My Newbie Blog is visited every day by people with questions about how to create a blog.  I was thinking back about my own blogging journey and how it has changed over time.  I have spent most of my life working with computers.   My first exposure to a computer was in 1972 at a terminal that allowed you to play a game of sorts where you would type in where what room you thought something was in and the computer would give you clues to help find whatever you were looking for. This terminal was more like a typewriter than anything we would call a computer today.  IN 1979 I went to college and took a class in Fortran.  Fortran was a computer language that worked by using a type pad to make a a deck of cards and then the cards were fed into the main computer.  It was a very time consuming process.  In the early 80’s I had a Radio Shack Color Computer and I could go on Compuserve which was a big deal at the time.

I eventually ended up selling computers and can remember the first IBM’s coming out with the two floppy disk drives.

Seagate introduced a 20 MB Hard Disk and I remember thinking that no one could ever use 20 MB of Hard Disk space.  And then came Windows and you needed at least 40 MB of Hard Disk Space.  And on and on ……………….

What does all that have to do with creating a blog?  I guess I am amazed at where things are now and I am wondering what they will look like 10 or 20 years from now.  I would encourage all of you newbies to keep your eyes open to look for ways to utilize the Internet and be ready to go with the changes that come along.  I am sure we haven’t seen anything yet!

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.

On May 9th I wrote an article called SEO Case Study where we examined the Search Engine Results (SEO) of a site we work with called Evangelism Software. I was checking out the site today and had some interesting results to share with you. At the bottom of page 1, try and guess what showed up? The article I wrote talking about the keyword ‘Evangelism Software’. Why is the article outranking a page that is an exact match? Good question. This site is older than the ‘Evangelism Software’ site. It has more content and more links pointed at it. So in the short term it ranked higher. In case you were curious here is where the actual site returned on page 2:

The site is still hanging around. I told you in the first article that the site had the number 1 spot for nearly a month and didn’t get any traffic. The people at Evangelism Software have to decide how much work they want to put in the site. They could post a lot of fresh content and build links and get back to number 1, but, if there isn’t any traffic for the keyword, is it worth it? I suggested they let the site sit for a while, use it to link to their other sites, and see where it ends up as it ages. With a site like Evangelism Software, adding a post once a month ought to keep it fairly close to page 1. See if it gets any page rank on Google’s next update and then go from there. SEO is an important factor in how to create a blog.

P.S. I used the keyword Evangelism Software five times in this post in a very natural way. Let’s watch and see where this article ends up on the search results in a few days.