Start your blog properly

posted by admin in December 17th, 2007

1.Blog Design: When you want to start your Blog you can do it just starting a free WordPress theme that you can find it on all roads. Nothing compares to a unique theme made by a high skilled webmaster that makes the difference to enter in the Blogger’s great world.

2.Create Categories: For a good content and not anything hard to navigate and confused try and have no more than 15-20 categories. Depending on what niche you are working on, we advice you to follow the line of your niche, so don’t have other categories besides your niche.

3. Submit an About Page : When you lunch a website it is very important that the visitors to know who you are. So About Page is very decisive in a website life. The bigger and expressive the About Page will be, the better your visitors will know you.

4.Customize Permalink Structure: Find a Permalink Structure and keep it. I have tested different Permalinks structures and the best results i get with this one:
/%category%/%postname%

NOTE: Remember that this Permalink will work on other site, but when you change your Permalik those links won’t work anymore, so don’t forget to keep this structure from the beginning.

5.Make a FeedBurner account for your blog: it is simple. This will show the rate visitors on the blog.

6.Install the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin: The FeedBurner detects all kind of accessing your WordPress feeds and simply redirects them to the FeedBurner feed so you can track multiple subscribers.

7.Have your RSS button on your blog: You have the opportunity to choose a RSS button and put it on your blog linking your FeedBurner feed.

8.Start Typing: How can we have success without content. Let’s write on and on.

9.Have Google Sitemaps plugin Installed: For a reliable Blog you will have a plugin that will generate a sitemaps.xml that is compatible with Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask.com.

10.Submit your Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools: For a professional blog add your site to Google Webmaster Tools and also your sitemap too.

11.Install Akismet plugin, or Activate it ( you need a wordpress API key - Free ). For caching comment spam have this plugin installed. This plugin has detected over 150 000 spam comments on the blogs.

12. Add contact form: For being permanent in contact with the visitors add this plugin which allows you to be in permanent contact with them.

Stephen Cronin

In general, these are good tips, but I think it’s a bad idea to use category in the permalink structure for the following reasons:

1. if you decide you want to change your category structure (always possible with a new blog), you can’t do so without breaking the permalinks.

2. if you post using the wrong category, you can’t move the post to the correct category without breaking the permalinks.

Basically if you use category in the permalink structure, you can never rename or delete a category, and you can never move posts from one category to another (unless you want to get into permalink redirection which is messy). Not a good idea!

If I was starting again, I’d just go with postname.

December 20th, 2007

admin

I have read your post and i have used your structure: ” /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ ”

The problem is that people will look at your link : http://www.domain.com/2003/03/postname and believe me that they will leave your website very soon. People search over the internet accurate information not old information.

This is only my opinion. You can use your structure, because it is also very good.

I have over 20 blogs and this is the single structure i am using in all my blogs
Thanks

I agree with your comments about the date! It can make your posts look old and make people leave your site. If I was starting again, I’d just go with postname.

In my post I warn against that, because the WordPress Codex warn against it, but the bug they mentioned was apparantly fixed a long time ago. It should be fine these days.

Anyway, as long as your careful with the categories, the structure you’ve chosen is great for SEO purposes.