Feed Footer –>
(http://www.blogclout.com/blog/goodies/feed-footer-plugin/) This plugin allows you to add footers under all your blog posts in your RSS feed.

OIO Publisher Plugin –>
(http://www.johncow.com/oiopublisher) This plugin is very affordable at just $37 and is by far the best we have come across for easily managing displaying paid advertising on your blog.

Do not be concerned with modifying the settings for these plugins yet. You will do this later on once we add content.

Part 4 –> Shut off Notifications

Once you have installed your plugins, you are now going to turn off the default notification function. This is a powerful feature with Wordpress that notifies different blog directories when a new update has occurred at your blog. The problem is you do not want to be notifying anyone about your blog until you have some content.

To shut this feature off, click on…

“Settings” –> “Writing”

…and scroll down to the bottom of the page to the section called “Update Services”. Delete the url that is in the form field and click “save changes”

Now go to…

“Settings” –> “XML Sitemap”

…and un-check all the “Update notifications”

• Notify Google about updates of your Blog
• Notify MSN Live Search about updates of your Blog
• Notify Ask.com about updates of your Blog
• Notify YAHOO about updates of your Blog

Part 5 –> Set your Permalinks

One of the other draw backs of WordPress is that it comes default with very non user friendly file names. On the good side however, they make it very easy to customize this and make it very user friendly. So instead of having a url that looks like this…

http://www.yourblog.com/?p=123

…you can have something like…

http://www.yourblog.com/categoryname/keyword-phrase-here

To set this click on…

“Settings” –> “Permalinks”

…and click on the “Custom Structure” radio button. Now in the field provided you can set how you want the file system to display. There are dozens of combinations that you can create and the available tokens can be found by clicking the link called “number of tags are available”

Once you have the permalinks set, click the “Save Changes”. Wordpress should update this automatically but it may require you to modify your .htaccess file. Wordpress will provide you with the exact steps you need to do this.

Congratulations, your blog is set up!

In the next post we focus on getting our “Link Bait” set up and optimizing the blog around it from a visitor and search engine perspective.

We hope this was helpful and we will talk to you all tomorrow

Please provide your feedback!

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