In this report I will give you the knowledge, tools and SEO secrets you need to create the ULTIMATE configuration for a WordPress blog. If you want to have a traffic generating superblog that's worshipped by Google and other search engines, read this whole page.
From the desk of
Riccardo Ferrari
Dear Future Blog Owner,
Without a doubt, WordPress and SEO are the key to generate an endless stream of free traffic and prospects for your business.
I'm a marketer, I build online businesses, but I became an SEO expert out of necessity.
After getting ripped off several times from different so called gurus, I decided to hunker down and learn the craft myself in order to control my own marketing and expand my business.
After purchasing several expensive SEO and WordPress courses from top, reputable experts, reading over 2,000 pages, watching 40 hours of video, spending TENS of thousand dollars in private consultations and spending grueling months of researching, learning, trying, tweaking and experimenting, I can share important details that make the difference, help you simplify the process and win the search engine game.
There are no tricks or blackhat stuff. Search engines have become way too smart for that. Just purely knowing how to set up WordPress correctly and doing the SEO "just right" is the secret in itself.
Why Do You Need a Blog To Run Your
Online Home-Based Business?
Using a blog is not only becoming absolutely necessary, but it's also a down-right smart strategy to generate, captivate and cultivate masses of new prospects.
If you are a direct or network marketer without a blog, you absolutely should think about getting one right away. For THREE major reasons:
First, it's much easier to generate a whole lot of traffic and targeted leads with a blog. Generating leads from social media, article marketing, video marketing and other Internet mediums cannot be done right without a blog.
Second, you can launch products and new programs instantly. You can post training and instructions for your reps.
Third, you can brand yourself. This is a very important thing to do when working on the Internet. Providing information about yourself, your views, training, news and updates will give you a significant, competitive edge.
Here is a question I get a lot:
Is WordPress Difficult to Install and Configure?
Can I Do It Myself?
Generally speaking, to install Wordpress is not diffucult. You don't have to be a techie, really. At the basic level, WordPress is relatively intuitive and has an easy-to-use admin and writing interface. For any Joe AnyBlogger this many be fine.
However, when it comes to setting up a "serious" marketing blog you can get lost in tall grass real quickly.
A fully functional marketing blog with all the whistles and bells that makes money is a time-consuming effort of research, layout and configuration. Behind the simplicity of WordPress there are a gazillion details. And, if you don't do it right to start with, it will be very messy to fix later on.
Even a very basic installation requires changing the theme with FTP (File Transfer Protocol), a "bare minimum" of 18 important tweaks, including installing/configuring several specific plugins with over 50 check points.
Depending on the theme you may need some HTML, CSS and PHP code manipulations tweaks. Free themes especially always have a number of glitches to fix.
A more advanced installation that provides key marketing functionalities, automation, downloads, optin form, follow-up autoresponders, commenting, social media syndication, database security, duplicate content indexing prevention and other issues requires knowledge of plugins, FTP, SEO, HTML, MySQL, CSS, and PHP.
Choosing plugins is a time-consuming problem. For every plugin there are three or four others that do the same thing. You need to narrow down those that work best. Some plugins don't work with certain themes and need code tweaking or researching alternative plugins.
Here's Is What You Need To Do: Installation, Configuration, Plugins, Code Tweaks and SEO.
Installation and configuration:
1. Install your blog in the root directory of your domain www.yourdomain.com
If you don't have a domain/hosting yet, I recommend using Bluehost.com.This is the preferred company of many high-end marketers. The hosting is $6.95 a month and their domains are only $10 and go active immediately. They have a 5-star customer service.
- Go to your hosting control panel, scroll down to "software/services" and click on the WordPress icon. Follow the easy screens and with a few clicks your blog will install on your domain.
- Go to Google, search and download the free Filezilla FTP software (it's the best), log into your hosting, navigate to "wp-content" directory, drag your preferred theme into the "theme directory." I recommend the Fesh-News theme from Woo Themes it's the prefered choice of many marketers because of the layout and functionality.
- Go to Google, search and download all the plugins in this list and load the plugins zip files in the "plugins" directory in your hosting. WordPress will unzip them automatically during the plugins activation process.
- Log into your blog dashboard with the username and password that was emailed to you and perform the following:
2. Settings/general. Set your blog name, tagline, date format, time zone, blog email and change the computer generated password to one you can remember.
3. User - Set your profile. A blog can have different users. Set your profile and change the settings so that your name shows on every post instead of "admin."
4. Settings/reading - Set your home page. When arriving at your blog, a visitor can either see your latest post or a static home page. Set this for what is best for your business.
5. Settings/writing- Set Posting preference and POP3 account info. Fill this information if you plan to post through email or Blackberry when you are away or on vacation.
6. Settings/media - Adjust media settings. WordPress auto-sizes your main content column in your posts and pages. If your theme allows 500px or 600px for the posts/pages width, and the default for a large picture is 1024, you have a problem. Change the setting to your desired maximum picture size for your posts.
7. Settings/discussion - Configure comments. I could write a whole 30-page report on this topic, but let me just hit a couple of crucial points. You want folks to comment on your blog. You just don't want the Viagra, porn pushers, "bad bots" and other spam-happy jerks to invade the place.
Set up comment moderation in a way that you are in full control of the comments. Set the number of comments and links that a visitor can place (a common characteristic of spam is a large number of hyperlinks).
8. Settings/permalinks - Change the Permalinks structure. Nobody knows why, but Wordpress default settings for urls is just plain awful.
Make sure that your posts' urls look like this: www.yourdomain.com/hot-home-business instead of the default www.yourdomain.com/?p213? Where 213 is the post id assigned by WordPress. This not only looks so much better, but it's also very important for SEO.
9. Set the Canonical URL. Your URL must be set to either domain.com or www.yourdomain.com.
You can't have both. Google looks at them as two different blogs and will consider them "duplicate content" and penalizes your search-engine ranking. Duplicate content is a serious issue and also the #1 topic of concern and discussion amongst bloggers and SEO experts. To accompish this check the canonical URL box in the platinum SEO plugin configuration.
10. Turn off post revisions. Post revisions are a great idea that WordPress takes to an extreme. WordPress creates a backup of your posts every time you edit them. Great, but each saved revision generates a new record in your database, making it bigger every time, which eventually slow down the loading time of the blog. If you write your posts in MSWord you have a copy of your posts anyway.
Log into your blog's root directory with Filezilla and look for the wp-config.php file.
Right click on it. It will open in Notepad. Look for this line: define('WP_CACHE', true); add this line next to it: define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false); and save.
11. Set up the Categories. It's a good idea to give your blog a structure of the topics you plan to write about.
Lead magnet in the side bar:
12. To install a lead magnet in the sidebar you need to perform the following:
- Configure your AWeber or preferred autoresponder account.
- Prepare the HTML code that contains your AWeber form code, your text and image of a free report. Load the code in the text widget and position the widget in the sidebar.
- Set the form to email your list and RSS subscribers automatically every time you write a post and save it.
- You may decide to set Aweber to tweet your posts and post them on Facebook automatically depending on your business.
- Choose and configure the outgoing post template in AWeber with your personal information.
- Upload at least a "thank you for subscribing" autoresponder or your entire autoresponder series.
Plugins:
13. Activate the Askimet anti-spam. Obtain an API key and activate this plugin that comes with WordPress. There are people out there with bad robots that will post automated comments with spam advertising on your blog (especially Viagra, adult and others).
Install the following plugins:
14. NoSpamNX. Askimet anti-spam is very good and must be activated, but is not totally sufficient at keeping the bad guys out, so install this additional anti-spam plugin. It works well with Askimet.
15. Chunks for URL. This plugin limits the length of the links people can leave in the comments. If someone posts a comment with a long link it can overflow and break your theme.
16. Trackback validation. Performs a simple, but very effective test on all incoming trackbacks in order to stop trackback spam. Checks if the IP address of the trackback sender is equal to the IP address of the web server the trackback URL is referring to. This reveals almost every spam trackback.
17. WP-backup. Your entire blog content is stored in the database. If it crashes, your entire blog could be lost. The WP-backup plugin allows you to set the number of backups per month, week or day. It's important that blog is backed up in an "excluded" directory (non indexed by Google) to avoid duplicate content. You can also set it up so the back up files are emailed to you.
18. WP Super Cache. This is a static caching plugin that generates html files that are served directly by the server without processing "comparatively heavy" PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly. This is important because blogs can be a drag to load. Statistically people click off after EIGHT seconds!
19. WordPress.com Stats. Tracks views, post/page views, referrers and clicks (requires an API key). This is good for a quick view right from the dashboard. However, we also add the Google Analytics plugin for a much deeper analysis.
20. Query posts. Displays a list of important posts permanently, like featured posts. Unlike posts that eventually disappear inside the archive based on the date, featured posts are always visible.
21. Upload and configure the Google Analytics plugin so you can monitor:
- The number of visits to your blog.
- The number of optins.
- Where the traffic is coming from.
- How much time people spend on your pages.
- How often they return.
- Which keywords are working best.
- ROI analysis.
- And many other features that monitor the entire performance of your blog.
Google Analytics is free and comes with your Google account, which costs $5 one time.
22. Sociable. This allows people who like your posts to print or emailed them and share them on social media sites with other people.
23. Follow me. Gives you the ability to add links to your social media profiles so people can follow you there. You can add as many social media sites as you want.
24. Tweetly Updater. Posts on Twitter automatically and notifies your followers when you create or edit a post. Uses bit.ly for short urls. From there you can route the post to Facebook automatically if you want.
25. TweetMeme. The TweetMeme retweet button easily allows your blog to be retweeted. The button also provides a current count of how many times your posts have been retweeted throughout Twitter.
26. Target blank in posts and comments. All links leading to external pages to other sites or your affiliate products or whatever should open in a new window so people don't navigate away from your blog. This plugin adds a "target blank" option to the resident link configuration screen.
28. Post footer. Allows you to enter the HTML code for an ad or banner or text or whatever you want to say at the bottom of any post.
28. PageMash. Manage your multitude of pages with slick drag-and-drop style. Allows quick sorting, hiding and organizing of parenting.
26. WP-Sticky. A sticky post is one that always appears at the top regardless of the date/time posted. You may want to keep important posts pinned on top of the list. It helps you manage the display of posts along with the featured posts plugin
29. Banner and Ads. Allows you to easily add banners and display ads inside your posts or sidebar. This plugin make it easy to also rotate, control, and track your banners and ads.
30. Download Monitor. Allows you to upload .pdf, .doc and other files into your blog and track downloads.
31. Better tag cloud. Configures the number of tags displayed, the minimum and maximum font size, adds categories and other cool settings.
32. Collapsing Archives. It collapses the archive list so it doesn't take so much space on the sidebar.
SEO plugins
34. Google sitemap. It helps Google to index your post and pages faster and also promotes better rankings. Indexing simply means Google found your pages and copied them in their database. They need a copy of your pages on their servers before you can even hope to rank. Make sure to go through the entire list of configuration points.
35. MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer- Prevent "Over Pinging." This plugin is important because every time you post WordPress uses "Pingomatic" to notify other pinging services and search engines about your post. However, when editing and saving posts often, you risk "over pinging" and being banned from the search engines.
36. Nofollow for posts. You don't want Google to follow links that lead to other websites and bleed Page Rank away from your blog. You want to set "nofollow" to your blogroll links, any internal links going to external pages or sites and those leading to your affiliate websites.
37. Related posts. Automatically adds the related posts at the bottom of every post, which is necessary for good navigation and internal linking structure. SE spiders crawl your blog from page-to-page, so they have to be linked together. You should also link to other related posts and pages as you write your posts.
38. Platinum SEO plugin (an advanced version of the All In One SEO plugin) and the
This plug in has a list of configuration points and sets all the nesessary duplicate content indexing exclusion like categories, archives, tags, admin pages, RSS, comments, trackbacks, feeds and comments. It allows Google to index only what's important like posts and pages.
- It allows you to preform the necessary on page optimization every time you write a post or a page. Every time you write a post this plugin gives you the fields for the title, description, keywords and tags meta values that you must fill in
- Permanently setting the title, description and keywords for your home page.
- Setting for the "title format" of posts. This is the most important tag for Google. It has to be set to show just the "post title" that you choose and not the "default post title | blog title."
39. Yoast Robots Meta
This plug in can preform some of the functions as Platinum SEO (not as intuitively,) but has a few extra feature that are necessary for good SEO.
- Produces a non-indexing meta tag for the "noodp" "noydir." This prevents some search engine to "make up" a different description meta tag other that the one you wrote for your posts.
- Allows you to edit the Robot.txt and .htacess file without messing with the root-level files on the server. Nice convenience.
- Allows you to enter the
meta values for Google, MSN and Yahoo verification codes without messing with the HTML code in the index.php
Advanced SEO configuration
40. Configure the Robots.txt file in the root directory to fully control exclusions for duplicate content and indexing of pages and posts BETTER than with plugins.
Controlling exclusions and indexing can be accomplished with plugins (a lot of bloggers do this), but they are not totally sufficient because they produce a virtual Robot.txt file, which cannot be edited and don't prevent the indexing of many other things. Advanced SEO is accomplished by installing a physical Robot.txt file that fully control indexing and exclusions.
The Robot.txt file is the "gate keeper" and all robots that arrive at your blog have to shake hands with the Robots.txt file and follow instructions. It's a key script that specifically makes sure to:
1) Eliminate any doubt of duplicate content at the root level.
2)
Tell Google, MSN Yahoo and other bots exactly what to index and what not to index and also prevent the crawling and indexing of other unnecessary files and directories.
3)
Disallow a long list of known "bad bots" like spammer and harvesters to further help the anti-spam plugins in the blog.
----> Sidebar: When using the Robot.txt it's important not to use the Platinum SEO plugin exclusion features, because the virtual Robot.txt wil conflict with the real one. However, the plugin must remail installed to manually preform the post on-page optimization.
Robots.txt must be programmed to exclude access to:
Categories, archives, tags ,admin pages, RSS, comments, trackbacks, feeds, comments, trackbacks and many other files that are useful to the blog, but not for search engine rankings. Like .cgi-bin, rss, .css, .pdf,.js, .doc,. inc, and .txt files.
Also exclude other pages that don't need to be indexed. Like, footer legal pages, disclaimers and downloads. Must exclude images that don't contribute to good SEO, only allow the indexing of the main images that Google likes and not the myriad of little .gifs, arrows, shades and bullets around your blog. This is done by giving Googlebot-Images specific instructions of which image directories to crawl and index.
Robot.txt. syntax is complex, but when used right it's ultimate SEO weapon.
This assures that Google/MSN/Yahoo and other search engines don't crawl useless directories and ONLY index your posts, pages and relevant images, as it should be. You work hard to compose and optimize these pages and you want maximum Page Rank on these pages and nothing else.
The ultimate test is done in the Google Live Webmaster Tool. Here you can see exactly what pages are crawled and what not. When a blog checks out in Google Live then you know it's done right.
41. H1 and H2 hack. This is important and only a few blogger even know about it! It's a configuration change that must be done in the theme template.
Nobody knows why, but WordPress comes with the "Blog Title" wrapped in the H1 tag <H1>Blog Title</H1> and the "post title" wrapped into the H2 tag <H2>Post Title</H2>, which is not a very relevant mark up for Google.
After the title tag, the H1 tag is the next most important tag to Google for identifying keyword relevancy in a post.
The H1 tag must wrap the "post title" when the keyword of that post is searched. But, if the "blog title" is searched then the H1 must swap to the blog title.
I can't give you a lesson in "on page optimization" right here, but trust me the post H1/H2 tags default must be fixed. It's done with a conditional PHP code script.
As you can see, you can achieve the perfect SEO configuration using this "team" of Robot.txt file, .htaccess file, Platinum SEO, Robots Meta and other SEO related plugins working together. Plus, the necessary PHP tweaks to the blog theme.
There You Have It. A Perfect Blog Loved By Google and Configured With All The Functionalities of a Serious Traffic Magnet.
All you have to do is make sure that you apply the correct on page optimization when writing your posts (your text must be relevant to a keyword. Make sure to fill in the fields for the title, description, keywords and tags) and start building link popularity.
I hope this information was useful to you for installing and configuring your own blog. If you want to save time and skip possible headaches you may want to consider our service.
This is a limited offer and subject to change any time. A basic blog installation with just a few plugins ranges from $400 to $600. That's if you use a regular, Elance type web master not a top expert.
If you add the lead magnet, the AWeber account configuration, the optin form and the free report download, that's easily another $350. And, the SEO package...forget it. The full, advanced SEO configuration package already installed in these blogs, with all the plugin settings, scripts and PHP code changes it's worth conservatively $1,300 to $2,000.
Please submit your hosting FTP login information and your AWeber login with your payment.
To your blogging success!
Marketer, WordPress and SEO Expert
Install WordPress Quickly™
For questions and clarifications contact: Riccardo Ferrari (760) 602-5090
P.S.: Private consultation is available to you. After we install your blog either myself or a staff member can give you a 45-minute consultation at $100 for a walk through of the dashboard, blog features and how to optimize posts for maximum search engine visibility.
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