RSS

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.  That probably doesn’t do much for you, as I’m still not even sure what it means.  The principle behind RSS is actually very simple, and incredibly useful.

An RSS is a link coming from your blog.  WordPress blogs generate an external page away from your main blog with either full content or snippets of all your newest posts.  This is generally set to 10 posts.  The RSS link links to this page.

Now that might not seem too impressive, but here’s what you do with that page.  You can do two things.  Submitting your RSS to RSS directories will get your sites content out on the web.  Every time you make a new post, your content is then trasnferred to wherever your RSS link is submitted to.  If your link is submitted to 100 directories, then BAM you have your content on 101 websites with one click.  Perhaps you could think of a few things you could do with this.. (adding links to your site)

The second thing you can do is get an RSS Reader.  This is what RSS is most conventionally used for.  When you subscribe to an RSS feed with a reader it gets information from all of your favorite blogs and puts all the latest and newest posts in one spot and on one page.  Having this is very time saving and easy for many people.  Instead of going to each website and looking at their news page, you can just have the news come to your RSS reader page!

That is the basis of RSS.  To get a great RSS Reader check out Google Reader

Yahoo Site Explorer is a great tool for bloggers concerned about their competition, bloggers doing keyword research, and to check the status of your own blog.  This site explorer will tell you how many backlinks a site has, how many pages it has, and where all these backlinks are coming from.

What can you do with this information?

• Check out your competition for a particular keyword, and see if you’ll be able to conquer it
• Use this to find high PR backlinks from sites that are ranking well
• Check out how many backlinks you have of your own, and which ones are taking effect
• See what backlinking method is working

This is a great tool to use and I use it very often, usually every day.  If you’re concerned about getting ranked, you should as well.

There aren’t too many options with the site explorer.  One feature that is awesome is the My Sites dashboard.  This allows you to store however many sites you want on it for quick referencing.  I have all my sites on there and a few sites of other people’s that I like to check out.

If you choose not to use that feature, you can just as easily type the site in the prompt and will be taken to the information you ask for.

Now that you have your blog set up, you are going to want to track who’s coming to your site, where they’re coming from, and what they’re looking at.  Google has probably the greatest tracking program I have ever seen.  Anything you could ever want to know is incorporated into this program and it is called Google Analytics. rc26tnedxj

I could go on and on about all the features of Google Analytics but that would make this article go on to a small e-book.  I’ll show you how to easily set it up with your wordpress blog.

• Log in to your Google account, or signup if you haven’t already.  Visit the Google Analytics page Here.  If you haven’t signed up already you’ll be brought to a page that looks like this:

Google Analytics Signup Page

• Click Access Analytics to link your Google account with Analytics.  On the next page you’re brought to simply click on the Sign Up button to sign up for analytics.
• Next enter your information like below

Google Analytics Account

• Click Continue then enter your name, phone number, and country/territory.
• Click continue again and you’ll be brought to an agreement page, check the Yes, I agree to the terms checkbox
• click Create New Account.

You’ll be brought to a page that has your huge tracking code.  For us WordPress users we don’t have to worry about that because we’re going to be using something much simpler.  Simply click Finish and you’ll be brought to this page:

Google Analytics Code

The code circled in RED is the code we are going to be using.  So where are we going to put this code on our WordPress blog?  Well if you haven’t already done so download the Google Analytics for WordPress Plugin or search for it on your plugins dashboard.

Once you have downlaoded and installed this plugin visit the dashboard under Plugins > Google Analytics.

We have covered up our code for security purposes but you will enter your code in the area circled in red, and make sure that you place the tracking script in the footer.

Google Analytics Settings

Click Update Settings and your Google Analytics will now be activated!  it will take some time for the data to be processed and show up on your google analytics dashboard.  To access it simply go to your Google Dashboard and click on Analytics.  Click on Analytics and you’ll be brought to your Google Analytics Dashboard.  Here you can play around with all the settings and features and now you can see how great Google Analytics really is with the amount data it processes.

With this information you can now see where your traffic is coming from and what they are looking at.  With that you can then increase what’s working for you.  If you’ve been article marketing and its been driving crazy traffic then rinse and repeat.  If you’ve been social bookmarking with no effect at all then stop doing that and write more articles!  If you’re getting a high bounce rate for your home page maybe you should change it up to make it more appealing to your visitors.

That’s only the tip of the iceberg.  There are so many things you could do with analytics and if you’re trying to monetize your blog or bring in more traffic, not using analytics is leaving money and visitors on the table.

If you don’t already have a Google Webmaster Tools account, you need to do so and you can follow our guide Here on how to do so.  Once you have set up your account, go to your webmaster tools home page and click Submit Sitemap

Submit Sitemap

Also make sure that you have the plugin Google XML Sitemap Generator.  This will generate a sitemap of every page on your blog and it will create a new one automatically every time you update your blog.  This is an amazing plugin and it makes things incredibly easy.  With this plugin it will create a sitemap at http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

On the submit a sitemap page click on Submit a Sitemap and enter that address:

Submitting Sitemap

Your sitemap page will now look something like this:

Sitemap Submitted

Again this will take a little time to get the data in there.  You have now submitted every page of your blog to the Google search engine.  This will help get your pages indexed and ranked fast.

How to Make Blog

Setting up a Google Webmaster Tools account is very simple, and very crucial if you want to track your blog in the Google rankings. Submitting your site to Google also allows you to show Google exactly what pages you have by submitting your sitemap, but that will be discussed in another article. The information you receive when you sign up is crucial to calibrating your site to it’s fullest potential.

If you haven’t already, sign up for a Google account. Use this as your master account for all your blogging needs. With Google you can submit multiple sites to any of their services, so having a master account will be a very convenient thing for you.

Also if you’ve not downloaded Google XML Sitemaps Plugin you need to do so now. It is crucial that you submit your sitemap to Google so that every time you update your blog they will be directly notified. This greatly increased your chances of getting your blog indexed and ranked very quickly.

Once you have signed up for your master blogging account with Google, head over to their Google Webmaster Tools.  Once you are at this screen it will ask you to simply sign in with your account, and that’s all you’ll have to do.

Next it will show you a screen such as this:

Google Webmaster Tools

Click on Add a Site

Google WebTools Add a Site

You’ll then be asked to verify that you own the site, and this is a pretty simple process.  We suggest uploading an HTML file as editing your blogs templates could have terrible results if you mess anything up.

All you will need to do is log into your hosting account for your wordpress blog, go to file manager, and create a file named after whatever they have you name it.  Make sure you do this in the root directory upon which your wordpress is installed.

Once verified you will be taken to the Google Webmaster Tools homepage

Google Webmaster Tools Home

Take some time to explore this area and find out what everything does.  If your site is brand new you will likely not have any information available.  This can take some time to get there – weeks.  The more popular your site and the more people that visit, the more often to Google bots will crawl your page and update your information.

There is some great information in these tools.  You can see how many pages of your site are indexed, which pages are indexed, if you have links that are broken, what your top search queries are, all of your backlinks, and much more.

As an example, if you know what your top search queries are you can choose which ones would be reasonable to try and rank for.  If you find a keyword that you didn’t think of beforehand you can now target it and start building backlinks with that anchor text and perhaps put much better SEO on the page that has the keyword.

One thing you also MUST do is submit your sitemap to google, which we will be discussing in another post.  Until then, see you later!

How to Make Blog

Permalinks are the format in which your blog posts are organized.  There are several different options you can choose from in your Settings > Permalinks section and you can also have a custom setting.  This is what your dashboard will look like:

As you can see you have a large list of options to choose from.  The default setting is very messy and for purposes of Search Engine Optimization we don’t want it to be that way, as Google likes things that are nice and organized.  The other choices wordpress gives you are not as bad but they leave things a little less organized than our custom structure.

With Category then Post Name this makes everything in your blog very logical and easy to find and follow.  This is the way Google likes to see your permalinks and we suggest that you do this.  Of course if you are not interested in Google you may put them as you wish, but unless you have a very specific reason to have them otherwise, it would be wise to keep them well organized.

There are many options under the Settings Menu in your WordPress Dashboard and I’d like to go over all of them.  We’ll start with General Settings.  Obviously these are the general settings for your blog.  When you click on general settings you will see this screen:

General Settings

Most of the options are pretty self explanatory but I will go over them anyway in case anyone gets confused.

• Blog Title – This will be the main header for your blog and should be a couple words that either brands your site or shortly describes it.
• Tagline – This is the line of text that will appear just under your blogs title.  You can use this in many ways.  It could be a description of your blog if you decided to use the title for branding.
• WordPress Address (URL) – This is your domain of your blog.  Setting this will make your “Home’ page go to your domain and as well as clicking on your blog title
• Blog Address (URL) – Set this to a different URL if you want your blog homepage to be different from where you installed your WordPress. That is if you want your homepage to be www.example.com instead of www.example.com/blog/
• E-Mail Address - This is used for admin purposes as stated.
• Membership – You can toggle this option if you would like to allow anyone to register on your blog.  Not recommended.
• New User Default Role – This is the default permission that will be granted for registered users.
• Timezone – What time zone are you in?
• Date Format – The format in which you want the dates to appear on your posts.
• Time Format – The format in which you want the time to appear on your posts.
• Week Starts On - The day in which you want the day of the week to start on for your blog.

There you have it!  Simple enough.

Widgets are probably the most awesome thing to come to blogging since… ever.  When you take a look at this site you’ll see to the right hand side some categories.  If you look to the left you’ll see our newsletter optin, our recent posts, our tag cumulus, and our blogroll.  We can add all these in any order or fashion we want, and we can add any other type of column you can think of.  These are out widgets.

Widgets are part of your WordPress blog’s appearance.  Depending on what theme you have there are multiple places you can put your widgets.  Sometimes you will have a theme with 3 different columns, and sometimes you’ll have a theme with only 1.  This is also something to keep in mind when you’re selecting a theme.  Depending on how many widgets you think you will have, you should pick your theme accordingly.

In your WordPress dashboard click on Appearance > Widgets.  You’ll see a screen similar to this:

Widgets Screen

As you can see for this example we have two sidebars.  To add new widgets or remove them, simply highlight them and drag them over to where you want them and they will be added to your site.  You can see why WordPress and widgets are such a great feature to have.  They are so easy to manage and do so much work for you it’s rediculous.

Also you can change the order of your widgets simply by moving them up or down in order.  To edit the options of the widget simply click on the down arrow of the widget and it will list the available prompts you need to fill in.

Widgets Options

That is the basics of what you need to know about widgets!

Article marketing is writing articles based on your niche, usually around 300 words, that will create interest in your site/product.  What you do with these articles is then submit them to article directories such as EzineArticles.com.  These sites have very high power in google rankings and any articles submitted to these sites will show up in the rankings very quickly.

What does this mean for you?  Well the catch here is that when you submit an article it is mandatory that you are allowed to include a signature.  In this signature you are going to link back to your money site.  If you’ve written your article well and created interest with it and offered some value, most likely people will click on your signature link and they will then be drawn to your site.

This creates a huge ability to generate traffic to your blog.  Imagine if you did this with 100 articles.  The amount of traffic that you would be pulling in would be a pretty decent number.

There are many tips and tricks that you can do with article marketing, I just wanted to cover the basics here, and this will be discussed in further detail in future posts.

Here are some sites that have high authority that you can submit your articles to:

• www.ezinearticles.com
• www.goarticles.com
• www.directorygold.com
• www.articlecity.com

Organization of your blog is key to having a site that people will want to visit.  Nobody likes to go to a site they think finally has what they want and then they can never find the information they’re looking for, even if it’s on the site.  Using the Categories option in WordPress will greatly increase the organization of your site for your viewers, and for the search engine bots.  They love organization just as much as we do!

Creating new categories is extremely easy.  Here is where you can easily add some categories for your post:

This is located directly to the right of your text box in your Posts > Add New.  Here you can click + Add New Category if you wish to add a new category, or you can select one in which your post already fits into.

Another great feature of this is that you can add new categories under a parent category.  This means it is a category under a category.  This will help your site become super organized.  This is also very easy to do.  Click +Add New Category and type in you New Category Name and select the parent category you’d like it to be under and click ‘Add’.  Simply select that new category and you’re ready to go.