Free Blogs

Free Blogs are a great way to build some high quality links for your site.  I’ve stated in previous posts the huge advantage a person has by owning several websites.  This tactic evens the playing field a little bit, and allows you to do the same thing by taking advantage of free blog providers online.  First I should state that starting a free blog for the purposes of link building or SEO is often against the hosting sites rules and I do not condone this action(be careful and be discrete).

This method can be very effective given the high PR of most free blog sites.  PR is Google’s measuring stick, telling you how valuable the particular site is perceived to be by Google.  These links are high quality because they come from trusted sites.

Now, if you simply go spamming the free blogs you are just going to get your free blog banned, so lets use some class in doing this.  One thing that I like to do is write a generic blog post in word, then spin the article a little (spin – keep same content and present it in slightly different language) for each free blog site that I plan on posting it on.  This means I write 1 article and alter it slightly for each blog so they all appear unique to the SE’s.  When possible you always want to use ANCHOR text for a link, meaning that the hyperlinks should be inside of the article attached to keywords that you are trying to rank for.  Use your imagination and come up with a similar game plan.  You may even want to put 1 link to your site, and 1 link to another ‘free blog’ that you posted on for quick indexing.

I’m not going to give you a list of free blogs to use because they are increadibly easy to find.  Type “free blog” into google, and that should keep you busy for a while.  I would obviously start w/ Wordpress and Blogger and then move on down the line.  A good percentage of the blogs use WP or a similar platform, so you should be right at home.

The first you should know about is the site operator.  It is fairly simple.  In the google search box type in site:yoursite.com and hit search.  This query is going to show you all of the pages from your site that google has in their index.  If you enter the search and nothing is found, you need to take efforts to get google to index your page.  For that read these 2 posts:

The second operator that you should know about is link.  To use this type in link:yoursite.com and hit search.  This will show you all of the links to your site that google has indexed and that you are getting credit for.  Remember the number of relavant links that you have strongly determines what type of search engine traffic you will get.  The more links the better.  You can also use this to investigate your competition.  Take some sites that rank higher than you do on google and see how many links that they have.  You can also investigate all of those pages that they have links on and attempt to get those sites to link to your webpage.

Here are some other basic operators and their functions:

• + (ex: +pa)  This excludes synonyms.  PA will not become Pennsylvania
• - (ex: car -hybrid) This excludes pages that contain hybrid
• “” (ex: “hey buddy”) This searches for the entire phrase and not 2 seperate kws
• * (ex: My * Blog) This is a wild card.  It matched My “anything” blog
• OR (ex: car red OR blue)  Searches for both car red AND car blue, but not car red blue.  MUST be in caps

In another post, I will explain some of the more advanced operators and show some of their uses.

After installing, log into your wp-admin page. If you installed with Fantastico or by some automated process, there is a good chance that it is not the latest version.  If you see a notice on your WP dashboard, the first thing that you should do is update to the new version.

Next, start with the Settings button and carefully go through all of the options.  Fill out everything that you can.  If you don’t understand something you can skip over it.  Here are a few important things to change.

Under writing, at the bottom replace your update service with this:

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

Next under Privacy, change the option so search engines can find you.

Now click on Perma-links.  For this you have several options.  What is important is that you have the post-name in the link.  Select either Day and name, month and name, or ideally you can do the following custom structure:

/%category%/%postname%/

This will display the links showing the category and the postname and is the way that this site has been set up.

Now you need to download several different plug-ins to get started.  If you don’t know how to install a plug-in, then go here.

Here are the Plugins that I recommend you start with:

All-in-One SEO Pack

Google XML Sitemaps

MaxBlog Press Ping Optimizer

Askimet Spam Protection – This may be included in your WP install

Download these plugins and configure them.  All-in-one SEO is self explanitory.  Just activate the plug in and fill out the first 3 fields.

Google XML Sitemap you have to go to settings and compile the sitemap manually the first time.  Your sitemap will be yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer is a pain in the butt to register, but it is worth the hassle.  This plugin keeps your blog from making excessive pings to RSS feed directories to avoid having your site banned.

Askimet usually comes with WP, so just activate the plugin, get a WP API key and you are good to go.  This stops spam comments and is a must.

That should be enough to get you started, more to follow…

Ok now we are ready to activate the plug-in.  First sign into your WordPress Dashboard.  On the left hand side at the bottom click on Plugins.  Locate the All-in-One Seo Pack and click on “Activate”

More or less all plug-ins are installed in this manner, so for any future plug-ins follow the above steps.  Once a Plugin is installed, they can usually be configured from the Settings Menu.

To configure the All-in-one SEO Pack, click on Settings and then “All-in-1 seo”  There are really only3 things we are concerned with.  First turn the Plug-in on.

Next fill out the Home Description.  This is for Meta-tags that search engines pick up.  Google will usually use the description you put here to explain your webpage in the rankings.

Now fill out the Home Keywords.  Think about what a user would search for to find your blog.  If you have a niche make sure to include that in your keywords.  Don’t go crazy, 5 or 6 keywords seperated by commas will do.

Home Title uses the Title of your blog if you don’t fill anything out.  All of the other settings can be left as is.  If you want to experiment go ahead.

Now that you know how to install a plug-in, the next article will be on how to set-up a clean install of wordpress.  Even if you have had your blog for quite some time, it is a good idea to make some of the changes suggested.

I have learned is that it is always best to set the blog up correctly before you get traffic.  Changing the structure afterward can sometimes mess with your rankings.  The next lesson is going to be on how to optimize a new install of WordPress.  To do this, you need to know how to install plug-ins first.

Here are some things that you need to install a plug-in:

1.  FileZilla – a FTP client used to send the plugin to your host

download here for free – Click on download under FileZilla

Or any other FTP client

2.  FTP login information – If you don’t know what your FTP information is then e-mail your hosting provider.  First try to login using your Cpanel login and password to ftp.yourdomain.com.

3.  All in One SEO Pack Plugin – We might as well install something useful.

download here for free – click on Download Now

Download and install FileZilla.  Download the all in one seo pack and unzip the file.  To make it easy, unzip the file to c:\plugins

Now open FileZilla.  On the column on the left click my computer, c:\plugins to get to your unziped plugin.  On the top type ftp.yourdomain.xxx in the host, and then your user name and password.

After you are logged in, look for a directory on the ride side called wp-content.  If you cannot find it then look for a directory called public-html click on it, and then search for wp-content.  After you are in wp-content search for plugins.  Click on that directory.  Now drag the contents of your c:\plugins diretory to the window on the right.  Now your files are copied to your server!

Next post explains the rest

Installing a WordPress Plugin Continued….