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Setting Up a WordPress Blog

One of the first questions I get asked is: how many pages should I have on my website? The answer to this question is usually driven by your intentions for the site, traffic-wise. You will probably be doing SEO on your site, and each page generally should be optimized for only one, or at most two keywords. It's a question of simple mathematics. If you have one page on your site, then the number of links you can generate is by definition limited, whereas if you have 20 pages, the number of potential links is instantly multiplied by 20. If you have 200 pages, then again the number of potential one-way incoming links is exponentially expanded and this would be even more true if you had 2000 pages on your site. Okay, having got this far, let me summarize how we are going to build your website.

The next thing that we are going to do is find a suitable theme (template) for your site.

After that, we are going to install suitable plug-ins to maximize the search engine friendliness of your site, and also to make monetization of the internal (content) pages of your site easier.

The main page of your site will be your promotional page. This page therefore needs creating and designing. However, as it is the homepage of your site, you must also have links from this page to the internal pages of your site as well. This enables both your visitors and the search engine robots to find their way around your site quickly and simply.

You need to present your visitors with the opportunity of signing up for your newsletter by using a special offer that you specifically "bribe" your visitors with to encourage them to join your mailing list. Ideally, you will have a stand-alone page on your site the sole purpose of which is to add people to your mailing list, and you should also include a subscription form on every internal page of your site too (but not on the front page).

Each of the content pages will be monetized, and every one will be used to maximize the number of one-way links coming into your site. Each of these pages will also be linked to your main index page, so that the most important page of your site has lots of links pointing towards it.

Some of the content pages will feature your own unique content materials, whilst others will be created using content materials that were originally created by other individuals in your market or niche.

After the site is ready, you will then start using additional traffic generation strategies based on keywords that you discovered earlier so that you can start generating the visitors and incoming links that you need in order for your site to be successful.

You should give a significant amount of thought to your choice of theme. The theme should match the tone and objective of your website, it should provide the functionality you need for the kind of content you will have. There are a huge variety of themes available, both free for downloading and for-pay at all sorts of price-points. You can find many wordpress photography themes, for example, with all sorts of "look and feel." You can spend hours Googling for them! Finally, the theme should work correctly with any plugins you choose to add to your site, and it should produce clean, valid HTML code (you would be amazed how many themes, even premium wordpress themes, don't do this!).

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Leveraging Guaranteed SEO for Your Blog

So, now that you've set up your blog or website using WordPress (almost always a good choice), you want to try for some ranking on a few popular keyword terms in the search engines so you can jumpstart your traffic. When doing on-site SEO, it's often hard to strike the right balance; remember: on-site optimization is important, but don't go overboard. You always want your website to be attractive and readable for actual human visitors. If you go Hulk on your SEO, trying to force keywords unnaturally into sentences where they don't belong, and generally compromise the quality of your site so it will "look good" to the spiders and bots, you will be making a big mistake. In the end, the site always has to provide a good experience to any visitors that you do get, or all the work you do to get traffic will be useless; people will hit your site and bounce like a silly-putty ball. What's the point? The good news is that there are a wide range of tools to make it easier to improve the SEO of your website. As a result of the popularity of WordPress, an entire industry is producing add-on functionality in specialized themes and plugins to simplify a guaranteed SEO procedure on sites built with WordPress. You can find all sorts of tools, including everything from free plugins like HeadSpace2, All-in-One SEO, and Google Image Sitemaps to premium plugins like SEOPressor or My SEO Status. As a general rule, the following procedures are known to help increase your optimization without creating pages that look too "out-of-whack" to your human visitors. The trick is to apply them consistently across your site. Whenever you create a page or post that you want to rank high in the search engines, either because it is a sales or show page or just to generally draw more visitors, you should select a SINGLE keyword phrase relevant to your site to optimize the page for. Don't try to optimize for more than 1, other than to add some related keyword phrases as described later. Once you have chosen your keyword, do the following:

Put the keyword in the page TITLE, that is, in the HTML title tags, preferably at the beginning

Have the keyword appear in an H1 and H2 tag on the page, and an H3 tag if reasonable

Put the keyword in the first and last sentences, and in the remaining content to about 2-3% keyword density

Add an image, larger than 200 pixels in size and smaller than 1000, with the keyword in the name of the image file

Put the keyword in the "alt" attribute and the "title" attribute on the image tag

Put the keyword in the "keywords" and "description" meta tags in the header

Put a few related keywords, called LSI (latent semantic index) keywords, in the content

All of these things can be done without spoiling the reading experience for your visitors. Note: the LSI keywords are simply words that are reasonably related to the core keyword. For instance, if you were optimizing for "fishing tackle", words like "net" or "bobber" or "fishing lure" or "fishing reel" would be LSI keywords. Their presence reinforces that the page content is indeed relevant to the main keyword "fishing tackle." Remembering to do all these tasks whenever you are trying to optimize a page for the search engines can be a chore. A lot of them can be automated by use of the correct themes and plugins in WordPress, giving you less to remember. The best SEO plugins can track what you're doing and even make suggestions to help you. Look into plugins like SEOPressor as an example; you should be able to find it with a simple Google search.

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Video Marketing on YouTube

When you use YouTube marketing to promote your product or business, you have the opportunity to reach literally millions of people without spending any money out of your own pocket. (Unless, of course, you have expenses associated with creating the video itself that you upload to the site.) So how does this work? Unlike television commercials which people usually use to advertise their products or businesses, YouTube videos serve a lot of entertainment purposes and are not as invasive or as aggressive as other forms of advertisement. When people post a YouTube video, even for marketing purposes, it is generally low-budget and serves some other purpose than to advertise. For instance, it can entertain, educate, or inform. Therefore, people are less likely to look away from it. You can also use YouTube to reach a large number of people. Millions of people watch videos on the website every month. People from all over the world, too. When you advertise in your local newspaper, or even on your local television channels, you are reaching a limited audience. In addition, on YouTube, people can search for your particular project using keywords and categories. That way, if you use the right tag words, people who want to purchase something similar to what you are marketing can find you. With commercials, you are appealing to everyone at once, while with YouTube, you can appeal to a niche, or targeted audience. It is important to remember to keep your video entertaining. People can always move right along to another video, after all. You have to make your video entertaining enough that people not only want to watch it, but also want to find your website afterward and hopefully make a purchase. Think of it as a better kind of infomercial-the kind that people don't want to look away from and actually search for. Now, some of these issues are specific to YouTube and the type of people who go there looking for videos. You don't labor under these requirements when self-hosting videos, but self-hosting is more difficult; though there are more and more tools to simplify it. For instance, see this Easy Video Player 2 review for some info on how it can make your job easier when self-hosting videos. There are plenty of other tools to be found, so don't be afraid to use Google and find the sites out there to find out more. If you create a great marketing video and you can get people to watch it, then word of mouth will take it even further. Some of the greatest YouTube videos weren't professionally market at all-someone just saw them and liked them and spread the word. Remember your audience when you are making your video. Also, remember why people get onto YouTube in the first place. Gimmicks are okay to use, as long as they are interesting. Above all, don't forget to include contact information so that people can find you when they have finished watching the video.