"The Secrets of List Building Unmasked"

Generally speaking, Google loves WordPress blogs. But it is even possible to screw that up if you are not careful when first configuring your WordPress blog.

Let’s examine some of the fundamentals to setting up a blog versus  building your own html pages.

When building your site everybody will tell you these few basic principles:-

• Add relevant content.
• Add content regularly.
• Add keywords to your blog post titles.
• Add keywords to the first sentence of your blog post.
• Spread keywords liberally throughout your blog content.
• Close each post with a short summary that includes keywords.
• Add relevant tags for each post.
• Include a keyword or 2 in your category name.
• Add alternate text for images included in your post.

That’s great, and all of these things are important when blogging, but it doesn’t end there as some would have you believe. I will now go through some options starting at the bottom and working up the list.

Permalinks, let’s start there.

Permalinks are preset to use a formula to decide on the blog title that will be listed in the search engines, but for many themes this data will include useless information and leave out important stuff. When setting up your WordPress, go to the dashboard and you will find a bunch of tabs down the left side of the page. Click on the bottom tab ( Settings ) and when it opens you will see another tab down near the bottom of that window called “Permalinks”. Click this tab and you will be presented with a window in the main screen that list all your permalink options under the heading of Common Settings. Default, Day and Name, Month and Name, etc. Click on the bottom selection ( Custom ) so it adds a dot to the selection button and add this text to the spec box:- %postname% Include the % symbols, type it or copy and paste it exactly as I have and click “Save Changes” on the bottom left of that page. No need to change anything else here for now.

Moving up the list of tabs we find “Privacy“, which needs no work apart from verifying that the top option box is checked. This is usually checked by default but it never hurts to take a look. This option will make your blog posts viewable to all, obviously we want that.

The next tab up is “Media“, leave these settings on default also.

Moving up one more tab we find “Discussion” Settings:-

Default article settings:-
Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article (slows down posting.) Check this box.
Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.) Check this box.
Allow people to post comments on new articles. Check this box.

Other Comment Settings:-
Comment author must fill out name and e-mail. Check this box.
User must be registered and logged in to comment. NO – Do not check this box, you want to encourage people to post comments but not post garbage. Asking for them to leave their name and email in the previous step will control that fairly well, forcing them to register and log in before they can comment will tend to dissuade them.
Automatically close comments on articles older than X days. I leave this unchecked because I believe that some of my best comments and visitors do not necessarily come immediately after posting a blog, they may be a month or so down the track, but I still like to hear their feedback.
Enable threaded ( nested ) comments…Yes, check this box.
Break comments into pages…..Yes, check this box.

Email me whenever:-
Anyone posts a comment. I leave this unchecked and check the next box – A comment is held for moderation. You don’t want 2 emails every time someone posts a comment so just check one of these boxes.

Before a comment appears:-
An administrator mmust always approve the comment. Yes, check this box.
Comment author must have a previously approved comment. I leave this unchecked and use the previous stting to force administrator approval of all comments.

That will do for this page for now so “Save Changes” and move up to the next tab – Reading.

There is not much to check here except that your latest pages are displayed. I also recommend no more than 10 or 12 posts are displayed per page. This is only really critical if you need your blog to load quickly like if it is listed in a traffic exchange, but I still prefer to keep the post count down where possible. You can choose to list a “summary” of each post and have 25 posts per page if you wish to.
Save any changes and move up to “Writing” when you are done.

Under the writing settings, there probably isn’t that much you need to cahnge unless you are posting from a remote location or mail server. However I do recommend that you add some more url’s to your pinglist. WordPress, by default, will only list 1 ping service, so highlight that service and copy this list to overwrite the existing ping service. Don’t worry about saving that original ping service, it is included in this list:-

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc/

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php

http://pingqueue.com/rpc/

https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast

http://rpc.britblog.com/

http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx

http://www.holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://ping.feedburner.com

Insert them just like they are listed above, one on each line. If you marquee select them all here, press Ctrl and C to copy and Ctrl and V to paste them over the existing Pingomatic url, all will be fine.

Now “Save Changes” and move up to the “General” tab.
Here you should set your Blog Title, tagline, email address, timezone, etc. Don’t forget to use some keywords in your Blog Title and tagline.

Save these changes also and let’s move up to “Plug-Ins“.
You are given a list of available plug-ins and the installation is simplified so these are dead easy to set up. Don’t forget to go in to the configuration of each plug-in after installing them. Most of the options are self-explanatory and there is nothing particularly difficult or tricky at all.
Which plug-ins do you really need from this huge list?
Firstly, Akismet is under the “Installed” list but is not configured, you need to jump through a few hoops to get an activation code. Follow the steps, it isn’t hard.

Next, click on the “Add New” tab under “Plug-Ins” on the left menu. Go into the “Popular” list on the top of that page, and install:-

Google XML Sitemaps. Take a few minutes to configure this correctly. I recommend you at least double the default values with regard to how long and how much memory to allocate. Personally I set mine to unlimited time to run update ( default is 20 seconds and is nowhere near long enough, it will fail every time ). I also set it to use 16M of memory because I found that the default 4M was never enough and 8M sometimes failed also.

All in One SEO Pack. I strongly recommend this one although opinions widely vary on the effectiveness of this plug-in. I figure that, even if it only helps a little, it is still better than not having it. Run the Install process and then set your configuration options.

The only other plug-in that I would strongly suggest is a social network plug-in, but this can get a little hazy. Firstly, if you are not a member of Digg, Delicious, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Twitter and Facebook then you probably should join up to those free services before intalling a plug-in like “AddToAny” or “Sociable”. I just feel that they work better if your configuration data is entered immediately after installing these plug-ins and can sometimes cause issues if data is changed at a later date. I know I had to uninstall “Sociable” once because it got confused about my log-in details for various sites. Another option is to simply add the “FollowMe” plug-in first and add the others after you have registered with them and have all your info. “FollowMe” will allow visitors to your site to follow your Twitter profile with a simple click, great for building a following quickly. Another excellent Twitter tool that will help your blogging efforts is “Tweet My Blog“, highly recommended and a good source of free traffic.

Another plug-in that I do like, and it seems to have some web presence, is “CommentLuv“. It encourages visitor comments by using some snippets from their own site to post under their comment. This adds credibility to the backlink and therefore promotes interest in posting comments. This does not directly affect the validity of the link from your point of view, but only for the person posting the comment. However, as more people post a comment, search engines will start to notice the “sticky” value of your site. This is good!

Over the last couple of years I have been experimenting with plug-ins, these are really the only ones worth using. Of course, that is only my opinion and as they say in the classics – Opinions are like armpits, everybody has them but most of them stink. Test out more plug-ins as you see fit, if they clash with something you already have installed then simply uninstall both and reinstall the one you wish to keep using.
A quick word on some of the video content plug-ins. Don’t be fooled, if you use the correct linking code to install the video on your blog, you do not need a plug-in. Video clips from YouTube and such, and even Amazon, already have all the tech data required to make them work on your blog.

That is about the end of the plug-in discussion.

Back to the subject at hand, now go up to the “Comments” tab and select “Edit”. Delete that tacky comment from your newly installed WordPress blog, it will make your site look amateur and that is something you don’t need.

Next, go up to the links and select “Blogroll“. Select all the default blogroll links and delete them all. It seems harsh but it adds to the amateur feel of a site if the only links in the blogroll are the standard WordPress “self-promotions”.

You are now ready to add your first post, so follow these couple of steps. In future you will simply go to “Posts” and “Add New” but for the first one we need to get rid of that tacky example post, so go to “Posts”, “Edit” and change the title from “Hello World” to something more appropriate. Next, and this is important, just below the title you just changed is your permalink for this post. You will need to change it manually for this time only, so click the edit button beside the permalink and alter it to read the same as your actual title but all lower case with a hyphen instead of a space between each word. This will be set automatically in future. Click save when done and then highlight everything in the main text window and type you blog post in as normal. Add an extract, using a couple of well chosen sentences from your post with some good keywords in them, into the appropriate box below the main post window. Head over to the right and add your tags ( keywords ) with a comma separating them and don’t forget to click the “add” button. ( It seems stupid to tell you to do that but I have done it a ton of times, type in keywords, add category, click update and D’oh! )

Now add a keyword for a category title, don’t use the default “Uncategorized” option because it has no SEO value what-so-ever, and you are ready to publish your first post. Hit the “Update” button this time, that button will read “Publish” when you post next. Remember to return often and post relevant, original content. Once a week is okay, but once a day is much better. I suggest that you do not use auto-posting programs for your blog, but if you do you MUST remember to set the ‘time to post’ options to an irregular time ( every 13Hrs43Min or something ) because if Google notices a post appear on your site every 12 hours exactly, you will end up in their “Sand-Box”. You do not want that.

I suggest that the next thing you do is go to “Pages”, and “Edit” the “About” page to a well thought out bio of yourself. Don’t bang away about internet marketing, this is where you show the people that you are a person with a mind, not a salesman, so give some personal insight about yourself and include some pictures if you can.

I was planning to give you a little about html but this post has got out of hand so I will make my next post about html. I will do this tomorrow I hope, but in the meantime go and grab this free website builder. It is much like Komposer, totally free and includes an ftp function for one-click website publishing. I don’t know how long this will be free, so grab it while you can. By the way, unlike Komposer, it comes with video tutorials to get the most out of the software.