HatchLLC

So you want to put up a blog? I really cant say enough good things about wordpress. Wordpress sites are best for search engines and can get traffic to them in no time at all. The majority of wordpress themes are free with a small handful being paid themes. Check out the resources page for some links

With most websites to get any sign of traffic at all, you have to get hardlinks to your site to have the search engines even think about crawling or indexing your site. With wordpress, if configured correctly, you can have to your site crawled within a week or so usually. Of course you won’t be getting thousands of visits a day, but a few anyway.

I am going to go over some steps that you will need to do in order to get a wordpress site up and going.

Get hosting - We offer hosting for $6.99 a month, This is not super cheap or expensive. Its just the going rate. Trust me when I tell ya, we are not getting rich hosting sites. You have to have hosting in order to put wordpress up. Check out our resources page to find some more places for hosting.

Setup Wordpress - Setting up wordpress is simple! For the sake of this article, I am not going to go into the technical aspect of actually installing it. This information can readily be found on the net. Plugins are one of my favorite things about wordpress, they extended the the functionality of wordpress and can give it a lot more features then it would normally have!

If you check out the products page, There are some e-books for sale and that is running from the e-commerce plugin. The e-commerce in wordpress is great, it’s very simple and the layout features are very flexible. It allows you to add any kind of product you want and set it up with several different payment processors. There is a free version and a paid version. They are both great! The paid version allows you to choose from more payment processors besides PayPal. I would not recommend using wordpress for full blown e-commerce if you are going to have thousands of products. One thing that I have noticed, if you have several products, it can be a bit more challenging to keep the layout under control. Some themes are better then others for keeping things organized, you will just have to experiment and see what looks the best. We have some links to themes pages on the resources page.

My next favorite plugin that I use is Google XML Sitemaps, The way I always set this up by creating a blank robots.txt, sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz upload those to your public_html or document root. The problem with this is that you have to leave them writable or 777 on the server and this has gotten me hacked a couple times, hackers take advantage of this. It’s never been a hack I could not fix in under 10 minutes though. If someone has a solution to this, I would love to hear it!!

The All in One SEO plugin is great also. I don’t personally run this, but I should to be honest. When David, My friend and business partner launched the Redneck site he installed this plugin first thing. As a matter of fact, he installs it on every wordpress blog that he works on. If you are one of the lucky ones that David coaches, I am sure he will tell you about this plugin. You can do separate meta tags on each post if you want, very cool.

After you get your plugins installed, Its important to know that one of the great things about blogging is the “pinging” that wordpress does after you make a post. It will notify many different places that you have updated your site and then they come crawl your site and index your posts. And then in turn, the other search engines crawl those sites, find links back to your site and index your site. Its a win, win situation for everyone. Thinking about this, it does not hurt to put a link back to your index page (Main page) with the anchor text that you are targeting.

To set this feature up, From your admin panel in wordpress, Click on Options -> Writing and then in the box underneath Update Services, Paste these in….

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.feedburner.com/
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.topchoicephonecards.co.uk/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/web…
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.bl…
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrp…
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogcha…
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blo…
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest….
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/

Click Update Options and start blogging! Don’t forget to read our Start a website site! And yes that link is worded like that on purpose Do you know why?

My 2 cents

Another great thing to do with Wordpress that not to many folks know to do is adjust your permalink structure. Heres my tutorial on that.

if you are using Wordpress for a blog script, make sure to utilize the permalinks feature. It will take your post from being a page number.

Example - www.yoursite.com/?p=123

to

www.yoursite.com/your-post-title/

I have found that if you change your permalinks to custom, and submit your new post to digg.com and reddit.com you will find your new post on the top of google within 2-3 days.

To edit your permalink structure, just go into your WP dashboard,

• Options,
• Permalinks,
• Put this into the custom text box /%postname%/
• Update

*Remember - If you update your permalink structure make sure your .htaccess is cmodded to 777 before you do it, or just go into your file manager and update your .htaccess file.

I have used this method quite a bit and have had great success for getting on the top of search engines for it.

Hope this helps.

David L.