“How do I make money from blogging? And where does my payment come from? Do I have to sell my articles to a magazine? I am confused at how this actually works and where the money comes from.”

Because it wasn’t that long ago that I knew nothing about blogging, let alone making money blogging, I can relate to this question. So in this article, we will take a look in detail at 50 ways bloggers make money. But first, let me try to talk you out of starting a money making blog.

Profitable Blogging is Simple, But Not Easy

I wrote an article last year arguing that attaining financial freedom is simple, but not easy. It’s simple in that all one needs is to earn a reasonable income, live below their means, and intelligently invest the difference. But it ain’t easy. It’s difficult to deny ourselves “stuff” when we have the money or credit to buy it. Profitable blogging is similar.

Fifteen months ago I knew nothing about blogging. Since then I’ve built a reasonably successful blog that will generate about $2,500 in revenue this month. Some months are better, others a little less. I suspect by year end I will have earned $20,000 to $25,000, and I expect next year to be even better–all in my spare time. And the top bloggers make much more. But here’s the catch.

I get up ever morning at 5 am to work on the blog. I write articles on the subway to and from work every day. Most work days I spend my lunch hour writing articles (when I’m not playing speed chess in the park). And here I am on a sunny Saturday afternoon writing this article.

On top of the time commitment, you must be a problem solver. I knew nothing about WordPress, html, php, adsense, or affiliate products when I started–I had to teach myself. For me, that was part of the fun. I can remember spending literally five hours trying to figure out how to flow text around the right side of an image I had inserted into a post. What’s the best way to market a blog? How should I balance content with ads? How do I get an ad to show up only on certain articles? How can I change the background color of a menu item when it’s selected? And the list goes on.

An article written more than two years ago by Steve Pavlina makes this same point–profitable blogging is simple, but not easy.

If I haven’t scared you away, then keep reading.

Traffic, Traffic, Traffic

One more thing before I get to some concrete ways to generate blogging income. It all hinges on traffic. You can’t make meaningful money blogging with 20 visitors a day. I started earning hundreds of dollars a month when I started getting hundreds of visitors a day. That took me about 6 months. While there are plenty of examples of bloggers who hit instant success on the launch of their blog, for must of us it takes time. It takes time to generate content; it takes time to get noticed by Google; it takes time to build relationships with other bloggers. I almost gave up many times. I’m glad I didn’t.

This article is not about building traffic. I’ve already written about SEO Copywriting–How to Get Your Article to the Top of Google. There are many ways to generate traffic beyond SEO, but I’ll save that for another article.

50 Ways to Make Money Blogging

Update: Flex Offers is a new affiliate program that allows you to promote products and services from hundreds of participating companies. Sign up is free, and Flex Offers is offering a $200 bonus after you earn your first $1,000 in commissions. Just use the promo code, “FlexCash” when signing up.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

PPC ads pay out when a reader clicks on the ad. The payouts typically vary based on a number of factors including the type of ad, the value of the keywords that generated the ad, the click through rate (CTR) for the blog, and the age of the blog. Google’s Adsense is the most widely recognized and used PPC program, but there are other options.

1. Google’s Adsense program is perhaps the single biggest reason for the explosive growth of blogs. A blogger can insert Adsense code into a post or sidebar and begin earning money immediately.
2. Yahoo! Publisher is similar to Google’s Adsense, but not as widely used. The only bloggers I know using Yahoo! Publisher are those that are banned from Google’s Adsense for violating its Terms of Service.
3. BidVertiser is another alternative to Adsense. Unlike Adsense which only pays out once a blogger has earned $100 (which took me 5 to 6 months), BidVertiser pays out at $10.
4. Clicksor offers several different types of ads, including text banner ads similar to Adsense and inline text ads.

Shopping Networks

Shopping networks is my designation for affiliate programs that offer you the ability to advertise a wide variety of products on your sites. Most of these programs pay out a percentage of sales generated from your site, although Chitika is a pay per click program.

5. Amazon is well known for books, but you can buy just about anything from Amazon. As an affiliate program, it pays bloggers a percentage of sales, beginning at 4% but quickly increasing to 6% and more depending on the number of items sold each month. You can insert text links into posts or banner ads to promote just about anything.
6. Chitika offers PPC ads based on the subject of the post or blog in which they appear. Here’s an example of what a Chitika ad would look like in an article about investing:

   

7. WidgetBucks is very similar to Chitika except that its ads tend to take more advantage of images.
8. Shopping.com is a PPC program that pays bloggers per click to drive traffic to various merchants.
9. Overstock.com pays up to 7% commission on sales generated through your site. Similar to Amazon, you can promote merchandise sold at Overstock on your blog or website.
10. Shopzilla is similar to Amazon and Overstock.
11. Ebay offers two ways to generate income. First, you earn a commission if somebody registers for Ebay through a link on your site. Second, you earn 50% of the commission Ebay receives when the winner bidder for an item clicked through to Ebay from your site. You can insert both text and banner ads to promote products for sale on Ebay.

Affiliate Offers

Like Amazon, affiliate offers provide an opportunity to promote products or services on your site. As an affiliate, you typically earn a percentage of the revenue generated or a fixed fee per sale. In addition to the shopping networks listed above, there are affiliate companies you can join that offer dozens if not hundreds of different affiliate programs. The benefit is that you get access to hundreds of products and services through each affiliate that you join. Here are the major players to consider:

12. Commission Junction is arguably the best known online advertising company. Through CJ, you can promote everything from credit cards to Apple products to clothing.
13. Flex Offers is one of my favorite affiliate programs. It allows you to promote credit cards and provides a wealth of information about each card offer. Payouts are good and the folks at Flex Offers are very helpful. As with every affiliate program I’ve ever used, it’s free to join.
14. CommissionSoup is similar to CJ, but it focuses on financial products, which are ideal of personal finance and investing blogs.
15. PepperJam gets an A+ for the coolest user interface. It offers a number of great affiliates. For a limited time, it is offering a $10 bonus for those that join PepperJam and $10 for every post those bloggers who have joined the program write about PepperJam. I don’t write paid reviews (and no, I didn’t get $10 from PepperJam to write this), but if you want to write paid posts, PepperJam is a great place to start. And quite apart from this incentive, it offers some very good affiliate programs to promote.
16. LinkShare offers a variety of products and services you can promote. I joined LinkShare initially because of the ShareBuilder affiliate program.
17. AzoogleAds gets high marks from a lot of super affiliates. Some of the more prominent affiliate programs it offers are Vonage, GE, and Blockbuster.
18. ClickBank is just another option with many affiliate programs to promote.
19. Never Blue Ads is one I signed up for but have never really used. Like ClickBank, it tends to promote affiliates that are outside of the mainstream. Depending on the content of your blog, though, it may be a great choice.

There are many other companies that publishers can sign up with and gain access to dozens of affiliate programs, but the list above represents some of the more popular programs.

Inline Contextual Ads

You can add code to your blog that will automatically search each article and create text links on keywords to promote products. You then get paid when a user clicks on one of the links. Amazon has a similar tool where your payment is based on a percentage of sales. Apart from Amazon, here are two of the big names with this type of advertising.

20. Intellitxt by Vibrant Media “reads web pages and double-underlines words and word-phrases dynamically and in real time. The code is installed by publishers into their sites and does not require any additional code, adware or spyware to be downloaded or uploaded by a user.” One thing to note about Vibrant Media is that your blog or website must receive 500,000 page views a month to qualify. If you site isn’t there yet, check out the next option.
21. Kontera does the same thing as Intellitxt, but you don’t need 500,000 page views to qualify. You can check out a demo of Kontera here

Text Links

Text link ads are similar to inline contextual ads, except they often are listed in the sidebar or footer of your site, not within the articles themselves. I should warn you here that Google will penalize your site for text link ads. It’s an odd thing that Google seems to have gone after those selling text link placement and not those buying them. Search on terms like “credit cards” or “payday loans,” and I guarantee you the first page results are websites spending tons of money on text links. While Google seems to have closed its corporate eyes on the buyers, it will hammer some small site trying to earn a few bucks if it detects a paid link. That said, here are some sites to consider if you want to earn money with paid text links.

22. Text Link Ads
23. DigitalPoint Link Sales Forum
24. Text-Link-Brokers
25. TNX
26. LinkWorth
27. Clicksor
28. SmartLinks

You can also sell your own text links directly with the websites looking to buy them. Just put contact information on your blog, and eventually you will start getting e-mail inquires. Although I do not sell text links on The Dough Roller, direct sales with the advertiser are the most profitable way to make money with text links because you do not have to split the revenue with a text link broker such as LinkWorth or Text Link Ads.

Pay Per Post

Companies will pay you a per post fee to write reviews about their products or services. This is not something I’ve done, but I know a number of bloggers who have. My only suggestion here is to make clear in the article that it is a paid review.

29. Review Me
30. Sponsored Reviews
31. Pay Per Post
32. LoudLaunch
33. BlogVertise
34. Smorty

Ad Networks

Ad Networks are companies that offer a variety of advertisers for your site and usually pay on a per impression basis. You may see the designation eCPM, which refers to earnings per 1,000 page impressions, although most networks offer a variety of ways to monetize a site. These networks also typically offer a variety of ad formats. Some of the major players in this space include the following:

35. Casale Media
36. Burst Media
37. Value Click
38. BlogHerAds (Note: While the ad company is geared toward female bloggers, it does accept applications from anybody.)
39. Tribal Fusion
40. Advertising.com
41. Gorilla Nation
42. Blue Lithium

Pop-Up Ads

As the name suggests, pop-up ads appear on a users screen when they visit your site. The user can either click on the ad or close it to continue to your site. If you want to ad pop-ups to your site, there are several options to consider. As with many advertising options, those listed below offer a variety of ad formats, not just pop-up ads.

43. PopupAd
44. PayPopup

Other Ways to Make Money Blogging

45. Pheedo enables you to place advertisements in your site’s feed, including a Feedburner feed. Until recently, there were few options to monetize a Feedburner feed, and none was all that terrific. Google has just started permitting publishers to ad Adsense to feeds. Pheedo places banner ads in feeds.
46. Vizu Answers enables you to add polls to your site to ask your readers anything you want. By itself, polls are a great way to engage your readers, and I’ve used a poll WordPress plugin on this site from time to time. With Vizu Answers, however, you can also incorporate market research polls into your site that can generate revenue.
47. ING Direct Savings Referrals allow you to offer readers a $25 bonus when the sign up for an ING Direct savings or checking account, and you get $10. You must have an ING Direct account. You can then use the Refer-a-Friend feature to email links to yourself. Simply copy the links into your site for readers to use to sign up for an ING Direct account.
48. ScratchBack has a unique way for bloggers to make money. Using their code, you add a widget to your blog that allows others to tip you through paypal, and in exchange, they get a link within the widget on your site. This is not a traditional text link ad, but you are being tipped in exchange for a text link.

Now at this point you are probably feeling cheated because I promised 50 ways to make money blogging, but have only listed 48. Well, the rest is up to you. If you know of another way to generate income from blogging, leave a comment or send me an email. If you are a blogger and I add your idea to the article, I’ll include a link back to your site.

Rule #1: Don’t lose money.

Rule #2: Don’t forget Rule #1.

Internet marketing can be boiled down to two rules as well:

Rule #1: Thou shalt get backlinks.

Rule #2: Don’t forget Rule #1.

When I first started blogging in May 2007, I didn’t have a clue about the value or importance of backlinks. I can remember submitting articles on my blog to carnivals, only to be disappointed that so few visitors actually clicked through to my site. I’m embarrassed to say, but I even remember being on pins and needles about whether the carnival host would pick my article as an editor’s pick, which always seemed to increase traffic. What I didn’t realize then was (1) the value of a carnival link is the backlink, not direct traffic; and (2) click-thrus from the carnival almost never result in conversions.

What’s a backlink? For those just starting out, a backlink is simply a link from another website to your site. The link can be to your home page or any other page on your site. And while not generally called a backlink, you should consider any links on your site to another page of your site a backlink, too. If you are perplexed about the value of linking from one part of your site to another, you should read my previous article, Do You Understand the Ranking Power of Home Page Links?

A backlink is in effect a vote cast by one page in favor of another. And who counts these votes? Assuming the pages are indexed, Google counts these votes (so do other search engines, too). And Google looks at several things when tallying these votes: (1) the source of the backlink; (2) the page the backlink is pointing to; (3) the anchor text in the backlink (the anchor text is the highlighted words you click on); (4) the text around the backlink; (5) and probably 10,000 other things nobody knows about.

So today we are going to let Warren Buffett teach us some things about backlinks. And to do that, we need to play a game of pretend. Let’s pretend that Warren Buffett has just said that I am a great investor (please, no laughing). To put this in terms of backlinks, we could pretend that the Berkshire Hathaway website linked to my personal finance blog with the anchor text of “great investor.” Let’s also pretend that my mom agrees with Mr. Buffett that indeed, her son, is a great investor. What can we learn from this?

Lesson 1: Not all backlinks are created equal.

The source of the backlink matters. When it comes to investing, Warren Buffett is universally regarded as an expert. His opinions count. In the language of the Internet, Warren Buffett has a page rank of 10. My mom, on the other hand, has a page rank of 0 or 1 (sorry, mom). If Buffett told the world I was a great investor, reporters would be beating down my door for an interview. In contrast, I could get my mom and a thousand other friends and family to tell the world I’m a great investor, and nobody would care.

Lesson 2: Relevance matters.

Now let’s assume that Mr. Buffett told the world that I’m a great son. Since he’s not my dad (at least as far as I know), and I don’t know him personally, his opinion would not be of much value. In contrast, my mom’s opinion, however biased it may be, would be valuable. The key here is not to get hung up on page rank. Links from pages about blue widgets to other pages about blue widgets are valuable. Besides, page rank can and will change over time. In fact, as of this writing, Dough Blogger has a page rank of 4, even though it has all of two articles published (this one is #3) and fewer than 150 backlinks (although quantity really isn’t the issue, but that’s for another article).

Lesson 3: Two’s company; three’s a crowd.

Let’s assume that Warren Buffett not only named me as a great investor, but at the same time identified 499 other “great investors.” Now his vote of approval isn’t so special. It’s still nice to be included in the list, but I’m a lot less likely to get a call from a reporter. The same is true with backlinks. Every web page indexed in Google has a page rank (eventually). Each page can pass about 85% of its page rank to the pages it links to. The more links on a page, the less page rank each link gets. In effect, as more links are added to a page, each link gets devalued.

Think about that the next time you want to exchange blogroll links with a site that has 200 or more links on its home page.

Lesson 4: Variety is the spice of life.

Imagine that following Buffett’s statement that I’m a great investor, a reporter asks a follow up question: “Mr. Buffett, exactly why do you believe The Dough Roller is a great investor?” In response, Mr. Buffett simply responds, “he is a great investor.” And as more reporters ask questions, he gives the same response, “he is a great investor.” After a while, his response is going to seem really unnatural, even odd. Is that all he has to say is “great investor?”

Google likes variety, too. Getting a thousand backlinks with the anchor text, “internet marketing,” doesn’t look natural. In fact, get too many backlinks all at once with the same anchor text, and the search engines may punish the site. It just looks spammy, and often is.

I’ve seen “make money online” experts pushing services that will blast an article to 1,000s of article directories for you. This gives you 1,000s of backlinks for little work. The MMO blogger gets an affiliate commission, but what do you get? You get 1,000s of backlinks all with the same anchor text submitted to really crappy article directories. And Google gets to flag your site as suspicious. Save your money. Trust me; I learned the hard way.

Lesson 5: Money doesn’t buy happiness.

Now let’s assume that when Mr. Buffett said I was a great investor, he was speaking at a charity event. The event, moreover, was a fundraiser for his favorite charity, and I had just given his charity a $10 billion check (I like to think big). It was in response to the check that Mr. Buffett proclaimed my investing prowess. Now what do you think of his opinion? Probably not as much, and neither would Google.

In December 2007, Google began to punish sites that buy or sell text links. Now an entire book could be filled with information about buying and selling links. The fact is that many sites buy links with good success. I never have, in part because I’m convinced that I’d be the only one in the known universe to get caught if I tried (I have my mom to thank for that). And of course, there are many ways to buy links. But the point is this–buy links at your own risk.

All of this leads to the really important question–how do you get backlinks? That’s the subject of my next article.

It started with Apple’s Refurbished iPhone

True story. In September 2007, I was behind on posting to The Dough Roller, my money management blog, and threw together a quick post on how to buy a refurbished iPhone. I didn’t give SEO or keywords a second thought because back then I didn’t even know what SEO stood for. I hit the publish button and moved on.

Because I liked the post (mainly because I like Apple products), I put a link to it in my sidebar along with some of my other favorite articles. This meant that every single page of my blog, including my home page, had a link to this article. Again, that fact never crossed my mind at the time.

About a month later I noticed I was getting several hundred search engine visitors a day to this little article. Upon further investigation through Google Analytics, I learned that the article ranked #2 for the keyword, “refurbished iphone,” just behind Apple.

To say that I was stunned would be an understatement. Depending on the news of the day and season of the year, I’d sometimes get 500 to 700 visitors a day to that article. Wow! It was by far my most popular article, so at the time, it was very important to me, and I regularly tracked its rankings in Google. And it always remained #2.

Wordpress theme change

In early 2008, I decided to change my Wordpress theme for a new fresh look. I changed some of the links in my sidebar, but made sure to keep the iPhone article in the sidebar. About three days after the change, traffic to the refurbished iPhone article disappeared. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. At first I figured it was just a reshuffle of the Google SERPs. After all, The Dough Roller is a personal finance blog, not an iphone site, so how long could the rankings last, anyway.

But I couldn’t stop wondering if the drop in rankings had to do with the new theme. After a lot of investigation, the only change I could see was the placement of the link in the sidebar. I had moved it from directly below an h3 tag to the bottom of the sidebar. So I moved it back up to its prior position, and guess what? Yep. Three days later I was back up to the #2 position.

Now, you have to be really careful when assessing the cause and effect in search engine rankings. It’s very possible that the change in SERPs had absolutely nothing to do with this change. So being the experimental sort that I am, after the rankings returned, I pulled the link out of the sidebar completely. Three days later, gone from the SERPs.

Then I got really experimental. Realizing that a link in the sidebar appears on every page of the site, I decided to put the link back in, but with some php conditional tags, have it appear only on the home page. If you’re wondering how I did that, the code in my sidebar.php file looked something like this:

if(is_page('[page #]')) { ?> 
<a href="[ url ]">How to Buy a Refurbished iPhone</a> 
<?php }

It took some time, but eventually the article worked its way back up the SERPs to the #2 spot.

Today I still link to that article from my home page, but no longer in the sidebar. Because the post is not that important to my site (for a number of reasons), I’m not focused on its ranking as much. Yesterday it was ranked #2 again, today it’s on the second page. Part of that is, from my perspective, changes at Google as compared to a year ago, but that’s for another post.

Page rank sculpting

So why do home page links have such a potential to affect your search rankings? For most sites, and certainly most blogs, the home page has the highest page rank. Page rank is simply a measure of the importance of a particular page on the Internet. While some may refer to a site as having a certain page rank, it is really page specific.

In the page rank toolbar for Firefox that shows you the page rank of the page you’re visiting, page rank is expressed as an integer ranging from 0 to 10. Google has a PR of 10. A new site, once it gets a page rank, typically starts at a 0 or 1. These integers are just a representation of the page rank of each page; the actual page rank known only to the Wizard of Oz behind the big Google curtain is far more complex. Here is the official definition of page rank:

PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results. PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.

Did you notice the reference to voting in the above quote? Typically, when one page links to another, it is “voting” for that page. And unless the rel=”nofollow” tag is added to the link, the linking page passes page rank to the page being linked to.

Let’s dispel a few misconceptions about page rank. First, linking to other pages does not diminish the page rank of the page doing the linking. Second, a page can only pass about 80% of its page rank, and that page rank gets divided up among all the links on the page. So the more links on a page, the less page rank each link gets.

Important: Page rank passes from links regardless of whether you link to another page on your site or to somebody else’s site. Because your home page probably has the highest page rank, the links on the home page are really important. If you are looking to increase your ranking for a particular keyword, consider a home page link with the appropriate anchor text to the page you’re looking to boost in the rankings. I didn’t appreciate this until after the iphone article experience.

Is it really that easy?

Yes and no. Yes, by adding followed links on your home page to sub-pages you want to promote, you’ll pass more page rank to those pages. And page rank is an important factor in search rankings, so you may very well see positive changes as a result. Now for the no part of the answer:

1. Page rank is just one of many, many ranking factors.
2. If your home page has a low PR, it obviously won’t pass much juice. But even at a 2 or 3 it can make a difference.
3. This can only work for so many pages. As you add more followed links, the page rank that gets passed to each diminishes.
4. Always put your reader first, not SEO. If readers need/want certain links on the home page that you don’t want syphoning your page rank, no follow the links

What’s on your home page?

So now take another look at your home page and sidebar, and consider the following questions:

1. Was it wise to sell text links? Google doesn’t like them, and now you may realize that the advertisers are “stealing” your page rank.
2. Do you need a blogroll with 58 followed links to other sites on every page of your site? Link out to other sites in articles, which are far more valuable links anyway.
3. Do you need followed links to all of your categories, particularly those that aren’t that important to your site?
4. Should you display the entire post on your home page, external links and all, or just an excerpt?
5. How important is a followed tag cloud? Do your readers click on it anyway?

What’s money got to do with this

If you’ve made it this far in the article, I’ll share how I use home page links to make money. Like most sites, mine have some pages that make me the most money, and some that don’t make me any money. For my money pages, I’ll place followed links on my home page or other internal pages with high page rank. I’ve personally seen how this affects search engine rankings for keywords that I track. So if there is a page you want to promote in the rankings, whether for money or any other reason, make sure it is linked to from your home page or other high page rank pages of your site.

I now use the Thesis theme for most of my sites. One of the reasons I love the theme is that it is very easy to customize the content on your Wordpress blog. For example, if you look at the category navigation at The Dough Roller that runs across the top of the site, you’ll see those categories that are most important to me. Click on any one of them and you’ll see that the sidebar is different for each.

With customization through Thesis, I am able to show my readers different articles, products and services depending on which category the post is in that they are viewing. Of course, this can be done with any theme by hacking away that the theme code (trust me, I’ve done it), but Thesis makes it much easier through what they call hooks.

Anyway, with hooks you can vary the links and anchor text that appear in the sidebar based on the category. This is ideal for the reader, who gets information relevant to the article they are reading. And it is ideal for SEO, too.

Table of Contents

1. Choosing a Domain
1. SEO advantages of a keyword rich domain name
2. Branding
3. Top level domains: .com versus .net versus .org
4. Buying an existing domain
2. Web Hosting
1. Selecting a web hosting service
2. Hosting your domain
3. How to Install WordPress
4. Selecting an Optimized WordPress Theme
1. What to look for in an Search Engine Optimized WordPress Theme
2. Free SEO WordPress Themes
3. Premium SEO WordPress Themes
4. Installing a WordPress Theme on BlueHost
5. How to install a WordPress plugin on Bluehost
6. SEO WordPress Plugins
1. Google XML Sitemaps
2. HeadSpace2
3. Related Posts
4. SEO Slugs
7. Seven More Plugins Every WordPress Blog Needs
1. FeedBurner FeedSmith
2. Full Text Feed
3. Maintenance Mode
4. SRG Clean Archives
5. Who Sees Ads
6. WordPress Automatic Upgrade
7. WordPress Database Backup
8. Configuring WordPress for Search Engine Optimization
1. Update Services
2. Custom permalink structure
9. Installing Critical Addons
1. Google Analytics
2. Google Webmaster Tools
3. FeedBurner
10. Getting Indexed in Google

1.0 Choosing a Domain

Choosing a name for your site is the most important and time consuming step in the process of starting a blog. The name of your site will live with you forever, and the name you choose can have a significant impact on your search engine traffic. And every day thousands of domains are registered, so finding a good domain name can be a real challenge. Nevertheless, profitable domains are still available, and here are some factors to consider when selecting the name of your new site.

1.1 SEO advantages of a keyword rich domain name

Keywords are the word phrases we all type into Google, Yahoo! or other search engines to find information on the Internet. When selecting a domain name, consider what keywords are relevant to your site and include theme in the domain name. There are at least two separate SEO benefits for having a keyword rich domain name.

First, the URL of a page is one factor Google’s search engine algorithm considers when ranking pages. If your site is about mortgage loans, having those keywords in your domain name will help your site rank well for those and related keywords. Second, you will find that most sites that link to your homepage will use your site’s name as the anchor text of the link. Having links to your site that use keyword rich anchor text can mean a huge boost in the search engine rankings for your site.

A keyword rich domain name is the approach I took with Credit Card Offers IQ. As you might imagine, the keyword credit cards is highly competitive and highly valuable, which typically go hand in hand. Credit card offers is not as competitive and not as valuable. Obviously I’ll be targeting other keywords on the site, but the domain name contains important keywords and describes what the site is all about.

1.2 Branding

If you are promoting an off line business, a domain name that matches the name of your company is obviously critical. But even if your business is entirely online, a memorable domain name can help you build reader loyalty and trust. This is the approach I took with the Dough Roller. Exactly how well I accomplished that goal I’ll leave to you, but the people I talk to say its catchy and memorable. That’s the goal if your focus is branding.

1.3 Top level domains: .com versus .net versus .org

Does it matter if your site ends with .com, .net, .org, or some other TLD? Yes and no. Domain names with .com extensions are more valuable than other TLDs. It’s as simple as that. In addition, most folks assume that a website is a .com, so they can have trouble finding your site if it ends with a different extension. I have no doubt that some have had trouble finding the Dough Roller because it ends in .net. I think that’s why I get a handful of visitors each day who find through the search term the dough roller.

From an SEO perspective, it doesn’t matter. I’ve seen nothing suggesting, for example, that the search engines favor one TLD over another. So my view is to get the .com if you can. But if you find a great keyword rich .net or .org, grab it.

1.4 Buying an existing domain

I’ve never bought a domain name, but I expect that I will shortly. Cost is the obvious downside. To register a new domain costs $10. Buying a domain name will cost more, and a lot more depending on the value of the name. One of the key benefits of buying an existing domain is its age.

When I started The Dough Roller, I got almost no search engine visitors to speak of. Part of the reason was that I didn’t know what I was doing. But another part was that I had a brand new domain. At the six month mark, after my domain name had age, I saw a noticeable spike in search engine hits. Many have reported the same thing at around the six month mark. We won’t go into what is called the Google sandbox at the moment, but the point is that the age of a domain is an important SEO factor.

Availability: So you have a great domain name in mind and want to know if it’s available. There are a million places on the net to find out if a domain name is available. I use GoDaddy. It’s easy to use and will give you alternative suggestions if the name is not available. You should expect to try a lot of domain names before you find one that you like and that is available. I’ll repeat this many times, but remember, this is not rocket science, but it does take a lot of hard work and perseverance. If you are not prepared to work at it, forget about making money blogging.

2.0 Web Hosting

2.1 Selecting a web hosting service

There are many hosting services to choose from. And if you ask five bloggers which is the best, you’ll get five different answers. You’ll also hear horror stories about every single hosting company out there. I use three hosting services: Bluehost, Dreamhost and Proud Domains. Why do I use three, you ask. Absolutely no good reason. Of these, Bluehost is my top pick for one primary reason–tech support.

I can reach a live tech support person at Bluehost inside of 60 seconds almost every time. At Dreamhost, I was told that live tech support doesn’t come with their basic package. Their hosting is fine, but without live tech support, forget it. So throughout this tutorial I’ll be using Bluehost in my examples. Most hosting services work pretty much the same way, but the user interfaces are different.

You can get Bluehost for as little as $6.95 a month and can host an unlimited number of domains for that price. I currently have about 20 or so sites hosted with Bluehost. if you’d like to sign up with Bluehost, you can by
clicking here (and you can also check our my Bluehost Review and Special Offer ). And if you’re just starting out, the Bluehost package comes with a free domain name.

There are, of course, other web hosting options. If you want to host just one domain, Hostgator
offers a hosting package for $4.95 per month. GoDaddy.com
is another option with low cost hosting plans.

2.2 Hosting your domain

I purchase my domains directly through Bluehost. It’s easy, costs $10, and I can have the site up and running in minutes. Assuming you already have a Bluehost account, here’s what you do. After you log in to Bluehost, it will take you to what’s called the cPanel, which looks like this:

During the signup process with Bluehost, they will walk you through registering your first domain. To purchase another domain name once you’ve already signed up with Bluehost, in the cPanel scroll down to the Domains panel, which looks like this:

In this panel, select “register domain.” This will take you to an easy to follow set of screens to enter the domain name you want and register it through Bluehost. Now comes the part that trips some folks up. Registering the domain and hosting the domain are two entirely different processes. You’ve registered the domain, but now you have to host it. Bluehost calls this an “addon” domain, and it’s easy to do.

From the cPanel, go back down to the Domains panel and select the Domain Manager. This will take you to a listing of all of your registered domains on Bluehost. Mine looks like this:

Of course, I’m just showing you a couple of my domains. But you’ll see that two of them are “unassigned” and one is “parked.” Don’t worry about parking domains for the moment. I redirect that site to the Dough Roller. If you want to host a domain name you’ve just registered, find it on your list of domain names and click the “unassigned” link. This will take you to a screen with four steps:

Step #1:

With step one, you want to select the domain name you want to host. In my example, I’m going to host the domain name, smartmoneytools.net.

Steps #2 and 3:

if you’ve registered your domain name through Bluehost, there’s nothing to do with step #2. For step #3, we want to select the addon button. This will enable you to host your new domain name as a separate, stand alone site.

Step #4:

Finally, choose to setup a new directory with the name of your domain. These settings are the default on my system, so all I really need to do on this page is click the “Add Domain” button and I’m done. Note that setting up the hosting after you click the button can take a few minutes, so be patient. Once that’s done, you’re ready to install WordPress.

3.0 How to Install WordPress

Installing WordPress takes all of about 60 seconds. From the cPanel, scroll down to the Software/Services panel and click on the Fantastico De Luxe button:

This will take you to the Fantastico page where you can click on the WordPress link in the left sidebar underneath the “Blog” heading. Here’s what the WordPress installation page looks like:

From here click the “New Installation” link to go to the WordPress installation page. In the dropdown box at the top, select the domain name where you want to install WordPress. In my example, I’m installing it in the coolmoneytools.net directory:

After that just work down the page inputting primarily the password you want to use and email name. Once you’ve filled in the required fields, click the “Install WordPress” button and Bluehost takes care of the rest. The next page will allow you to email the installation details to an email address of your choosing. This is very important, as you’ll want to save this information.

So that’s it. Pick your domain name, host it on Bluehost or some other hosting service, and install WordPress. You’ll be up and running inside of 10 minutes. In fact, picking the domain name is the most time consuming part of the process. Once you have that, hosting the domain and installing WordPress should only take a few minutes.

4.0 Selecting an Optimized WordPress Theme

Before diving into php and html code, let me just say that you can ignore this section for now if you want. But in the long run it’s important to understand what makes a WordPress theme SEO friendly, so I’ve included this section in the tutorial. If you want to just get started with an optimized theme, you can skip to the free WordPress theme section below.

4.1 What to look for in an Search Engine Optimized WordPress Theme

Rather than give you some grand theory about SEO, I thought the best way to introduce this subject is to walk through some of the SEO elements I look for when evaluating a WordPress theme. So here they are—

SEO optimized h1 tags: WordPress and the blogging world use lots of tags. You have the WordPress tags you can enter for each post, there’s technorati tags, and there are html tags such as h1, h2, h3 and so on. I’m talking about html tags, which serve at least two purposes.

First, html tags when styled with cascading style sheets (CSS) define how the text between html tags will look. You can define for yourself what your html tags will look like, including font size and color.

Second, and important for our purposes, html tags communicate to search engines the relative importance of the text on your page. The h1 tag conveys the most significance and should be used once and only once on each page of your site. The h1 tag typically appears in the header.php file of a WordPress theme because most themes mark the name of the blog with the h1 tag. (if you’re new to WordPress, click on Design–>Theme Editor–>Header.php, which you should find along the right hand side of the window containing your theme’s php code.) Here’s an example of code you’ll find in many WordPress theme header files:

<h1><a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>/" 
title="<?php loginfo('name'); ?></">
<?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></h1>

Note: Ignore the line breaks; they are necessary to properly display html and php code.

The above code does two things. First, it displays the name of your site as entered in the Settings of WordPress (Settings–>General). Second, it links the name to your home page, which is why clicking on the name of most blogs takes you back to the home page. Recall that last week we discussed the advantages of having your keywords in your domain name. If you do, then surrounding your blog’s name in an h1 tag is a good SEO start. For the Dough Roller, however, my keywords aren’t in my domain name, so I’ve modified my header file with the following code:

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<div id="headliner">
<h1>Smarter Money Management
<?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> | <?php the_title(); ?><?php } ?>
<?php if ( is_page() ) { ?> | <?php the_title(); ?><?php } ?>
</h1></div>

As with the code above, ignore the line breaks, which I’ve added to make the code more readable. Also, I’ve added the line numbers so we can break down this code easier. So here’s what this code does:

Line 1: The “headliner” id comes from the Stylesheet file (CSS) and defines how the text will appear (font, size, color, etc.).

Line 2: Opens the h1 tag so that everything following it until the closing /h1 tag is identified by search engines as very important. Following the h1 tag, I’ve added the keywords that are important to my site. Actually, I should probably move the word “smarter” to the left of the h1 tag since I’m really focused on “money management.” In fact, I’ll make that change soon. On the home page, “smarter money management” is the only text within h1 tags.

Line 3: When a single post is being displayed (in contrast to the home page, category page, and so on), the title of the post will be added to the h1 tag. If I’ve written my title to include keywords as I should, then adding them to the h1 tag will help with SEO.

Line 4: This does the same thing as line 2, except for WordPress pages.

Line 5: This line closes the h1 tag and the div.

Now, I’m not suggesting that this is the only or even best approach. I first learned it from Court’s Internet Marketing School, a site I’ll talk about and link to in a minute. Alternatively, for single post pages you might put the category and post title in the h1 tags. The key is that you want your top keywords in the h1 tag. And in my opinion, you don’t want the same h1 tag for every page of your site, although there are good exceptions to this rule.

SEO Optimized h2 and h3 tags: Unlike an h1 tag, it’s ok to have more than one h2 and h3 tags on the same page. The key problem I see with many WordPress themes is that they use the h2 tag to mark the headings in sidebars. The result is that Google thinks the words “popular posts,” “categories,” “blogroll,” and the like are really important keywords to your site. So if your theme uses h2 tags for the sidebar headers, change them to h3 tags. You may need to make changes to your Stylesheet file to change the way the h3 tags look; that will just depend on your theme and what look you’re after. I tend to reserve h2 tags for keyword rich headings in my posts.

Changing the sidebar tags from h2 to h3 is easy. Simply open the php file(s) in your theme editor that contain the sidebar code, and look for the headings that appear in your sidebar. You should see them surrounded by an h2 or h3 tag, most likely. If it’s an h2 tag, simply change it to h3.

Loading content before sidebars improves SEO: This is a simple one, and it amazes me that WordPress theme designers get this one wrong. You want your articles to load before your sidebar. Why? Two reasons. First, you do not want readers surfing away from your site because they got tired of waiting for the content why your sidebar loads. Sidebars often contain ads and javascript that can take some time to load. Second, search engines generally give more weight to the content higher up on the page. So why tell the search engines that your blogroll is more important than your articles?

So how do you tell whether your content loads before your sidebar? You can load a page of your site in a browser, go to the “view” menu and click on page source (in Firefox, please don’t tell me you use IE). Look at the html code that comes up and see if your post content is above or below your sidebar content. You can also look at the “Single Post” theme file and see which comes first, php the_content() or the code that calls your sidebar(s).

Remember that the location of your sidebar has absolutely nothing to do with whether it loads first. The sidebar can be to the left of your content and still load in the browser after the content is loaded. If you find that your sidebar loads first, you’ll need to move the code that calls the sidebar to come after the code that loads the content.

Using excerpts to avoid duplicate content: Google hates duplicate content. And unfortunately, a WordPress blog can have tons of duplicate content. For example, a single post can show up on the home page, the single post page, multiple category and tag pages, an author page, and an archive page. There are several ways to address this problem. One is to use a robots.txt file to keep Google and other search engine bots from indexing all of these pages. But I prefer a different approach, which is to just show an excerpt of the article on all of these pages (except for the single post page, of course).

The problem is that many themes aren’t built that way. The Grid Focus theme I use for the Dough Roller, for example, doesn’t even come with a category.php file. So when a user clicks on a category like credit cards, what theme file displays the content? If the theme doesn’t have a specific file to deal with the category view, it simply uses the index.php file. In my case, that currently displays the entire post, so the category page also displays the entire post. As I wrote this article, however, I fixed this problem in literally about 60 seconds. I’ll show you how, and you can then apply this fix to other pages such as tags and archives if you want to.

In Bluehost (or whatever hosting service you use), go to the file manager. You can refer to my post last week on how to install WordPress if you are unsure how to do this. In file manager, navigate to your theme files, which you find in wp-content–>themes–>[name of theme you are using]. With Grid Focus, my theme files look like this:

Find the index.php file, highlight, and select the “copy” button toward the top left of the screen. When you copy the file, name it “category.php”. This is important, because WordPress searches for this file when a user navigates to one of your categories. Once you’ve copied the index.php file and renamed it category.php, it will show up in the theme editor of WordPress.

Cautionary Note: You should not modify the production environment of your site, particularly without first making sure you have EVERYTHING backed up. Confession: I modify the production code of my sites all the time, but it’s a really, really bad idea.

Now from WordPress go into the new category.php file you’ve created (which currently is identical to your index.php file), and search for the following code:

 
<?php the_content('Read the rest'); ?>

Your code may or may not have the “Read the rest” in the parenthetical. (The text in the parenthetical is displayed if you insert the “more” command in a post.) You’ll then replace the portion of this code that reads “the_content(’Read the rest’)” with “the_excerpt()”. Save the file and you’re done. Now your category pages will all show excerpts of the posts rather than the full posts. Not only is this better for SEO, but I think users prefer this approach, too.

One last thing. When you write a post, one of the boxes within WordPress is for excerpts. if you fill in this box, the content will be displayed whenever the excerpt of the post is displayed. If you leave this box blank, WordPress instead shows the first four lines or so of the post. It’s really a good idea to complete the excerpt box for each post, but I’m guilty of neglecting this step.

Links in the theme’s footer are critical to search engine optimization: When I first started blogging, I didn’t give much thought to the footer. I figured nobody ever read the content in the footer anyway, so why bother. It turns out, adding the right links to the footer can be a big SEO plus. We’ll talk more about that in the weeks to come, but for today, the important point is to note what links the theme author requires you to leave in the footer. What you want to avoid are themes that come with 3 or 4 links in the footer, including paid links to spam sites. One link back to the author’s page is fine, much more than that and look for another theme.

And this brings us to the next topic. . . .

4.2 Free SEO WordPress Themes

The thought of significantly modifying a WordPress theme may not be your idea of a fun time. In addition, you may just want to start off with a well optimized theme to save time. Fortunately, there is a great resource that offers free optimized Wordpress themes. Court’s internet marketing school is a great resource if you want to make money blogging.

One of the things Court has done to promote his site is to create WordPress themes optimized for search engines. And in addition to offering these themes for free, he also offers a great lesson in internet marketing. Question: Why is Court going to all this trouble to build themes and then give them away for free? Is he just a great guy? Well, I’m sure he is a great guy, but there is some self interest involved. Each theme includes a link in the footer back to his site. So every time somebody uses one of his themes, he gets a free link. He has even purchased themes, modified them as necessary to improve search engine optimization, and then made them available for free. In fact, one of the themes he now owns is the one used by JD at Get Rich Slowly.

So if you are looking for a well optimized WordPress theme, check out what Court has to offer.

4.3 Premium SEO WordPress Themes

There are premium WordPress themes that you must pay for. If you are just starting out, I highly recommend using a free theme at first. As you learn how to work with themes and what you want for your sites, you can then consider a premium theme. Most bloggers probably never pay for a theme. The theme I use here at The Dough Roller is free, although I have bought a few themes for other sites. But one thing to remember is that premium does not necessarily mean better or SEO friendly. Premium usually means that the theme comes with a lot of bells and whistles that add a lot of features to the site. They also add a lot of complexity, which is why I suggest starting with a free theme.

4.4 Installing a WordPress Theme on BlueHost

For those just starting out, let me quickly walk through how to install a WordPress theme. I’ll use Bluehost in the example, but the process is generally the same for any hosting service.

Step 1: Select your theme and download the zip file to your hard drive.

Step 2: Log into Bluehost and open up the File Manager.

Step 3: In the File Manager, navigate to the WP-content–>Themes folder.

Step 4: Once you’re in the theme folder, click on the “Upload” button toward the top left of your screen:

Step 5: From the upload screen, select the “browse” button and find the theme zip file you downloaded to your hard drive. Once selected, Bluehost will automatically upload the file into your theme folder.

Step 6: Go back to your theme folder and find the zip file you just downloaded (you may need to refresh the screen). Check the box next to the zip file and select the “Extract” button near the top right of your screen:

Follow the prompts to confirm the action, and you’re done. Now when you go into your site’s WordPress Design–>Theme, you should see your new theme as an option. Simply select it by clicking on it, and you’re ready to go.

5.0 How to install a WordPress plugin on Bluehost

Installing a WordPress plugin is similar to installing a theme:

Step 1: Download the plugin to your hard drive.

Step 2: Log in to Bluehost (or other hosting service) and from the cPanel, select the File Manager. Navigate to your domain folder –> wp-content –> plugins.

Step 3: Once you are in your plugins folder, click the upload navigation icon. This will take you to a screen where you can browse your hard drive and upload the plugin file.

Step 4: Find the plugin file in your plugins folder and extract the files.

Step 5: In WordPress, navigate to the Plugins page and activate the plugin.

There are two shortcuts to this process you should know about. First, when I set up a new site, I quickly copy all of the plugins I use from one of my existing sites on Bluehost to the new site. In File Manager, you can select multiple files and then select the Copy icon to copy the files over to the plugin folder of the new site. It literally takes me 60 seconds to upload all the plugins I need for a new site.

Second, you can use FTP (file transfer protocol) software and other methods to transfer files from your hard drive to the Bluehost servers without manually logging in to Bluehost. I’ve not covered that here because I think it’s important to understand how your hosting interface works. But eventually you’ll move to FTP.

6.0 Must Have SEO WordPress Plugins

6.1 Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps: Sitemaps tell search engines like Google and Yahoo! what pages are available on your site for crawling. They give search engines a road map to your most important content. With the Google XML Sitemap plugin, generating a XML-compliant sitemap is a snap.

After you download the sitemap plugin, upload it to your site’s server (see below), and activate the plugin from the plugins page of your WordPress installation, you can configure the plugin from the “Settings” page of WordPress. This plugin is rich with features and resources. I’ve found that the default settings typically are all that you need. Once you’ve generated your sitemap, it will be accessible at http://www.[yourdomain]/sitemap.xml. At that point, you can upload your sitemap to Google’s Webmaster tools. Google’s Webmaster tools provides a rich set of information about your site, and we’ll cover it in more detail next week.

6.2 HeadSpace2

HeadSpace2: The functionality of HeadSpace2 could fill 10 articles. It does everything All in One SEO does and more, and gives you more control of the settings. For example, you can set a single page or post to use a WordPress theme other than the one you’ve selected for your site. You can set global meta keywords that get inserted into all of your site’s pages. You can insert your Google Analytics (more on this next week) id into HeadSpace2 to track your site’s traffic.

I highly recommend this plugin if you have the time to understand how to use it. If you do, you should read the HeadSpace2 plugin page. In addition, WebHelperMagazine has published two great posts that you can read here1 and here2.

I do want to highlight one feature of HeadSpace2 that is particularly helpful if you already have a WordPress site with lots of posts. From the Manage tab click on the Meta-data sub-tab. This brings up a screen that lists every post and page on your site. Here’s what the screen looks like (click image to enlarge):

This feature allows you to edit or add meta tags/keywords, titles, descriptions, more text, page slug, site name, and site description. The drop down box lets you chose which one of the meta tags to change. If you click on the green arrows to the right, HeadSpace2 inserts suggested keywords and descriptions. One great benefit to this screen is that it’s an easy way to find old posts where I’ve forgotten to add keywords, tags, or meta titles.

6.3 Related Posts

Related Posts: This plugin automatically inserts related posts at the end of each post. This gives your readers some additional articles related to the topic if they want to keep reading. But the plugin also has a big SEO benefit. Internal links, that is links from one part of your site to another, are absolutely critical for SEO purposes. I’ll even go so far as to say that they are more important than back links. And the related posts plugin ads relevant internal links to all of your posts.

6.4 SEO Slugs

SEO Slugs: In older versions of Wordpress, the write post and page screens included a SLUG input field. This field was automatically populated with the post or page title to create the page URL. SEO Slugs plugin removes from the SLUG common words such as a, an, and the to improve the SEO benefits of the URL. In the current version of WordPress, you’ll find no mention of the SLUG. Instead, you’ll see a Permalink line immediately below the title. SEO Slugs works the same way for both new and older versions of WoredPress.

7.0 Seven More Plugins Every WordPress Blog Needs

Whether you are setting up a mini-site, niche blog, or a social blog, there are certain plugins that can really make your life easier and your blog better. Over time you’ll find that a well written plugin will save you a lot of time and add great functionality to your site. While different sites require different plugins, here are seven that almost every blog should have.

7.1 FeedBurner FeedSmith

FeedBurner FeedSmith is a simple plugin that detects all the ways to access your site’s RSS feed. It then redirects them all to FeedBurner (see below) so you can track all of your subscribers. Without FeedBurner FeedSmith, your FeedBurner subscription number will not account for all of your site’s subscribers. After you have created a FeedBurner account, which I’ll describe below, simply activate the plugin and navigate to Settings–>FeedBurner. Under line item number 2 you’ll type in your feedburner feed address, which will look like this–http://feeds.feedbuner.com/[your feed's name].

7.2 Full Text Feed

To reduce duplicate content, it’s a good practice to show the excerpt of a post on the home page of your site. This is accomplished by use of the “more” tag in WordPress. The problem is that before version 2.5, WordPress would only show the excerpt of the post in your feed. Most people reading your articles through a feed want to see the entire post; they don’t want to have to click through to your site to finish reading the article. With the full text feed plugin, you can show the entire post in your feed even if you use the more tag.

In the newest version of WordPress 2.5 (which you should be running), this plugin is no longer needed. Simply navigate to Settings–>Reading and select “Full text” next to the “For each article in a feed, show” option.

7.3 Maintenance Mode

The maintenance mode plugin allows you to take your site offline while you perform upgrades or maintenance. When activated, anybody coming to your site will see a screen stating that you are performing maintenance on the site. You can also indicate when your blog will be back up (e.g., 15 minutes, 30 minutes and so on). Once installed and activated, you’ll find the plugin in Settings–>Maintenance Mode.

7.4 SRG Clean Archives

SRG clean archives allows you to create a page listing of your site’s archives by day and month. By default, the most recent month’s archives will be expanded to show each individual post’s title. A user can click on earlier months to expand that month’s titles. An excerpt can also be shown for each post. You can see the plugin in action by checking out my archive page. Once installed, you’ll find the settings for this plugin at Plugin–>SRG Clean Archives.

NOTE: Once installed, the tab for a plugin can generally be found in the Settings, Manage or Plugin main tabs of WordPress. The location is up to the plugin author, and sometimes you have to hunt around for the plugin after you have activiated it.

7.5 Who Sees Ads

Who sees ads is a great plugin that allows you to set who sees adsense and other ads on your sites. For example, you can set an ad to display only to search engine visitors. You can also restrict ads on any given post or page. This plugin takes some time to fully grasp, and I highly recommend that you read through the instructions on the plugin page. If you still have questions, feel free to contact me.

7.6 WordPress Automatic Upgrade

The WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin does just what it’s name suggests, upgrades your WordPress installation to the newest version. With this plugin, the upgrade literally takes about 60 seconds and requires just a couple clicks of the mouse.

7.7 WordPress Database Backup

The WordPress Database Backup plugin downloads a backup of the content of your site (but not your theme files). You can have the backup emailed to you daily.

Configuring WordPress for Search Engine Optimization

After you install WordPress, there are certain configurations that are a must. For example, you’ll want to make sure that your Blog’s title and tagline are correctly entered in Settings–>General. You’ll also want to make sure the correct time zone is selected (also in Settings–>General). But there are in addition to important settings for SEO–the Update Services and Custom Permalinks.

Update Services

When you publish a post, WordPress has the ability to notify various update services to tell them you’ve just added new content. This is a quick and easy way to broadcast your new posts. You can edit the list of update services by navigating to Settings–>Writings and scrolling to the bottom of the page:

WordPress, however, comes installed with just one ping service listed. So one of the first things you want to do is update this list with other Update Services. For a complete list of services, check out the WordPress Codex, which lists Update Services you can cut and paste into your WordPress blog, along with links to other Update Service lists and related plugins.

Custom permalink structure

Setting the correct permalink structure is one of the most important things to do when starting a new blog. The permalink is the URL that will be associate with a WordPress post. By default, WordPress uses URLs with question marks and numbers that are not very search engine or user friendly. Fortunately, at Settings–>Permalinks, WordPress allows you to customize your new site’s permalinks:

As you can see in the screen shot above, I use the following custom structure: /%category%/%postname%/. This permalink structure results in post URLs that look like this: www.domain.com/category_name/post_name. If you use keywords for category name and place your keywords in post titles, the result of this custom structure is a keyword rich URL.

9. Installing Critical Addons

After configuring WordPress, there are several third-party services that should be added to the blog.

9.1 Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a tool that tracks information about visitors to your site. This information includes whether a visitor came to your site from a search result, and if so, what keywords they used for their search. This is incredibly valuable information and makes Analytics a must have tool for any blog.

Analytics is free and signing up for an account is easy and requires only a valid email address. Once you’ve signed up, you need to add your site to your Analytics account. From the main Analytics screen, you’ll see a link at the bottom left to add a new website:

Clicking on the link takes you to a page where you can enter the domain of your blog. After pressing the Continue button you are presented with a choice as seen on this screen shot:

You should select Analytic’s New Tracking Code to insert into your blog. This new code was released in December 2007 and is required to take advantage of future advanced features that Google plans to release. So having clicked over to the New Tracking Code, copy the code and navigate back to your blog.

There are two ways to insert the code into your site. First, you can access the footer file in Design–>Theme Editor. You’ll want to paste the code just before the < /body > tag in the footer file. Here’s what the code looks like on my site:

Alternatively, you can insert the code into the HeadSpace2 plugin. Simply navigate to Settings–>Headspace–>Modules and scroll down to the Site Modules panel. You’ll see Google Analytics on the list, check the box, click the edit icon and insert your Analytics ID and paste the code into the window provided. The advantage of using HeadSpace2 to hold your Analytics code is that if you ever change your theme, the code will go with the new theme. If the code is in the footer, you’ll have to cut and paste the code into the new theme’s footer.

9.2 Google Webmaster Tools

Goolge’s Webmaster Tools are a set of free tools that provide a ton of information about your how google sees your site. It shows you things like the top 20 search queries used to visit your site, how frequently Google’s bot crawls your site, and whether there are any errors with your sitemap. In fact, it is through Webmaster Tools that we upload our sitemap to Google.

Once you sign up, simply add your site in the box provided. Once you do, you’ll be taken to a screen where you’ll need to verify that you own the site. There are two ways to do this. I always verify my sites by adding a meta tag to my site’s header file:

The process is very similar to inserting the code for Google Analytics, except this time the code goes in your theme’s header and it must be placed before the and tags in the file.

Once you’ve verified your site, the first thing you should do is upload the sitemap you created with the XML sitemap plugin. Simply select your site from the Webmaster Tool’s dashboard, go to Sitemap, and upload your sitemap. Remember that your sitemap URL will be www.domain.com/sitemap.xml.

9.3 FeedBurner

The last addon is to burn a feed with FeedBurner. Here just sign up with FeedBurner, which is free, and then type in your sites URL in box to burn a feed:

FeedBurner will now manage your feeds, and you can display the number of subscribers to your site with a FeedBurner widget. FeedBurner offers a lot of features that are beyond the scope of this tutorial. But for setting up a site, I just burn the feed and worry about the other features as needed. For my mini sites and niche blogs, I typically don’t do much with FeedBurner other than managing the feed.

10. Getting Indexed in Google

Having set up your site, you now want to get indexed in Google as quickly as possible. Google has a means for you to submit your site’s URL for indexing. DO NOT SUBMIT YOUR SITE! Let me repeat that. DO NOT SUBMIT YOUR SITE TO GOOGLE! Sorry for yelling, but this is one of those “but it don’t make no sense” moments in life. Submitting your site to Google for indexing will delay your site being indexed for four to six weeks in my experience.

All you have to do is get a site that is already indexed to link to your new site. How? Leave blog comments linking to your site on blogs that follow the links. Submit your site to a couple popular directories. When I’ve linked to one of my new sites from The Dough Roller, it’s usually indexed that day or the next.

I hope this tutorial has been helpful. If you have any questions or would like me to cover something I’ve missed, just send me an email to dr [at] doughroller [dot] net or leave a comment.