Blogackers

Blogs are one of the quickest and easiest ways to set up your website.

If you web hosting company is one of the many that give you the option of a “one click” installation of Wordpress then this is far and away the easiest way to get a basic Wordpress installation on your website. It will take care of the database that your Wordpress blog will use and will unzip all the files into the right place.

The only snag is that Wordpress updates itself regularly, so you may have a slightly out of date version. It’s up to you whether you’re worried about this, although I would advise that you do keep your version of Wordpress as up to date as possible as the updates often cover security bugs.

The next thing to do once you’ve got the newest version of Wordpress installed on your website is to make some small changes that will have a big influence on making it as attractive as possible to the search engines.

This involves modifying some of the default Wordpress settings and also uploading what are known as “plugins” to improve the functionality of Wordpress.

Don’t go mad adding lots of plugins. Keep to a short list like this:

• Akismet, a useful plugin that helps cut down comment spam on your blog
• All in one SEO pack, which does exactly what it promises and helps you optimize your blog so that the search engines will love it
• Sociable, to allow your blog readers to easily add your blog to various social bookmarking sites
• Wordpress stats, which make your stats just a click away from your main Wordpress dashboard

The other thing to change is the “permalink” structure. Go to the Settings tab on Wordpress, click Permalinks, go down to the custom structure box and type in:

/%postname%/

then save your changes.

This will change the way your blog posts are stored and will make them friendlier for the search engines to index.

Check out my series of free videos that show you how to earn money with blogs. It’s easy to follow this information on earning money from your blog.