THE Biz Seminar
100 business owners gathered in front of me at THE Biz Seminar, and I happily shared with them some insight into setting up a self hosted WordPress website/blog. We covered a lot of information in one hour- so I’m posting a PDF review of the basic points we covered and my list of favorite plugins. I’m also going to share with you the PDF version of the handout I give to all my clients at their blog training session.
Click on the links below to take you to the download.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD Basic WordPress Set Up Review
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD Basic Instructions for Blogging on WordPress
Got a website? Not WordPress? Consider
making the switch!
Fun and Feminine WordPress Themes
So many WordPress Themes seem so boyish dont’ they? Sure, they’re clean and minimal- but where’s the feminine touch? The swirls? The Flirty Fonts? The cute icons? Well, I found some!
Modern Blogger- The name says it all. It’s fresh and modern, with a touch of retro. Child Theme available for Genesis Framework
Vintage- Great magazine style theme for an online presence that’s pic heavy. Another Child Theme for Genesis Framework
Handmade- Feminine photo editorial magazine theme available on Theme Forest. Great for a food or style blogger where pictures really matter.
WordPress and Common Sense SEO
I really, really heart WordPress, but one of the best features is the common-sense-anyone-can-do-it ongoing search engine optimization ability that you have when you use WordPress along with a great SEO plugin like All In One SEO.
I am NOT an “SEO expert”, and I’m happy about that. As with all things in my life, I like stuff to be simple and straightforward- and I think my clients probably feel the same. Search Engines, specially the big Google change their stuff often and it can be hard to keep up, but one theme that seems to be prevailing is their attempt to provide results that are driven by good content. Gone are the days of super heavy keywording and meta tags. Hopefully, gone are the days when a search delivers results that have good page rank with bunk content.
Now, back to WordPress and All In One SEO, and how simple it is to optimize. For every site I start, I follow the same simple steps to begin a long time friendship with search engines.
The first, is permalinks. They MUST be custom. WordPress gives you option on how to set them, and I go with setting them to the post name. Then, when required, I edit the permalink in post to something that is search engine friendly. For instance, a post or page titled “About Me” will probably get a permalink that is more relevant like “about-andrea-walker-photographer”. Here I’m keeping the content friendly, and making the permalink a little more search worthy.
The second thing I do is install my favorite SEO plugin, All In One SEO pack. This allows me to set a SEO friendly title, description and keywords for every page or post in WordPress. It’s so simple and straighforward. The hardest part is deciding exactly what your key word is going to be.
Lastly, I make my images search friendly by giving them titles that are relevant to keywords I’ve decided on. At my hyperlocal blog, mymapleridge.ca, my major key word is, of course, Maple Ridge. So if I’m including a picture of a horse from Maple Ridge, I title the image mapleridgehorse. jpg.
These are all simple tasks, that I do on an ongoing basis and tasks that I encourage my clients to do on a regular basis. If your using WordPress to manage your website, then you’ll find that it’s easy to upate your content (something that search engines love), keep your content worth reading (and not just loaded with keywords) and spend only a couple of extra minutes optimizing your information when you update!
A Reason to Write
In honor of a fabulous local writer’s group I belong to – Golden Ears Writers- I’m sharing this fabulous and fresh WordPress theme available on Theme Forest. If your not a story writer, you’ll want to be when you see this theme.
Novelist features a design that reads like a book and features a trendy full screen background image. It’s a got a simple menu, google fonts and nice, clean looking integrated social media buttons. It also re sizes easily for different screens, changing from a book layout to a standard blog-style layout, a great must have feature to optimize your site for different types of displays. It’s also comes with two more things that make it even better: video support to help you with set- up and a five star rating!
Connect