Author: Paul
Setting Up Permalinks for Better SEO
The default URL settings for WordPress pages or posts are not quite user friendly or SEO friendly. https://wp89.com/learn/setting-permalinks-seo makes more sense than https://wp89.com/learn/?p=230 ( where I can never figure out what 230 refers to.). Search engines can also make more sense out of the URL with key words too.
Here's the video tutorial showing you how to setup more meaningful URL for your WordPress pages or posts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vdi7xDzN7a8
Creating Posts for Your Blog or Website
WordPress got famous as a blogging platform, so the default front page is showing the latest blog posts. If we add a post, the latest post will show up on the top of the front page.
Before you create any contents for your WordPress site, you should understand the major differences of between a post and a page in WordPress. For best SEO result, I will try to create most of my new contents with posts instead of pages.
Here's the 1st video tutorials on how to create a new post:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY9FxfCEbrk
Install WordPress with Softaculous
Arvixe hosting is great for anyone who wants their own self-hosted WordPress. One of the reasons we love Arvixe is that they give you a free Web application installer called Softaculous. Here's a video tutorial show you how easy to have your own WordPress up and running:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeJ9fHIDGio
Other reasons that we choose Arvixe to host their WordPress sites include:
- Very affordable. For only $4/month, you can host up to 6 domains with unlimited space and traffic bandwidth. Other hosting services may look cheaper, but if you choose to pay for the 2 year plan, you end up pay more for less for only one domain. Some hosting services may even charge you extra if you want to have cPanel. You can get lots of other services without pay extra.
- You have great support community
Why not sign up Arvixe today?
Video Tutorial: Create Pages & Menu Items
This is one the WordPress for Beginners Video Tutorials.
After you understand the differences between a page or post, you can add more menu items by adding more pages. Creating pages and menu items is pretty simple in WordPress CMS.
Here's our Youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yySeHU_j4Z8
Differences between WordPress Page and Post
For most WordPress beginners, they need to learn about the differences between a page and a post. They may ask the question: "Shall I create a new post or page?"
If you use the default theme, or other similar themes, you may notice the following major differences:
- If you want to create static page for an item in the menu, you should create a page not a post.
- If you want your new article appear in some category like the default page in the front, you need to create a post.
- You can put a post under different categories and or put a few tags to it, but you cannot do this with a page (unless you use some special plugins);
- When creating a page, you need to select no parent or parent for the menu item. And you can set the order for the page appear as an item in the menu.
- Last but not the least, posts appear in the RSS for those who subscribe to your blogs. This can be very important as RSS updates may notify some search engine to get the robots to craw your website.
Other things we need to mention are
- For front page, you may also create a post and set it as your front page at Settings => Reading;
- Usually the default order of listing posts in the default front page or post category page is "the latest first", however, you may also set the post sticky by click "Edit" in the Visibility under Publish section on the right and check the box beside “Stick this post to the front page” so that the post will always stay on the top;
Some video tutorials will show the differences clearly. Stay tuned.
Self-hosted WordPress Websites
The simple truth is that if you can't afford only $4 a month for hosting sevice, forget about making money with WordPress. The good news is you can really make much more than $4/month with a self-hosted WordPress website.
Here is a short list of a self-hosted WordPress website can do:
- Run Adsense, Yahoo, Chitika, TextLinkAds and other ads.
- Put affiliate links (including Amazon, Clickbank, CJ) or any links you like.
- Putting on new site designs with custom themes, or free themes you can find and modify according to your own tastes and needs;
- Add any features and functionality you need with the free WordPress plugins and widgets or the custom plugins you or your hired programmers created for you.
- Use great traffic analysis services such as Google Analytics (free)
- Embed more videos from more services other than Youtube
Here is what we use WordPress to build with a very affordable hosting services:
- Online store (selling good or e-goods, ebooks, services) using Paypal, Google Checkout or other payment gateway;
- Membershp web site (such as online lessons for members only) like this one: http://chineseBay.comhttp://CantonesePod.com;
- Affiliate website like this one: http://giftingcomplete.com
- Newspaper website that runs online ads for their clients: http://newsforChinese.com
- Coupon website
- Wholesale online catalog like this one: http://newfashionsny.com
- Bilingual (or multilingual) professional websites like this one: http://immigrationmeng.comhttp://sacattorneys.comhttp://zpdental.com
- Real Estate sites;
- Restaurant with online menus and order form;
Self-hosted WordPress is a great Web development framework that can create almost any kinds of websites. Many successful cases prove that Web development cycle can be greatly shortened with WordPress CMS.
Matt Cutts:WordPress Hero
We have been search for WordPress heroes (top WordPress users), but forgot Matt Cutts, who himself may not realize that he is one of the WordPress heroes.
Why? First of all, his speech on WordPress at the WordCamp San Francisco and the great SEO results with WordPress inspired and encouraged a lot of people (business website owners, Web developers, SEO experts )including me and many of my clients to switch to WordPress from other platforms. At that WordCamp, he confirmed my early observation was right. Matt notes “WordPress takes care of 80-90% of (the mechanics of) Search Engine Optimization (SEO).” at his slide 12 of the 50 at "SEO for Bloggers"
Second of all, his only Website is running WordPress with an Alexa ranking 4,193 (as of this writing)
.
It proves that WordPress can handle pretty heavy traffic with ease. (Alexa says 50% of sites are slower )
If you are serious about SEO with WordPress, you should watch this video over and over again:
These points should be noted
Plugins recommended by Matt Cutts:
- Akismet
- Cookies in Comments
- WP Super Cache
- Enforce www. Preference
- Feedburner Feedsmith
Avoid Backlink Obsession (BO): Sometimes fewer links are better than more. (check out slide 18)
Don't forget image search, videos, etc. ( this point encourages us to think of add some more images for our posts and create more video tutorials for Youtube or other video sites.)
Find some more tips by yourself at his page: "Matt Cutts on WordPress".
Why WordPress?
Why A Business Use WordPress?
Here we list some top reasons why a business site would use WordPress as the publishing platform?
- It is so easy to use! If you can type, you can add new contents to the WordPress Website. For bloggers and marketing professionals, they can focus on writing great contents that are most interesting to their readers or customers. It is so easy to upload a photo or image, or create an online album, or embed a video (from Youtube or other video sharing services) to go with the articles.
- It is powerful and extensible. There are so many free or affordable WordPress plugins to give your business websites the features you need. You can also pay an experienced WordPress developers to add the functions you need when you cannot find the plugins you need and the their services are so affordable compared to others. You can run an online store using WordPress platform; you can get paid via Paypal, Google Checkout or other payment gateway for your online or offline services (for membership websites providing internal contents, or the tuition of your music schools, private preschool or after schools.)
- WordPress Themes and Template System can give your business site great new looks and interface while keeping your existing contents. There are so many free WordPress themes for those doesn't anything about Web design to choose from. For those with special needs, it is so easy to hire a WordPress designer to create the themes according to exactly what you want.
- For SEO (search engine optimization), WordPress is the best Web Publish platform that major search engines (such as Google, Bing and Yahoo) love. Just imagine why Matt Cutts, the most famous Google search expert, use only WordPress for his own website ( http://mattcutts.com/blog/ ). Besides the WordPress built-in SEO friendly Website structure and features, you can get lots of free SEO plugins to help you optimize your pages and posts for search engines.
- WordPress is the best Web development platform with short turn over; it is great for business sites with limited Web development budgets. So many Web developers are turning to WordPress to develop turn-key business websites because it is a very efficient development framework based on PHP & MySQL, the most used Web technology for the most of the websites in the world ( right! ASP, .Net or Java are not as popular as PHP & MySQL). This development framework is proved to have the least learning curve too.
- this list is growing on and on...
The list above is only the beginning, please submit your reasons to use WordPress for your Web sites in the comments, and you will be surprised how many WordPress users are willing to share their excitement and success with WordPress.
Main Differences of WordPress.com Sites & Self hosted WordPress Web Sites
There are many benefits and disadvantages of the free WordPress.com sites.
The pros first. The advantages of a free WordPress.com site,
- You can don't need to pay a penny;
- Fast setup! You got rich features already set up for you (e.g. iPad WPtouch theme plugin for a mobile version of your site. SEO friendly permanent link was setup for your posts by default, but they put the dates as subfolders in the URL, which is not recommended by Matt Cuts. http://wp89.wordpress.com/2011/05/09/turnkey-wordpress-website-service/ should be http://wp89.wordpress.com/turnkey-wordpress-website-service/ without the date instead. You can only do this with your own hosted WordPress sites.)
- It's great to beginners to get familiar with the WordPress interface, features and functions
- You don't need to worry about the software upgrade; WordPress takes care of all the upgrades automatically for you.
- You are not alone; you can find a huge community of WordPress.com users who love to share experiences and tips on using WordPress.com
The greatest disadvantage of the free WordPress.com sites compared with the self-hosted WordPress sites is that you cannot use the WordPress plugins you create or find free available out there to extend the features and functions. Also you cannot use any themes (custom ones) other than the themes they offer.
Limitations of WordPress.com websites:
- Adsense, Yahoo, Chitika, TextLinkAds and other ads are NOT allowed. You cannot even put the affiliate links like clickbanks.
- Uploading file formats only allowed: .jpg .jpeg .png .gif .pdf .doc .ppt ( for security purpose)
- No custom css (unless you upgrade for $15/year ), no custom themes( or edit themes), no custom plugins
- Limited upload space: 50MB ( upgradable to 1000MB for $20/year)
For someone who just need a blog for simple task, you may be satisfied with the free WordPress.com service. For some bloggers or serious business site owners, you must get your own hosting service to run your own WordPress websites with so much more features and functionality to extend. In our later articles, we are going to talk about how much more we can do with your self-hosted WordPress websites.
Top 10 SEO Plugins for WordPress
Although WordPress publishing platform is already pretty SEO friendly with lots of built-in features:
- auto RSS generation ( for off-page SEO)
- permanent link setup via "wp-admin/options-permalink.php"
- search engine pinging via "wp-admin/options-privacy.php" and "Update Services" at the bottom of wp-admin/options-writing.php (notifying search engine indexer via http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ )
We may use some good SEO plugins to improve our WordPress site SEO. We may just install 5 or 6 of the top 10 WordPress SEO plugins to really optimize our sites. The following is the top 10 in no particular order
- SEO Ultimate (downloaded 211,981 times , 4 of 5 stars based on 76 ratings)
- WordPress SEO by Yoast ( download 214,556 times, 4 of 5 stars based on 459 ratings) special feature: Google search result snippet previews, let your editors improve your SEO!
- Greg's High Performance SEO ( although downloaded only 90,299 times, it got almost 5 of 5 stars based on 23 ratings)Special about this plugin: it provides built-in support for titles and keywords left behind by alternative SEO and other legacy plugins such as:
- All in One SEO Pack
- Autometa
- HeadMeta
- Headspace
- Platinum SEO
- Related Posts
- SEO Title Tags
- SEO Ultimate
- wpSEO
- Platinum SEO Pack(downloaded over half a million: 535,551 times! 4 of 5 stars based on 88 ratings). The features I love: Automatic 301 redirects for any permalink changes (Platinum SEO plugin will take care of issuing a 301 redirect to the new location.This is a new essential feature, not present in All in one SEO, the author said); Lets you override any title and set any META description and META keywords, for any post or page.
- Google XML Sitemaps( We will list more top SEO plugins next our next article. Stay tuned.)
We will also create some video tutorials on WordPress SEO, the best publishing platform that can get your site to rank higher in the search results.