Wordpress is simply the best blogging platform on the planet! Being open source software, developers around the world have produced hundreds of plugins to enhance its basic functionality, as a result blogging has never been easier, and the search engines love it!

Blogging with Wordpress offers two huge advantages:

1. It’s FREE to download and use
2. The Search Engines, in particular Google, love Wordpress blogs

Wordpress is open source software, which means it’s free to use. When you choose a hosting account, try and choose one that uses a control panel called “CPanel”, because installing Wordpress becomes as easy as clicking a handful of icons, it really is simple!

So you’ve bought a domain name, found a hosting company with CPanel and installed Wordpress on your new domain! In theory you’re ready to make your first post! But before you do, read on!

Before you post, you need to configure your blog and optimise it for the search engines, doing this before you post makes life a lot easier for the future.

As Wordpress is open source, developers around the world have written literally hundreds of plugins that enhance the functionality of your blog, and again the majority are free to install. Take a look at Wordpress.org where you’ll find hundreds of free plugins. Ones I recommend are:

- Installer (install this one first, simplifies plugin installations)
- All In One SEO Pack (optimises your posts)
- Adsense Manager (adds Adsense blocks to your posts)
- Google XML Site Maps (creates a site map for your blog)
- Ultimate Tag Warrior (essential plugin for managing tags)
- Sociable (assists with social bookmarking)

Next, within your dashboard, select Options in the menu and then Permalinks. You need to change the settings on this page in order to optimise your post’s url for the search engines, this change will ensure your keywords appear in the url. In the Custom Options box, insert the following text:

/%category%/%postname%/

Typing this will optimise your posts, but you must be careful only to ever select one category per post in the future, and not change a post’s category after you’ve published it!

When you post with Wordpress, it automatically notifies (known as pinging) blog directories of your new content, they index it based on the tags you assign. The search engine robots regularly visit these directories, and as a result your new post will be indexed by them very quickly. Rapid indexing is one of the huge advantages of blogging!

In your blogs configuration, you should add as many directory sites as possible to ping, in addition to the default url. Simply search on the web for “ping list”.

Finally, you need to optimise the appearance of your site. You don’t want to use the basic template that comes with Wordpress. If you do a search online for Wordpress themes, you’ll find hundreds to download for free.org again in their themes directory. Whilst there are hundreds of free themes around, I never seem to find one that perfectly meets my needs, so I often end up buying one!

Once you’ve installed the theme of your choice, activated all of your plugins, and made the configuration adjustments I’ve recommended, you’re ready to post, so what are you waiting for!

Get a copy of my personal “ping” list at http://www.essentialseotools.com/seoblog , where you’ll also find lots more information and tips on blogging with Wordpress. For some great looking themes visit Instant Wordpress Themes.

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A lot of attention is quite rightly focused on securing your Wordpress installation itself. But, however secure your WP installation is, it counts for nothing if you’re leaving other doors open. If a hacker is absolutely determined to get into your site they’re probably going to succeed. But you can protect your WP installation from the mass bot hackers with a few common sense precautions. Here are some steps you can take: Firstly, make sure you keep your version of WordPress up to date. In addition to that, I’ve changed my login name from admin to something else (long and complex), made sure my password is as strong as I can make it, I’ve put an extra layer of security around the wp-admin directory, created a blank index.html file to hid the plugins I’m using and a few other steps. There are a number of good plugins that will carry out those steps and continuously monitor your blog for security vulnerabilities. I do recommend you install one of these – and keep it up to date! The more users you allow to update your blog the more risk there is. I don’t have guest bloggers, but if I did I’d ask them to send me their articles for posting, instead of giving them access rights. I also don’t ask people to register. But there are some areas that people often overlook, and which allow hackers to get access to your Wordpress installation via your FTP details. If you’re not using SFTP (or Secure Shell Access if your hosting provider doesn’t support SFTP) then your FTP login details are being transmitted across the Internet in clear every time you log on and upload/download stuff. I back up my blog system files each week by copying everything back to my PC. Since this takes around an hour there’s plenty of opportunity for someone to intercept my FTP details. Also, of course, you could have spyware on your machine which would pick up your FTP logins from there. (Along with all your other logins!). Make sure you include your entire PC environment when you’re putting security in place – not just your WP installation. In addition to all those WP specific precautions, make sure your PC is absolutely clean (use a good anti-spyware application and scan it regularly) and use SFTP or Secure Shell Access to upload/download stuff from your server.

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Moving a blog can make it unreachable for 24 – 72 hours, unless the new domain name has fully propagated around the Internet. It is just the way it is and WordPress doesn’t have anything to do with such limitation. Moving is best done when you have the time or have planned ahead.

Moving Towards a New Domain Name

The first thing to do is create a database back-up. The entire WordPress installation needs to be downloaded with no exceptions. This is not the time to tidy up your install or to upgrade/change anything. That would have to wait after the blog has been moved and is shown to be working. Your computer should now have these items: one or more database backups plus all your wpfiles, folders and images directories. The backups should be copied again to somewhere safe on your machine so that the next stage can be done on a copy.

Alterations are needed to be made. The details of your new mysql connection have to be changed by opening the file “wp-config.php” on your WordPress install. The file: SCR 1.0.002 Freeware Edition (13KB) should be downloaded to search and replace your website URL with your Xampp url. This is because your blog address inside the database has to be changed. Database files can be very large, thus opening them can be excruciatingly slow. It could even crash your machine. By replacing the old address with your new address, the URLs within your site will still work.

Moving hosts will mean changes in your passwords. You can double check your new passwords for your mysql connection as well as other passwords that you have in use. After which, it is now time to upload all your files to your new web space and restore your database. From the website cpanel, select the database you are using. You should still need to look inside the “wp – options” table to check that the values in “site – url” and “home” are correct. Clear your cache and cookies before checking your new site.

It is possible that you will get a blank page when looking at your blog right after moving. In this case, the themes should be checked. A faulty theme file causes a blank page. You can try changing themes or uploading a new theme then changing to it. Should this step not help, you should check whether all the WordPress files are present and are of the correct size. You can use your ftp client to download a new set of WordPress files, if needed.

There may be instances where you would need to move WordPress around within your server. WordPress is flexible enough to handle this situation. Moving WordPress from one server to another is also possible.

Moving Within

WordPress files can be moved from one location on your server to another. Start by creating the new location using any of these methods: create the new directory when you will be moving your WordPress core files to a new directory, or move the WordPress to your root directory by making sure all index, php, .htaccess and other files that might be copied over are backed-up and/or moved. This will then make the root directory ready for the new WordPress files. It is crucial that you set the URL locations before you move the file.

When done, test your site to confirm that it works right. Make sure that you let people know the new address when the change involves a new address to your blog. Consider adding some redirection instructions in your .htaccess file to serve as a guide to visitors towards the new location.

Handling Redirects after Moving a WordPress Blog

Concerns should not be limited to the moving of the actual WordPress program files but also on finding a way to redirect visitors that may be following outdated links to an old content. It is possible that redirects can mess up RSS feeds and search engine results thus an ideal redirect option that preserves both past and current search results is the key. After moving your WordPress blog, look into how 301 redirects can be properly handled.

A suggested way goes like this: open your .htaccess file in the directory that houses your newly moved WordPress file and edit in either your host’s file manager interface or by downloading to your local machine. Insert a line at the top that reads: redirect301/blog/http://www.yoursite.com/. You have to make sure to insert the opening and trailing / at the end of the destination path. Save your .htaccess file. Reupload it if you’re editing on your local machine rather than on the server. Load your old WordPress URL to make this work.

Moving Several Posts from One Blog to Another

When you decide to move over all your WordPress related posts from another blog, the task is basically to extract a few posts and their comments and to insert them into the database of the new blog. This can be accomplished by following these steps: click on the wp-posts table name in the left panel when you are in the proper database. It should be noticed that other tables might have a different prefix. Click browse on the top in the next panel. Select the checkbox at the beginning of the rows that you want to extract or export. Select “Export” at the bottom of the rows where it says “with selected”. Deselect structure on the next panel, leave selected Data, check Save As file, then Go. You will then get a prefix – posts.sqlfile.

Open the file in your chosen text editor such as Notepad. Change the wp-part everywhere to target_ -, depending on the prefix of the tables where you want to move the post using Search/Research. You are ready to go if you move the post to a new, empty database. However, if the target blog has posts in the database, there is some more work to do. You have to check in the database what the ID number of your last post is in the target blog. You should also go back to the .sqlfile and take a look at the first line below Dumping data for table…

Moving a WordPress Blog to Your Own WordPress Installation

WordPress is a platform you install on your own/hosted server and maintain the installation yourself. However, attempting to make the move should only be done if you’re comfortable with ftp, basic work in the UNIX shell, basic SQL and a little bit of general hacking. Expertise is not really required but possessing the basic skills and the willingness to give it a go are.

The first thing to do is to install WordPress and get a hosting service. Choose one that does an automatic install of WordPress to do away with fiddling. Of course, you would need http://mysql.php, some form of ftp access and a shell account. The challenge lies on setting up your blog on a new place while finding the theme and the plugins you want. The themes on http://WordPress.com normally have links to places you can download them from.

http://www.theinternetone.net

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Wordpress is the best tool for Blogging. Moreover it has become popular as Content Management System. As its functionality can be enhanced by using pluggins .Content Management is total content control. With a content management system, or CMS, you can maintain consistency across your site with a few clicks. Whether brand messaging, news, or even look and feel, a CMS makes site wide maintenance simple and quick. But there’s more to it than that.

With the many capabilities of a Wordpress, businesses can leverage this technology to meet business goals, drive demand, and create deeper user engagement.

By immediately posting news, comments, and other information, a company can respond almost instantaneously to changes in the digital marketplace. Whether this means adding, deleting, or editing live content
, a wordpress is a tool that should be carried in every webmaster’s toolbox.

Wordpress is easy to customize

* Pick a theme that vaguely resembles what you would like i.e. 2 column, 3 column etc. I’ve chosen to use the default template for this example.

* If choosing other than one of the defaults, download and extract the file to the your wordpresswp-contentthemes directory

* Either extract the same downloaded file to the same place giving it a different name or simply navigate to the themes folder and copy/paste it into same directory giving it a different name.

* You now have 2 identical themes one with the correct name and one with the name you gave.

* From Your Theme directory, Open up the style.css file in your favourite text editor and edit the first few lines to suit e.g. Theme Name, Theme Description, version and urls. I made the changes shown below:

* That’s it, save and close the style.css file. Then, if you haven’t already, upload those two theme directories (default and MY Theme) to the themes directory online.

* Login and Open up your WordPress dashboard under Presentation > Themes you should see both themes, with the correct names beside them, activate the one with your name.

At this point this theme is exactly the same as the original (default), and if any edits you make to your theme do not do as expected, then you can do real-time switching back to the default.

Wordpress as a E-commerce Website

The lite version of this plugin allows you to sell products via PayPal only. Whilst it’s called ‘lite’ it’s not that simple as such. You can have your products in categories, there’s a shopping basket and it uses the PayPal IPN for instant notification. I’ve not gone through the whole process but I would assume that if you’re selling a digital product it will also then provide a download link to the buyer to download the product, as I’ve had the option to set how many times the product can be downloaded by the buyer.

WP e-Commerce is just like any other plugin for the installation. Just unzip the files and upload the directory to your plugins directory, and activate it in the WordPress admin. You then get an extra menu for it, where you can set your shop settings, other preferences, and start adding categories, brands and product information. It can deal with physical products or digital products, the latter was what I was interested in. You can also easily select which fields to have in the form on the front end, and which of these fields to send PayPal so that they’re prefilled. As I’m only looking to sell digital products I took the address details out as these are not needed.

Marketers need to remember that a wordpress gives them the ability to leverage unique pieces of content across multiple sites while providing multi-lingual support and content, a critical factor for companies with an international reach and online presence.

Wordpress as a Forum Website

WP-Forum is a WordPress plugin that enables you to have a forum directly attached to your WordPress installation. As one of the more popular forum software available today, SMF would be a good choice if you have no particular preference towards any forum solution. It’s still pretty bloated/bulky and can be difficult at times to customise (though less than many alternatives really), so I can’t say it’s my first choice solution at the moment. And while its backend integration with WordPress just requires the installation of a single WP plugin, I can’t seem to find a proper guide on layout integration yet. Here’s how you do it:

1.Install either one of two “bridge” plugins, i.e. WP SMF Bridge Plugin 1.0 or the CMS & SMF Plugin. While both provide user account integration (log into/register via WP = log into SMF/register into SMF), listing recent forum topics/messages on your blog, and etc., the latter plugin hooks WP to SMF via a portal CMS known as Enigma. This results in a more powerful setup, but also a more complicated one. So, for those who just want a forum to use with WP, I suggest using the former plugin.

2.Now that we have our backends integrated, layout is next. It’s a pity, however, that there doesn’t seem to be a step-by-step guide on how to do this. So, for now, you’re on your own on this. SMF does have documentation on how to create/edit its themes though.

More SEO For Wordpress

The Meta-Description is used by Google and other search engines to provide the description of a page. This is quite important – particularly since Wordpress by default does absolutely nothing about it. wpSEO can generate post descriptions in a variety of ways, however in most cases it makes sense to cite the actual postings – automatically. If you’d like to be more precise, you can also provide a brief summary for Meta-Description manually. The definition of used Meta-Keywords offers you more flexibility. If you are already using the plugins UT’W or STP, wpSEO can use your tags as keywords. Otherwise the keywords will be automatically generated from the article, which is not always a sound solution for efficient SEO. By default wpSEO generates keywords fully automatically, however you can let it extract text passages marked in bold or italics or in -tags. You can also use filters to ensure that only relevant data is being used

To install the plugin, it’s enough to upload it to the plugins directory (wp-content/plugins) and activate it in the Wordpress engine. You should avoid using two or more plugins (as mentioned before) at the same time. Previously installed plugins can cause conflicts, just like manual entries in your header.php file. To make sure the wpSEO is working properly, you should at least deactivate similar tools; better – delete them.

A last useful feature you might never use, but would be happy to have available once you need it: you may export all your settings as an XML-file and use them for another blogs. Therefore it’s very easy to maintain the optimal configuration and adjust it to a number of blogs.

At it’s very core, Wordpress content management is about reaching the right person, at the right time, with the right CONTENT. This creates an engaging user experience that drives demand. The dynamism of content management, and the re-purposing of relevant and engaging content, is an evolution in online strategy that will drive strong results for any organization.

Technoweb World, offering services for Blogs customization and Online Marketing. Various small and large organizations can greatly benefit from this wonderful technology. Technoweb world has best in class resources for Wordpress Blogs Customization that can help in leveraging the capabilities of Blog to reduce development cost and time to market.

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