WordPress
I started using WordPress websites a few years ago and to be honest to start off with I did not get on well with them. I guess it was just the fact that I was not familiar with how they worked and I didn’t find them to be that user friendly. After some time of using other people’s wordpress websites and now setting up my own I have really started to get to grips with them and find that you can make a quick and easy website with very little effort and no need for design skills.
I by no means profess to being an expert at WordPress websites (although I thought I had a good foundation, having worked as a Sharepoint website expert previously and having a lot of experience in HTML, Javascript and ASP) but I wanted to show you what I had learnt about setting up a WordPress website and what I do each time I set a website up so that firstly, any beginners might get a few tips that they didn’t know and secondly, anyone who is an expert can correct me and tell me if I am doing something wrong or missing something!
WordPress – Blog or Website?
Although WordPress was really set up as a blogging platform, it is also great to use for setting up a standard websites as you don’t have to design the whole site from scratch, there are lots of plugins that can do whatever you want them to do which saves you a whole lot of time if you want to start a website.
I currently have around a dozen WordPress websites set up with more in the pipeline and am using them for earning extra online income, primarily with adsense and Amazon. I don’t generally set them up as blogs, but more as standard websites using the blogging function to add news articles.
WordPress Hosting
I have all of my WordPress sites hosted by Hostgator which has a great plan for unlimited hosting so that you can have as many wordpress sites as you want to hosted on one account. I checked out a lot of hosting providers before choosing Hostgator and it seemed like they were not only the most recommended but also the ones with the best pricing structure. You can choose a plan that allows you to set up as many websites as you like so the more you build the less the cost per website. You can check them out here and if you want any more incentive then I have a discount code which will give you 25% off any plan you choose. use the code AZURE25OFF for this discount. Other hosting providers can also set up WordPress hosting for you but this seems to be the best one that I have found and was also recommended to me by an SEO expert.
WordPress Website – Step 1 – Choose Theme
So, let’s say that you have your website set up and have installed WordPress on it, so if you are using Hostgator then you will have the theme Twenty Fourteen used on your website.
The first thing that I will do with my website is to choose a suitable theme. If you go into the WordPress admin console and select themes then you will get a choice of a lot of free themes that you can choose to use for your website. Choice of a WordPress theme may depend on the layout – how many columns do you want and in which position? Or it may depend on the look of the website – you can search the themes by colour, description and layout amongst other things. if you google free wordpress themes for your category you can often find one that will suit your website.
If you don’t like any of the free themes that you see then you can buy custom themes or get someone to build one for you. once you have installed a theme you can also customise the style sheet and hence the appearance yourself.
WordPress Step 2 – Install Plugins
Plugins are the things that make WordPress sites do what you want them to do – there is pretty much a plugin for anything and most of them are free. There are many different plugins for each type of thing that I am trying to do but these are the ones that I have found suit my needs best. The plugins that I will install as soon as I set up my WordPress website are as follows:
- WordPress SEO – this is a key plugin if you want to get more traffic to your website. This plugin ensures you maximise the SEO and create all the correct metadata for each of your pages.
- AGoogle Adsense Plugin – there are quite a few to choose from and most of them will do a similar thing by enabling you to add Google Adsense blocks to your site. You can choose where to add them and whether you want to add them to pages, posts or just anywhere. This is a great way to monetise your site.
- Easy Privacy Policy – this adds a privacy Policy page to your website which you will need if you are displaying adsense or selling affiliate products. Quick and easy as it says!
- WP Amazon associate – again there are a few Amazon plugins that you can use. This one can customise the item you display to the location of the viewer (providing that product is available in their location) so is pretty useful.
- Google XML Sitemaps – creates a sitemap that Google recognises and that can be added to the Webmaster tools.
- Simple 301 Redirects – used so that affiliate links are not shown on each page but are instead on a 301 redirect from a web page (apparently Google recognises affiliate links and does not like them).
- YouTube Embed – allows you to embed YouTube videos in your website if required.
- WP Spam Free WordPress – you will find that you will get many spam comments and trackbacks on your website unless you ahve an anti-spam plugin so make sure you install one!
Plugins are constantly changing and becoming unavailable so if a particular one mentioned here is not shown then there are bound to be others that do the same thing.
In addition to these I may use other plugins that are specific to each site but these are my staple ones that I will pretty much always use.
Step 3 – Create Content and Set Home Page
One thing that I usually do is to change the WordPress website so that it looks less like a blog. I prefer to have a static home page with the ‘blog’ entries on another page so to do this I first add two new pages to the site – one called ‘Home’ and one called ‘news’ (or something similar). Then I go to Settings, Reading and change the home page to be a static one (Home) and the ‘posts’ page to be ‘news’ – in this way I can have plain text on the home page.
Once I have done this will create all of my pages (bearing in mind I will have already done the research on my keywords and so I will know what I want to call the pages) and will already have the content created that I can just insert into the pages. Whilst creating all the pages I will also fill in all the SEO information on them.
WordPress Websites – A Few Extras
Some of the extra steps I will take when creating my WordPress site are:
- Install Google Analytics
- Change the admin password that was automatically generated
- Make sure in settings the site is set with the www in the site URL
- Add the site to Google webmaster tools and register the XML file
- Submit the site to Google and Bing
So Far So Good
So far I am happy with the way my WordPress websites are going. Within 2 months one of my sites has reached page 1 of Google (positions 3 and 4) and is getting some good traffic. I have a number of other sites that are on the first page of Google. The others have increasing traffic and a bit more competition to overcome! One thing I think is key is to get the right URL – in particular a .com if you can – and I focus on the URL as the first thing before I set up a site.
