Moving Along
How to Create a Blog - Part 1
This site is filled with articles about how to create a blog. From the very basic “starting a blog from scratch” information, to developing “niche sites”, to getting your blog recognized by the search engines. We provide this information for free to everyone who just wants to get started in the blogosphere. My Newbie Blog has two sister sites, Blog Consulting and Blogs For Sale, where you can receive help for any blogging questions you have at very reasonable rates.
In this “How to Create a Blog” series of articles we are going to talk about how to make your blog one of those sites that people keep coming back to. Return visitors to your site are a key element in developing a successful blog. We will create a blog called “Current Events Online” to use for demonstration purposes.
We will assume that you know how to get a domain name and web host and be able to get your site to the generic Kubrik theme provided by WordPress.org. (If you need help with any of these things, read the articles on this site about “How to Start a Blog”).
Let’s get started. We are going to install a theme to help us begin to get noticed by the search engines. For this project we will be using a theme called Dateless Sniper by Courtney Tuttle. This theme is simple to use and is very good with the search engines. I think it is a good theme to use in the beginning of your blog. After you have your blog well developed and situated you can change the theme. The Dateless Sniper theme will allow for an easy transition to a different theme later on. In our next article we will discuss adding some plugins.
Finding the Right Theme
Once you have your site well underway, you may need to take a good look at your theme. There are some well established very popular blogs that utilize very simple themes. That may be the right choice for you. But there are so many great looking themes available for WordPress that you might want to take a look and see what is available.
When I am checking out themes there are a few things that I look for:
- Attractive
- Functional
- Ease of use
- SEO Minded
Some themes look great, but they are so hard to install that it makes them unusable. Other themes set up pretty easy, but don’t adhere to basic SEO principles. Some of these themes can be made SEO friendly, but again how much work it takes is a factor. I have a couple of themes that I use that are “Premium Themes”, which means that I paid for them. They were relatively inexpensive and I like the way they look. They really wouldn’t work for a niche site because they take some effort to set up. I have been working with a new free theme that I like. It’s called Massive News and it is available at www.wpelements.com. It is one of the easiest magazine themes I have worked with. It is worth checking out.
I also just stumbled upon some free themes that look promising. They are located at www.wp-magazine.se/free-theme-wp-pixels/ I haven’t had a chance to check them over to see if they are workable or not, but they have promise. If you get to them before I do, let me know how they stack up.
Taking Care of the Day to Day Stuff
As you work through the logistics of how to create a blog you need to consider how you will balance your time. You need to spend time writing articles. Articles are what ultimately build traffic for your site. You want to have good articles written on a consistent basis so that people who have visited your site have a reason to come back. You need to build links to your site so that it shows up on Search Engines. This is the primary way that you will attract new visitors. If you are adding niche sites to your blogging business you need to spend time doing keyword research and doing site development. You may need to consider what your strengths are and then start getting some help in areas that you can’t get to.
One suggestion would be to hire someone to help write articles. You might consider trying to hire some college students to write articles. College students usually need to make money, are pretty good writers, and are computer savvy. You should be able to find someone to do a little research and write you a 300 - 400 word article. Have them write the article, and then do a quick rewrite of the same article (a rewrite would be going through the article and changing words and phrases so that you basically have two articles on the same topic). A reasonable rate for this would be between 8 and 10 dollars. So you get an article for your site and an article to publish for eight bucks. For a small investment you can get a steady stream of articles.
Allocate your time so that you are writing articles, building links, and developing sites. All three are important. Perhaps the best ratio would be 50 percent article writing, 30 percent link building, and 20 percent site development. Avoid the temptation to waste time checking you stats. I limit my visits to statcounter, and then I am trying to see if there are some keyword ideas popping up that I need to be capitalizing on.
The Transition to Geekdom
It finally happened. I used to be a fairly normal person. Recently I have had two events happen that make me realize that I have transitioned into a Geek. The first event was a few days ago. It was a beautiful day outside and I hadn’t even opened the shades in my office. I had just found some really nice WordPress themes for free! My 17 year old son walked in to the office and I said “Hey, I just found some really excellent themes!”. He just looked at me, shook his head and then in a mocking SouthPark tone said “I just found some excellent themes”. Apparently he didn’t share my excitement.
Yesterday, I knew the transition was complete. All day long there was something wrong with my Internet connection. It was so slow that I thought I was going to lose my mind. I finally gave up, (after several hours) and walked away from the computer. I felt defeated. It was then that I realized the transition had happened. I have gone from fairly normal to blog Geek. Hope you enjoy My Newbie Blog Geekdom!
Google Bombing
What is Google bombing? Here is the definition from WikiPedia:
A Google bomb (also referred to as a ‘link bomb’) is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions. Because of the way that Google’s algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb is created if many sites link to the page in this manner. Google bomb is used both as a verb and a noun. The phrase “Google bombing” was introduced to the New Oxford American Dictionary in May 2005. Google bombing is closely related to spamdexing, the practice of deliberately modifying HTML pages to increase the chance of their being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned…
Whenever we use SEO to improve the rankings for our site we are trying to figure out the Google algorithms that are controlling the results. Anchor text figures in to the algorithm in a significant way. But the algorithm is touchy and if you overdo one keyword you can get penalized for Google bombing. One of the results is that your keyword quits being returned in the results. The best answer is to balance between 3 or 4 keywords so that you don’t push one to hard.
If you read the article on Google Bombing in WikiPedia you will see how the process is sometimes used for humor. (I apologize to anyone from France who reads this and is offended but it is an interesting example of Google bombing) One example is a keyword search for French Military Victories. The result looks like this:
If you open the first result on page 1 this is what you get:
The result is part of the SEO process. Using keywords and links in a such way that the site that you want to have returned is what is returned. The idea is that if it can be done with a joke it can also be done for your site.
From Theme to Shining Theme
I wrote an article some time ago called Create a Blog You Can be Proud Of that demonstrated how to create a blog from scratch all the way to having a blank WordPress theme. This article will take you from that standard theme to one that includes the plugins, pages and posts you should have to get your blog going. Follow the steps and you will soon have a blog that you will really enjoy.
It Starts with the Kubrick Theme
Under the Meta heading click on Login
Enter in your Username and Password. Welcome to WordPress!
At the WordPress Dashboard click on Options
Change the Blog title. Change the Tagline.
Press Update Options and then press View Site
You should see your new Blog title and your new tagline. Under Meta press login to go back to the WordPress Dashboard. Press Options and Privacy. Change the visibility of the blog so that everyone including search engines can see your blog.
Press Update Options. On the WordPress Dashboard go to Options and Writing. Look at the bottom of the page where it says Update Services. Make sure that the ping is set to http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
Press Update Options. At the WordPress Dashboard go to Options and Permalinks. Select Custom and enter /%postname%/
Press Update Permalink Structure. At this time you need to change your WordPress Theme. For a detailed explanation of how to do this read 50 Things to Do to Start a Blog From Scratch - Part 2.
Now That Your Theme is in Place
Go to the WordPress Dashboard - Users - Your Profile. Change the display name from admin to your name.
Press Update Profile. You need to add some pages to your site. Start with an About Page. If you need help adding a page read my article called Using the WordPress Write Post and Write Page Editor.
Now is a good time to write your first Post. Delete the Hello World post that came with the Kubrick WordPress theme.
Write your first post by describing what your blog will be about. While you are writing add your first category. At the end of the post include some tags (keywords for your post). After you publish this post you can go back and copy the text and paste it into your About page. Get your plugins installed.
Installing Plugins
WordPress Database Backup - I am listing this one first because I think it is one of the most important plugins you will install. It will automatically backup your blog every day and send you the backup in an email. You should do this!
WordPress Automatic Upgrade - Another important plugin. This one automatically upgrades your WordPress whenever there is a new release!
Akismet - This one comes with WordPress but you need to activate it and get an API key. Akismet is a spam blocker. For more information on how to install this one read my article titled Installing the Akismet Plugin. This is a good one to start with. It will help you get the idea of how to install a plugin.
All in One SEO Pack - This plugin is important for gettting your blog optimized for search engines.
Brian’s Threaded Comments - This gives you threaded comments and a wandering comment form.
Dagon Design Sitemap Generator - This plugin does all the work for your Sitmap page. It is an HTML sitemap, which means that people can see it. IT is different than the XML sitemap that you will create for Google. If you have questions about installing plugins you can read the article I wrote about installing this plugin titled More Progress on the 50 Things to DO to Start a Blog from Scratch.
FeedBurner/FeedSmith - This plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. For more information onsetting up FeedBurner read my article titled Making Progress on the Starting a Blog from Scratch List.
Google XML Sitemap - This one is for the search engines. People on your site will never see it. The instructions will help you upload it to the search engines when you have it installed.
NoWWW - This is really a matter of preference. Do you want your site to be http://www.whatever or just http://whatever? If you install this plugin you will get rid of the www. You get this plugin at the WordPress Plugin Directory.
Sociable - Automatically add links to your posts to popular socail bookmarking sites. This plugin makes all links Nofollowed.
Related Posts - This one is good for SEO. It is a little tricky to install. Make sure you have a backup before you do it.
WP-Contact Form - This plugin is a drop in form for users to contact you. I go in to a lot of detail about installing this plugin in an article I wrote called 50 Things to Do to Start a Blog from Scratch - Part 3. If you read this article it will help you through the process of installing all kinds of plugins.
Add the Widgets
A good place to start is with the Text Widget you need for the Feedburner plugin. For more information read Making Progress on the Starting a Blog from Scratch List. Add a tag cloud widget. Tidy up your blogroll and your categories.
Finishing Touches
You should add a few more posts and a couple of categories. You should try and have at least five pages in place. Get Adsense set up. For information on getting your Adsense account working read Google Adsense. You may want to further monetize your site by setting up a Paypal Account to receive donations. Read How to Start Monetizing Your Blog. That should have your blog in a really good place. Now you need to focus on writing articles and promoting your blog!
Hi Francesca,
You should have no problem setting up a blog with Good News Domains from the UK. If you ...
Hi
I wondered if you're system will work for me here in the UK? I imagine it may if I ...
I was just skimming through a few of your posts. They are very handy guides to some facets of ...
Thanks so much for adding me to the list! Woohoo! 
Thanks for the tip about the WordPress backup and upgrade plugins. 
This helped me with the WordPress editor.