This guy had been quoted hundreds to build and host a site, so I offered to get something set up for him that he could then maintain himself.

So, what should you think about before starting?  Below is the first email I wrote to him.  If you are looking for advice on setting up a new website, for plumbing or anything else, then this may help:

How much website maintenance are you happy to do yourself?  If you are comfortable doing some simple editing using an online interface (I suspect you are) then it means there is no need to pay for anything except the hosting and domain name.

 

On your current site you use “we” and “us” rather than the more personal I.  Which one do you want to go with?  If it is you that does all the work, or at least directly oversees it all then I would recommend making it more about you as an individual.  When people call any trade they are worried that they speak to someone helpful and intelligent by phone but then might get some junior apprentice arriving.  If you use the personal tense you can inspire a sense of loyalty from your customers and they will be more likely to refer you as an individual.  If you prefer to use “we” then I would recommend having a whole page dedicated to you as an individual anyway, with a brief resume of your experience and skills, and statements like “I personally train and oversee every single plumber and take full personal responsibility for the quality of their work.  If you ever want to discuss anything with me I am just a phone call away and will do everything to make sure you are delighted with the quality and service we provide”.

 

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).  Every page should be optimized for just one or two phrases.  For example “Plumber in Kenley”.  That means that the phrase you choose gets used at least 2-3 times, and is referred to in an image too.  SEO in the old days meant stuffing the page with lots of barely legible text or white text on white background in the footer.  All that is a definite No!  The page needs to be easy to read to a real person, so including the SEO text has to be subtle and natural.   Done well SEO will have a huge effect and will get your site listed high in Google, over time.  It does take time though, and will move slowly up – but worth starting now.

 

The best way of moving up the search engines is to create content.  Testimonials are good because they can be added regularly, and they contact nice keyword-rich phrases like “powerflushing” and “Croydon”.  Over time if you set a target to write a page of content every month say, that will make a huge difference.  For example one month, you can write a page on advice for fixing leaks, the next month one on preparing your house for winter, 5 things to do to avoid expensive plumbing bills, how to keep you heating in top condition etc.  They should come across as useful advice rather than as a sales pitch.  That way they become useful reference material for people and if you are lucky will get shared and referenced by others.

 

In terms of site structure, I’d suggest something like:

 

• Home page: Brief overview of services.  Quite visual.  Not much text.  A prominent phone number to allow people to call you quickly.  Menu bar at top or on left to link to other pages.
• Contact us page – With a form that sends an email to you.
• About me / About us – A brief summary of your experience. Gives people confidence.
• Services – An overview of services offered, with subpages for each one.
  • Powerflushing – Subpage with description of what is involved. Price range.  Link to contact form and a call to action “Contact us now for a free no-obligation quote”
  • Boiler Servicing – Subpage
  • .
• Testimonials – Short phrase from clients. If they email you thanks, or you know they are happy you could ask.
• Image Gallery – Personally I think I’d drop this and instead put images into each of the Services subpages

 

• Footer of every page – Your address, phone number, and short list of areas served. For example.  “Serving Kenley, Purley, South Croydon, Sanderstead and the surrounding area”.  Again, good for SEO without sounding spammy…

Comments

Was this helpful.  What else would you recommend he thinks about before I get started?  Do you have any other advice on setting up a new website for a Plumber?  Please comment below.

Making money from Websites

So, you have a website up and running?  Perhaps several already.  If so then you are well on the way to being able to make some nice easy cash.  If you haven’t yet started with a site, then there is a good getting started guide here:  Get started with a new website.

Once you have your site up and running you start to add content.  Regardless of what you used to get your site up, whether it was WordPress, Blogger, your own code, or a Hubpage, the most important thing is to drive traffic to your site.

Once you have traffic, you can start to earn revenue from the site.

Revenue = Traffic * Conversion ratio * Cash per conversion

That’s where this very interesting little tool comes in.  WP-Syndicator takes a snippet of every post that you put on your website and creates a new post from it.  The plugin then automatically posts that new post to 15-20 web 2.0 sites, creating a whole swathe of valuable new backlinks to your site.

The sites that WP-Syndicator uses are the top web 2.0 properties so by leveraging their traffic and powerful link juice you can drive valuable traffic back to your own blog.  Automatically…

You can download WP-Syndicator here:  Download WP-Syndicator.

I’m going to be installing and trying out WP-Syndicator on a couple of my blogs this weekend, so I will update you on how easy it was and what the success rate is.  I’ve heard some good things about this plug-in so I’m hopeful…

The best way to keep updated is to sign up to the email updates (the top of the right hand column of the website).

Getting started

I wrote this post to help out my good friends, Matt, Gary and Eli, all of whom wanted advice on setting up their first site, choosing a domain name and hosting.  What helps them will help you too.  I will provide a short step by step guide to choosing a domain, hosting it on some web space, and setting up the website.  There are lots of in-depth tutorials online, so I wont try to repeat the detailed background.  Instead this page will help you get started with a new website in an hour, cutting through the more geeky “options” and sharing my expertise to let you set up a new site that will last for life, without having to learn all the lessons the hard way.

Ready to start?  Well, lets go.  You will be up and running in less than one hour.

Step 1: Choose a killer domain name

The domain name provides the first impression of your site, your brand, your company.  More than that, of all the aspects of your site the only one that will never change is the domain name (URL).  Choose carefully.

If you want to catch “passing traffic”, ie people who are doing a search and just spot your site, then consider a name that is descriptive.  Looking for news on the Olympics?  Then a site named Olympics-latest.co.uk is likely to catch your eye more quickly than a trendy name like consiglium.co.uk.  Give your visitors a clue to what your site is about.  On the other hand if you are setting up a new company then having a name without any meaning can be an advantage.  It opens up all possibilities for what you put on there, without restriction.  After all you’d struggle if you wanted to change direction and turn olympics-latest.co.uk into a site selling cars!

Is your name available?  Check using a domain name search tool, like this one:  Domain Search Tool

Once you have chosen the name, its time to spend your first few pennies and purchase the domain.

Don’t worry.  Domain names are cheap.  Generally you will pay around £10 + VAT for a co.uk domain and £25 + VAT for a .com domain.  And that is for 2 years.  I recommend using Easily (www.easily.co.uk) to buy your domain.  Personally I have been with Easily for over 8 years and they offer fantastic service.  If you want to host somewhere else there is no problem.  You can buy the name at Easily and just point it at another host.  I do that with many sites because I find Easily hosting a little expensive for my smaller sites.  Other than easily another good host in the UK is NamesCo.

So, go ahead and buy your domain now.  Don’t wait too long or it will be gone.  And once you have it its yours for life to do with what you wish, or even to resell.  There is a big market in reselling domain names as the good ones are going fast…

Think about:

• Do you need the .com as well as the .co.uk?  If you don’t buy both how will you feel about that decision in 5 years time?
• Is this a “quick and dirty” test site, or your ten-bagger.  If this is your main site how would you feel with the domain name on your business card?  If its a smaller money site then keywords in the URL are far more important than having a great sounding name.
• Don’t try to save a few pennies by buying a .co.uk for less than £10+VAT.  Companies like Easily give you full rioghts to the domain to do what you like with it.  Many others actually just register the name themselves and let you use it, until you choose to move.  Then you find the name isn’t actually owned by you!

Step 2: Where to host your new site

Once you have purchased your domain you need to think where to host it.  Hosting a site allows it to be accessed 24 hours a day, from all over the world.  In theory you could host the site on your own PC, but nobody does that.  It means that as soon as you turn off your PC your site can’t be accessed.  Not a good idea.

There are literally thousands of hosting services available.  Prices vary from free to several thousand pounds a month.  For the average site a cheaper hosting provider will be fine.  Once you are earning a few thousand pounds a month you can think about upgrading your hosting package.  In fact the only difference between cheaper and expensive hosting is the number of customers it can serve.  For example, WebMasters hosting (which I recommend highly) offers an entry package for around £50 per year, which lets you host up to 100 domains and 300 databases.  Once your customer volumes go above 5000 or so a day you can upgrade to their next package with a single click.  At the top end sites like BBC iPlayer pay thousands per month because of the huge traffic volumes.  Something that is unlikely to be your problem for a while!

I strongly recommend WebMasters (www.webmasters.com) as the host if you are willing to pay.  If not, then there are some good free hosting providers available.  For my small test sites I have used free hosting from freevirtualservers.com and am very pleased with it.  Avoid freehostia.com.  Terrible availability with servers heavily overloaded.  I moved my sites from there and Freevirtualservers.com have stood up very well in comparison. Get started with a new website by choosing the right host.

Think about:

• What is the importance of reliability of your site?  Free hosts are always overloaded and you will suffer high downtime.  I have tried many.  Don’t believe the “99% up-time guarantee”.  Its false.
• Do you want to add extra domains later.  If so, choose a host that offers free “add-on” domains.  That way your hosting will let you add new sites without paying any more.  The great thing about these add-on domains is that as far as Google and the other Search Engines is concerned, each site is 100% independent.  They can not tell that the sites are on shared hosting.
• Where will your customers come from?  Are they spread globally, mainly in the UK or mainly in the US.  Most hosting is in the US, which will work perfectly well for most regions due to the excellent high-speed connections that the US has.  However, if all nearly all your customers are in the UK you may want to choose a UK based host, such as UKHost4U (www.ukhost4u.co.uk).  I use them for my high-traffic football sites and have found them excellent, though a little more expensive than WebMasters.

Step 3: Install WordPress

Why did I call this step “Install WordPress”?  Why WordPress.  Cant I just build my site in HTML / Dreamweaver / Joomla / Other?

Well, yes. You can build a site from scratch.  But this article is about the best way to get a great-looking site up quickly so I am going to tell you to stick with WordPress.  It is quick, simple, looks great, and will let you maintain a scalable website that will last for many many years.

Before we continue, let me clarify one thing.  When we talk of WordPress here I am referring to self-hosted Wordrpess, not wordpress.com.  You can set up a site at wordpress.com, similar  to blogger.com, but then you are handing over ownership of all your content to a third-party.  They set the rules, and they can delete your site if they don’t like what you are doing.

Hosting WordPress on your own site means you remain in full control.  For ever.  If you want to move your site to a new host then you can.  Its yours, and no-one can touch it.

So lets go:

1. Download WordPress from WordPress.org.  Save it to your hard drive.  This is only temporary.  When we have finished you wont need any software at all on your own PC.  Everything will be on the server so you can access it from any PC.  Great news if you plan to make updates to your site in your lunch hour from the office!
2. Upload it to your hosting provider.  If you are using WebMasters (I recommend you do) then click File Manager -> Upload
3. Alternatively, instead of Step 1 and 2, you may be able to install WordPress directly from the control panel of your hosting provider.  That can save a bit of time.  Look for something called “Install scripts”, “Intall WordPress”.  On WebMasters hosting it is called “Auto Installer” (see Figure 1).  The end result is the same.
4. Go to your domain in Internet explorer and you will see step by step instructions.  WordPress is famously easy to use, but if you have any questions please post them below this article and I will help.

Figure 1: You can autoinstall WordPress from WebMasters control panel

Step 4: Configure WordPress

At this point it is time to experiment a little.  Most of the options in WordPress are very simple to access, and are intuitive.  Just try them.

The great thing about having a site in WordPress is that your customers see a fantastic looking site, and you manage everything via your control panel so you never need to see any HTML, unless you want to!

If you want an example of a site built in WordPress, you don’t need to go far.  This site (www.linkbuildingtools.co.uk) is entirely WordPress, using only standard WordPress plugins.  I haven’t touched any html.  In fact the only addition is changing the default theme to Suffusion (my favourite theme), which you can do by clicking the Add Theme button in the WordPress Admin console.

Step 5: Create Content

A site with nothing on it won’t attract much traffic.  So next step is to start writing.  Content is King!

At this stage many people slow down.  After all you have a working site right.  Content can wait eh?  Well don’t wait too long.  Try writing an article every single day.  Even if it is just 50 words.  if you can add a post every day, or even once a week, within a few months you will have loads of interesting and unique content, all being indexed by Google.  Search Engines love fresh content, and if it is unique to you then all the better.  Traffic and customers will just start pouring in…

Step 6: Promote your new site

Again, this is too big a topic to cover here.  So I wont.  But suffice to say promoting your content is crucial if you want it to be found.

There are many good articles on this site that I have written to help you promote your site.  I really recommend you read everything and try them all.  I have learned the hard way so I know what works and what is a waste of time.  Also sign up to the newsletter (that’s it over there in the right hand column) and you will receive an email alert every time I add a new article to this site.

If you want an absolute killer way of getting loads and loads of links and customers then look at Brute Force.  Nothing comes close in terms of the impact on traffic.

Linkbuilding is also crucial.  Its another topic, too big to go into here, but if you want the full works then nothing comes close to BackLink Builder.  It is a full-suite automation package.

For those with a little more to spend you can purchase links back to your site from Backlinks.com.  Well worth it to get additional Google pagerank and more traffic.

Step 7: Monetise your site

Why did you first create your site?  Whatever the reason probably the chance to make shed-loads of easy cash on autopilot was somewhere in the back of your mind.  If not, why not!

To make some money out of your site there are a few options:

1. Google Adsense.  The easiest to set up.  You need to set up a Google account and Google will then post small text or image ads on your site in the pace you specify.  If you look around you will see some on this site (though not intrusively I hope!).  Done well, these can add to the user experience by offering relevant links to them.  The advantages:  Quick and Easy.  Google manages the ads so all you do is wait for the money to pour in (or more realistically to trickle…).  The disadvantages:  Google are strict on content so you cant place the ads on a site they don’t like the look of.  Secondly, the amount you get for a click can be very small, so don’t expect to retire on this alone.
2. Affiliate adverts.  Sign up with an affiliate programme such as Affiliate Window (www.affiliatewindow.com).  Once you have signed up you have access to hundreds of companies, all from one place.  Click the company whose goods you want to sell and you will receive a simple link.  Add that to your site and you will receive a percentage of the sales.  You can add the link to photos too.  Advantages:  Quick and simple.  Many vendors in one place.  No need to handle payments, customer queries etc as all that is done by the site without you doing anything.
3. Sell something. Selling directly can be lucrative.  You get all the profit for yourself and no-one else is involved in the payment cycle.  The disadvantage is that you need to create a shopping basket, collect the money, physically package and deliver the good and deal with queries and refunds.  You can save some time by selling “non-physical” goods, such as an eBook, but you still need to deal with queries, payments etc.
4. Amazon.  Join Amazon’s affiliate programme and they will provide you with links, images, reviews and many other tools that you can place on your site.  When one of your readers clicks on the advert they are taken straight to Amazon.  From that point on you get a percentage (currently 5-10% but it changes from time to time) of all sales for the next 24 hours.   Advantages:  Amazon are the master of upsell!  You may refer someone to a cheap book, but what does everyone do on Amazon?  Firstly, they add another book or two to bring it up to the free postage limit.  Then Amazon suggest you may “like these too”.  So your customer adds another item.  You get a percentage of everything, not just the small item you referred the customer for.  Once your first customer buys a £1500 garden table and chair set, or £2000 3D TV you will recognise Amazon’s power to upsell!

Step 8: Optimise your Robots.txt file

I won’t go in to this in detail here, as it is more advanced.  However, the robots.txt file is really important.  It will increase the speed of your website, increase security, and provide you higher rankings in the search results.  If you are on a WordPress blog read how to set up the best robots.txt file for WordPress and start there.

Comments and questions?

Did this article help you? If you liked it please help me back by Tweeting it or “Like” it on Facebook using the buttons below.

If you have any questions, feel free to post them below and I will get back to you just as soon as I can.  I am happy to help.

So, you have set up a new site, added some content, made it look reasonably presentable, but still you are not appearing in Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.  How can you get it indexed fast?

First, one thing not to bother with.  Search Engine submission forms.  They are useless.   Ignore.  The good news is that Google will follow all links eventually so as long as you have a link or two from other sites you will be indexed.  But the bad news is it can be slow, unless the site pointing to you has a very high page rank.

Getting a site indexed fast

Fortunately there is a sure-fire way to get your site indexed.  Its a tool I was told about a year ago, and it is still almost unknown.

This tool is invaluable.  I use it for every new site I create, and the site is always indexed within a few days.  I don’t know how, but it works.  And its free and totally without sign-up, so you cant receive any “reconstituted tinned meat products”, if you know what I mean.

The tool is:  http://woothy.com/domain_indexer/

All you need to do is enter your URL in the first box, then select the total number of submissions.  I leave 5 in the first box, and set the second to 100.

Make sure the pop-up blocker is off, then just hit the button and wait.  It takes 20 minutes or so and is 100% automated.

Go and have a coffee while it works because your desktop will be cluttered with lots of windows (it will close them when it finished submitting).

If you want a more guaranteed way, there are some great Gigs on Fiverr.com that will do it.  I’ve used this one and its fantastic. Get your site indexed in 24 hours.  SEO Agencies charge a lot of money for this.  Don’t pay their huge fees when you can get the same thing for $5 or even for free.

Don’t worry! I am here to help by sharing with you my knowledge of link building tools and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), developed over the last 8 years of website design.

Google, Bing, Yahoo… Find the secrets and tricks on how to great traffic, absolutely free.

Start here!

Getting Started with Link Building

• Getting started
• Top 10 WordPress SEO Plugins
• Awesome Article Marketing
• Search Engine News
• Pay Per Click Advertising
• Thousands of free hits via Viral Marketing
• Questions and Answers (Q&A)
• Use your Robots.txt file to get more traffic
• Use Twitter to get massive traffic

Try outsourcing articles if you are short on time

Using Articles to promote your website is not a new idea.  But the evolution of Article Marketing has now taken the practice full-circle.  In the early days articles were about building a presence in the online community, and this use of articles, to establish your brand and provide you with high quality backlinks for very little effort is what makes Article marketing so compelling.

What is Article Marketing

Your site will fail if it doesn’t have inbound links.  It will sink into ignominy, down into the hidden depths of the Internet.  But with a few well placed links from other sites it will rise to the top, where it gets read, gets linked to, and gets indexed, in a virtuous circle of success.

This is where articles can help.  Article Marketing involves you writing a short article (300-500 words in best) and then including a link back to your site in the footers.  You then submit the article to the main article directories (see below) and they publish your article, including the links back to your site.

That in itself is pretty good. These article sites, like Ezine Articles, are very high page rank, and the search engines index them almost constantly, so you will get links back to your site in no time at all.  But it gets much better!    As well as your article getting published at the directory it will also get picked up by tens, or hundreds, of blogs, news sites and publishers.

These publishers come to Ezine Articles and take your article for publishing on their website.  The crucial detail is that they must leave all the links intact.  By doing that you still receive the credit, and now, instead of having links from a few article directories you also have it from potentially hundreds of blog and magazine publishing sites.  Backlink heaven!

Killer Article Marketing Strategy

Follow this simple plan to get awesome results, massive traffic, and high quality “link juice” back to your site.

1. Create your article.  Make it 500 words max, with a simple clear title that explains the contents
2. Carefully check your article for spelling and grammar.
3. Make sure text is well spaced out.  No huge paragraphs.  Bullets and lists work well.  Think of your reader, who is probably scanning very quickly
4. Now publish the article to your own website.  Many people will suggest you first publish to Ezine Articles (EZA) but they are wrong.  I have tested both ways and believe me that publishing to your own site first will help.  In any case, who do you want to be seen as the “original owner” in the eyes of the search engines.  These things matter.
5. Wait a few days until Google has come along and indexed it.  You can submit to some social bookmark sites to help speed it up if you wish
6. Now for part B:  Take the same article, and add two links.  One should be to the exact same article on your website, and one to another place (on that site or a different site you own).  These links are what gets you all that lovely link-juice.
7. Publish the article on EZA.
8. Wait until the article is indexed.
9. And finally part C:  This is where the huge traffic boost comes in.  Take the article, and rewrite the title slightly.  For example you could change “Dog Training: How to teach a dog to sit” to “Teaching a puppy to sit in 7 days”.
10. Change the links.  The first link, which pointed back to your website, is fine. However, make the second one point to your article on EZA.  This will keep the EZA article, which is by far the most important in terms of your visibility, high up in the article rankings so it will keep on getting referenced.  You now have two permanent links to the same original article on your site
11. Sit back and watch the traffic build up.  Rinse and Repeat!

If any of that isn’t clear please leave a comment below and I will explain further.

Which Article Directories?

There are literally thousands of Article directories out there.  However, the following directories will provide you with 80% of the coverage, for around 10% of the effort.

• Ezine Articles (EZA):  The largest and most visited of all the Article Directories.  Always start here.  Beware:  Content must be owned by you.  Despite what many will tell you there is no problem submitting articles that you have already published on your website, so long as you own the copyright to those articles.  That means you write them yourself, or you paid someone to write them for you.
• Articlesbase.com:  Second in size to EZA, and contains a large store of articles.  Slightly less strict with the URLs, so you are allowed to include a link in the main body as well as in your author signature (called the author bio) section.
• Goarticles.com: Another of the biggest article directories.  High Google Page Rank (PR5) and daily indexing so your article, and the links to your site will appear in Google very quickly
• Articledashboard.com: The last of the big article directories.  Just copy and paste your articles into here for an extra boost of link juice and traffic
• Suite101.com:  A great site to use if you are looking to use the Article to make money, rather than just drive traffic.  Suite 101 pays you for your articles.  They must be original and in your name.  No pen-names or pseudonyms allowed

I’d recommend submitting to these and then stopping, but if you really want more then there are good online resources where you can find more.  Does anyone have a list?

Get started now and you will see a steady increase in traffic and inbound links.

This site is awesome.  You will get thousands of hits per day, from real people, not robots.

Sales = Hits x Conversion rate

This tool won’t increase the conversion rate (i.e. the percentage of your visitors you turn into a sale).  But it will increase the hits.  That alone allows you to get your wares in front of enough people to increase sales.

1. The system is 100% FREE.  There is no risk, there is no sign-up and no-one is going to ask for your credit card.
2. The system is viral.  Traffic increases exponentially, doubling each day while you do other things.
3. The system is entirely automated.  It will send ongoing traffic around the clock long after you have it stopped using it directly yourself.

How to get Ten thousand hits per week

• Go to FW Traffic
• Get your sign-up code
• Enter your website URL
• Sit back and watch your hits increase…

Try it and let me know what you think.  I sound very enthusiastic but that’s only because it works and its free.  I havent used it long enough to see if it increases my sales yet, so I’ll come back and post an update in a few weeks.

Before we start a few quick facts on WordPress:

• There are over 146 000 000 (that’s 146 Million!) blogs in the world according to Technocrati
• Fewer than 0.5% of blogs have any SEO applied at all
• Even basic SEO, the kind that takes 10 minutes to apply to a blog, can increase SERPs by a factor of 10 or more, and traffic by a factor of 100.
• To get high quality, repeat traffic you need to be recommended by real visitors.  WordPress SEO helps visitors find you, and then its up to you to impress them.

SEO for WordPress: Five essential tips

1.  Optimise the Page Title

Generally your page title will be your post title, which is fine.  Think carefully about the placement of words, ensuring your title is descriptive for the reader, and contains the main keyword you want to target.  Place keywords near the start of the title.  For example “Why you should start early when training your dog” has the keywords late in the title.  Instead try “Dog Training: Why starting early gives the best results”.  There is no conflict between writing for search engine visibility and writing for your customer.  They both want to find information quickly and easily.  Please them both and you will have stellar results.

2.  Permalinks

Make sure you have changed the default WordPress setting so that you URLs show the full post title in the title bar.  For example, you want your article on Blue Widgets to have a URL like this:

www.yoursite.com/blue-widgets

not the default setting, which would give something like:

www.yoursite.com/postid12346

To change WordPress so it always uses the post URL, great for SEO, go to your WordPress site’s Admin console, then select Settings, Permalinks.  You will see 5 or so options.  Select the last one (Custom Structure) and enter the following into the box, before pressing save.

/%postname%/

3.  Set a homepage Description

OK, not strictly SEO as the search engines generally ignore it.  But your visitors don’t!  This description is usually (though not always) the small piece of text that appears underneath your site in the Search Engine results.  Make it short, snappy and focused on the customer (use the word you, not we).  Get this right and you will be the result they click on, ignoring the results above and below you.

4.  Submit a sitemap

You can do this manually via Google Webmaster tools.  Its doesn’t take long and it ensures Google is aware of your deep pages that may not be linked to.  There are also some great plugins that will submit your site map automatically every time that you update your site (see the Top 10 Essential plugins for WordPress).

5.  Avoid duplicate content

If you have an article in multiple categories is it showing up in every category.  If so, you will fall prey to the duplicate content penalty.  Don’t panic.  The “penalty” is not actually that.  Google’s TOSs are very clear.  You will not be penalised, but the duplicate pages will be ignored, meaning you lose essential places in the SERPs.  You can use plugins to avoid this, but the simplest way is not to regularly assign posts to multiple categories.  Use tags instead and keep the majority of posts in a single category.

Follow the 5 steps above and you have covered the 80%.  And it took you barely 5 minutes!  Form now on, all you need to do is thing about SEO when you write your posts.  A great title, and embed the keyword once or twice in the article.  Above all make it look natural.  SEO for WordPress is important, and if done right it helps, not hinders, your readers.  Try some killer article marketing to build backlinks quickly.

Did it work?

Having completed these steps, and got your site indexed,  you will already have created a significant increase in visibility of your blog.  To monitor your visitor numbers install a good analytics tracker.

I use Google Analytics as it is free and offers a comprehensive breakdown of visitors, where they cam from and the “bounce rate” for each page.  The bounce rate tells you how long each visitor stays on each page. If visitor s arrive and leave quickly then it’s a good sign that you are not delivering what is promised.  “Britney nude” in your title might help attract attention, but if the article is on SQL programming then you are unlikely to interest your new visitor!

Look out for the keywords that people used to find your page.  If you notice some unexpected keywords landing people on your site, consider writing a new post on that subject, so they keep growing and they find what they are looking for.

Any thoughts?

I hope you found the above tips useful.  If you have any additional tips please leave them below.  Don’t forget to sign up for the tips newsletter.

I’ve been searching for the Fastest WordPress theme.

If like me, your site loads a little slowly, you need to consider either faster hosting, or a lighter and faster WordPress theme.  Ideally both.

Being a tightwad I don’t want to pay top-end hosting rates so it’s on to investigate fast themes.

WordPress Themes Tested

1. Suffusion (the theme I use for this site)
2. SwiftThemes
3. vCandy
4. WP Simpy
5. After Burner
6. TwentyEleven
7. ClickBump
8. Magnolia
9. The Arialist
10. Business Lite

How to Test

I am running each theme through three tests, all using the same page:  Banking Glossary.  The reason I chose that is that its a fairly standard site.  Some plugins but not too many, and nothing non standard.  It contains a mixture of text and images.

I tested using:

• Pingdom tools page load test
• Yahoo Yslow page score

Results

All sites were tested using the same page, the Banking Glossary homepage.

For the Pingdom tests I ran it 3 times, once from Dallas, Texas, once Amsterdam, and once New York.  I averaged the three results to get the score.

Speed results are:

Overall, the results vary significantly, from my existing theme’s 2.19 seconds, load time right down to just 1.38 seconds with The Arialist.

I made sure the tests were fair, using the same page.  However, the themes vary hugely in their functionality.  Overall, I still prefer Suffusion to all the others for its adaptability.  However, perhaps that is just because I know it so well.  In terms of pure Speed, The Arialist takes it.  However, I wouldn’t use that for my sites as it is just too minimal and lacks the types of widgets like Feedburner email and RSS buttons which visitors expect.

For the best combination of speed and functionality SwiftThemes takes the prize.  The free version actually performed less well than the paid version, which is odd.  Overall the speed score of 97 on Google PageSpeed is incredible, and much higher than even the developer claimed for it.  I ran it several times, on different PCs to convince myself it was right.

How else can I speed up my WordPress site?

Other things you should consider for speeding up you websites include adding a caching plug-in.  See the article on 5 SEO tips you must follow in WordPress for more details.

Comments

Which theme do you use?  Do you have any other advice to share on the best wordpress themes for speed?

You’re probably wondering whether this is really necessary.  If I just leave my WordPress install alone will it be alright? Do I need to worry about this?

The short answer.  Yes.

Setting up the best robots.txt file for WordPress can make a huge difference to your search rankings, as well as to the performance of your site

Reasons to implement robots.txt

• It will speed up your site by stopping irrelevant pages being crawled
• It will boost your position in the SERPs (search engine results pages) by blocking duplicate content
• It will increase security, by stopping crawlers from going through wp files that they shouldn’t see.
• It will prevent your server from being paralysed by vast crawler requests (especially important on shared hosting)

When I was trying to set up my Robots file I read numerous articles online, but nothing quite worked. There was too much poor quality info and guesswork.  Instead I went back to basics, learned how the crawlers work from scratch, and then experimented until I got the perfect file.

Below I will break it down. If you want to jump straight to the chase, scroll on down to the “Best Robots.txt files for WordPress” section to find the file I use.  Simply copy and paste for your own site.

How does robots.txt work

The robots.txt file is a file that sits in the root of your site and tells crawlers (also known as bots) what they should index and what they should stay away from.

By default you won’t have a robots.txt file at all.  That is something we are going to fix right now.

Before I cover what to put in your robots.txt, have a look at a few other sites and you will see they all have a robots.txt file.  Even Google itself has one, to tell other search engines what to index and what to ignore.   Have a look here:  www.google.com/robots.txt

To see the robots.txt file for any site, if it exists, just type the URL and add /robots.txt at the end.

Robot.txt increases site security

We want to block all WordPress directories, as well as a few other places that you don’t want anyone to be able to see in the search results.  Do you really want the scripts in your cgi bin to be public and appear in Google?

By using robots.txt you get to block these places.

Here is the block I use:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

If you want to allow your images to get crawled and they are in the default place for WordPress then explicitly allow the folder your images are in.  For example, I put mine in /wp-content/images/

allow: /wp-content/images/

Avoid Duplicate content like the plague

Now you know all about this  – don’t you?  Google hates duplicate content, and WordPress is full of the stuff.  If you just set up WordPress and leave the robots file alone you will have duplicate content all over the place.  For each article or blog post you have the front page, the article page itself, and then the exact same content under the tags, under the categories, under your author page, even under the date archives.

You shouldn’t worry too much that the content is on the front page and on the blog post page itself.  That’s normal.  But all those other dupes?  Not so good.

By using the best robots.txt file you can stop Google (and of course the other bots) from seeing lots of copies of the exact same content on your WordPress blog.  Not only will that help you in rankings, it also makes sure that the main post is the one that appears in the search results.  And that is what you want.

The following settings will weed out duplicate content, as well as a few other files you don’t want crawled, like style sheets.

Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /index.php
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.inc$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: */trackback/
Disallow: /tag/

Setting a Crawl delay will speed up your site

Setting a crawl delay won’t harm your site. It simply stops crawlers from asking for too many pages too quickly. Use crawl delay to lower the load on your server, and speed up the site.

This stuff matters. If the load on your server (CPU usage or bandwidth usage) goes too high shared hosts will block your site for the rest of that day, or sometimes longer. This could already be happening without you knowing.

Reducing the server load of course also means your site is faster for your real visitors.

Setting a crawl delay is easy.  I use 5 seconds for Google, and more for the other engines.

Crawl-delay: 5

Blocking bad bots

Personally I don’t bother. If you use the setup above you will slow them down enough that it won’t cause any problems.

Some people block certain bots, but the reason I don’t is 1) new bots appear all the time 2) bad bots will often ignore robots.txt anyway

Instead I rely on the crawl delay which keeps the requests low.

Treat other crawlers differently from Google

The sections above are targeted at the main Google crawler.  You can, if you wish put separate instructions for every crawler.  Personally I don’t bother.  Instead I do one for Google, and a slightly different one for everything else.

One difference, for example, is that I don’t want Google to crawl my feeds as I don’t like the duplicate content.  However I don’t want to block all bots from the feeds as I want my site to appear in RSS directories.

The syntax to use for all bots, is:

User-agent: *

Another important thing to know is that Googlebot recognises the wildcard (*) but most other robots don’t.  So I take all wildcards out.  That’s important.  You don’t want the parser to ignore the whole block because of one command it doesn’t understand.

The best robots.txt file for WordPress

Putting all that together, here is my recommendation for the best robots.txt file for a WordPress site.  Feel free to copy this into a new text file and use it yourself

User-agent:  Googlebot
# Slow the bot down to speed up my site
Crawl-delay: 5
# Stop access to these directories
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
# Avoid duplicate content and files with certain extensions
Disallow: /index.php
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.inc$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /*.gz$
Disallow: /*.cgi$
Disallow: /*.wmv$
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /*/feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /*/trackback/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /*/tag/

#For other bots I allow feed and slow it down a bit
User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 10
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /index.php
Disallow: /tag/

http://www.linkbuildingtools.co.uk/sitemap.xml

Validate your Robots file

• You can look at the robots.txt of your competitor sites. See what they are doing. Remember what they have won’t necessarily work for you.
• There is a great WordPress plug-in that will generate the robots.txt for you (see here). However, if you use the file above you won’t need that.
• Validate your robots file using this free online validator – http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml

Share the word

If this article helped you please spread the word using the links below.

Comments?

Do you use a similar file?  What else do you include or exclude?  Leave questions or comments below and I will try and help you out.