WordPress

Web Development

How to Create a Website

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Domain Name Registration

Your domain plays a very important role in SEO. SEO is Search Engine Optimization. When registering a domain, there are few stuff you have to consider.

  • The shorter the domain, the better.
  • Your domain must contain your main keyword(s).
  • I highly recommend a .com or a .net because of SEO.
  • Make the domain easy to remember.

A domain like howtomakemoneyonline.com is way too long, even though it is right to the point, onlinemoney.com is a much better domain, or .net if the .com isn’t available.

If you are going to make a site and you want to rank your domain for certain countries, like if you are going to make a site specifically for UK, then you would consider getting a UK domain extension (.co.uk) , and if you are Indian and will be writing in Indian language, then an Indian domain extension (.in) would work the best. This means if your domain extension is .co.uk, then you would be targeting Google.co.uk , since you want people from UK to come to you, and you would rank for Google.co.uk.
If your site is going for worldwide, then .com or .net is the best. But of course if you cannot afford $9-$10 then you would either have to wait for a $1 .com coupon from Godaddy, or you would have to buy a .info (which is from $0.9-$2.5, depending on the registrars). If you have $0, I would recommend you to go with http://Blogger.com since it’s owned by Google.com, and is extremely easy to setup, and Google will help it rank (but not alone of course).

Here is a list of the top domain registrars.

The prices are different for different domain extensions.

Choosing the Best Web Hosting Company for your Website

Web hosting is simply where you host your website, in better words, where you keep the site’s files. This is needed for a site.
Don’t get frightened because I said files, you don’t have to have any skills to make a site, you don’t have to know how to code or design. 99% of the hosts have Fantastico, it is a tool which is you will get when you buy a host. Fantastico makes life simpler, There are many programs which you can install with 1 click using Fantastico, you will just have to enter the basic details (site title, description, email, username, password etc).
Well I recommend you to install WordPress (under “Blogs” in Fantastico). WordPress has extremely good plugins, and they are very easy to install, and surely will help in SEO and other stuff (depending on what plugins you use).
And another reason to use WordPress is because WordPress has lots and lots of themes, any kind of theme you can think of, even company themes.

Here is a list of Paid Web Hosts:

List of Free Web Hosts (I recommend paid)

I haven’t used any of the free hosts above, so if something happens to your site, it is your own responsibility.

I am not sure if free hosts have fantastico, but if they don’t, it’s very easy to install wordpress.

WordPress as CMS for your Website

I have already mentioned the basics about WordPress, now once you have installed it etc, here are good plugins to use.

  • Google Analyticor
  • Redirection
  • Google XML Sitemaps
  • All in one SEO
  • Sexy Bookmarks
  • Tweet This
  • Top Commentators Widget
  • Contact Form7
  • Akismet
  • SEO Friendly Images
  • WP Super Cache
  • WP Auto Tagger
  • Broken Link Checker Pro
  • WP-DB Manager
  • Permalink Redirect
  • Related Posts

Now it comes to the themes part, choosing your theme for WordPress.

Here are a list of sites that have Free Premium themes(not all of them though) and free themes.

Some themes don’t allow you to add a logo, you can just enter the site title and it will be shown as text, but some themes require you to add a logo, but no worries, there are plenty of free tools to make logos (online tools), and you can make your own if you are good at photoshop, or if you can afford, then just hire a designer from BHW, and again, there are plenty of good designers here.

Make your Site Content Good and Unique

When it comes to content, there is a very popular quote, “Content is King”.
Google, and any other search engine site LOVES unique content, by unique I am saying that it cannot be found anywhere else, you can write unique content, if you can’t, then you can use a content spinner (there are many free ones, but you will have to do small changes to it since none are perfect).

It is extremely easy to add articles on your WordPress blog, I am sure you already know by now.
You may ask, how many words per article does Google love the most, people say different stuff, but I prefer 300-500 word articles.
If you can afford to hire an article writer, then sure go ahead, an article writer charges about 1 cent per word, and there are plenty of good writers here on BHW, go to the Buy/Sell Service section and you should find plenty.
But if you cannot afford, and you are not good at all in writing articles, then you can use non-unique content, just copying from another site related to your niche, and then pasting it on your site.
There is a plugin for WordPress called wp-o-matic , it’s really simple to use, it will take content from the sites you want, but sometimes you will have small issues, so you may need to add the article(s) yourself.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Website

Every search engine loves certain backlinks, Google will love backlink type A more than backlink type B, but Yahoo will love Backlink type B more than backlink type A, but all search engines have something in common, they all like backlinks, but just some are more powerful than others. So any backlink you can get is worth it.
There are many tools that can get you backlinks, and they do save time.
Before building any backlinks, you need to know your keyword, which will be your anchor text. The keyword must be located in the title/domain.

Anchor text is basically text/keyword that is clickable, like example when you go to Google.com , on the top you will see “Images” “News” etc, those are anchor texts, clickable words/text, which will direct you to another page.
Here are ways to get backlinks.

Blog Commenting – Blog Commenting on High Page Rank (PR) blogs are very powerful, I used to do them a lot before and the results were impressing. You can find high pr blogs easily, just google “how to find highpr blogs” and there are tons of ways, you can also hire someone to use scrapebox for you to find high pr blogs.
There are also high pr blog posts, meaning the post itself has a high pr, that is more powerful, but you might notice there are many spammy comments, but still it will take you few seconds to get a backlink.

There is a tool called “Scrapebox” that scrapes blog posts, on any niche (you decide the keywords etc) and it will scrape it for you, and you fill in the details (ie anchor text, url etc) and it will comment on all of them, but watch out about akismet, but I prefer manual blog commenting.

Forum Profiles – Well you know what’s a forum I suppose? You are on a forum right now. Simply find many high PR forums, register on them, and in your signature just enter your anchor text. Most of the times or forums it is this format (without space between U and R at the start)

Code:
[U RL=http://mysite.com]Keyword[/Url]

There is a tool called XRumer, it is an extremely powerful tool, but if your site is new, you should not use it, it creates thousands and thousands of forum profiles and puts your anchor in signature, but it is expensive.

Link Exchange – This works best if your site has a page rank, then you just request link exchange on DP or WF with the same niche, and most likely with the same PR. He will put your anchor text on his/her site, and you put his/her at your site.

Web Directories – There are tens of thousands of web-directories for you to submit your website to, and they will approve it. They also have featured listing but don’t mind that, just go for the free listing which 99% of the directories offer, these aren’t as strong as high PR backlinks, but they are still worth it, as I said, every backlink is worth it.

Press Release – This is usually done when a new site is launched, or you are launching something on your site, or there is an event etc, then you simply write a press release (google “how to write a press release”) , and then you will submit it to many press release sites, it will take few days to approve your press release.

Buying Links – You can pay other website owners to put your anchor on their site, the prices vary depending on the page rank of their site, and of course target websites on the same niche as you.

Guest Blogging – This one is one of my favorite. It is simply offering other blog owners as the same niche of your site, offering them a free article with 2-3 anchor texts in your article, this is indeed really worth it.

Buying Blog Posts – You can also buy blog posts, sometimes they will write an article for you and publish it on their blog, and sometimes you will have to write an article and they will publish it on their site, and again, prices vary on the page rank of the site.

Article Directories – Writing unique articles yourself or hiring an article writer, and then submitting it to high PR article directories, it will take few days to approve.

Yahoo Answers – You can also hire people for this as well, but a bit hard to find. Answers.Yahoo.com , register an account and go to the category on your niche, and answer people’s questions, but first 25 answers, don’t put anything in the “source” box, and then afterwards, for most of the answers put your website link in the “source” box, but make sure your answer actually answers the person’s question, it might get chosen as best answer, and Yahoo Answers ranks well for questions, and your answer will be shown first if it was chosen as Best Answer by the questioner.

Social Media – Social Media like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc, submit your websites there. There are many social media sites like digg, and you will have to create an account on all of them, and then submit your website.

Web 2.0 Profiles – Creating profiles on Web 2.0 sites is very powerful indeed, like Squidoo and then writing an article and linking back to your site, and also Blogger (Free blog, yes!) and writing an article linking back to your site, and video sites like Youtube, Metacafe etc.

Monetizing your Website or Blog

Monetizing your website so you can make money. Here are few ways you can make money from your website.

Google Adsense – Google Adsense , to register an account your site must be at least 6 months old, they will give you a code and you will put it on your site, and a banner will show up, or text link (you decide), and then if a visitor goes to your site and clicks on it, you will get money, how much, it depends on the niche and keywords.
There are other networks like Google Adsense, but Google Adsense is the best.

Content Lockers – In order for a person to access a page on your website (this works only if the page has something useful for the visitor), you simply put a content locker , and the person will have to do a survey in order to access the page. There are sites that offer that, you can google “CPA Sites” and you will get a list.

Selling Banner Space – If your site gets lots of visitors, you can sell banner space on your website.

Selling Text Links – Selling text links on your Page Rank blog (works best if your blog has a page rank! Else you don’t have to do this). The price you will offer for links on your site depends on the page rank your website is.

Affiliate Marketing – Clickbank is a website where you can find many stuff to sell, and you will get a percentage for each sale. Usually each affiliate offer you will get banners to advertise it with, with different sizes so you can put it on your site.

Donations – This barely works now, it will only work if your site really really had useful information so the person will donate to your paypal.

Best Tools for Backlinking

  • Xrumer – Tool for creating forum profiles
  • Scrapebox – Tool for blog commenting and pinging
  • SeNuke – Multiple uses, Web 2.0 profiles, article directory submitter, etc

Other tools for Backlinking:

  • Market Samurai
  • Sick Submitter
  • Rss Submitter
  • SEO Pressor
  • Tweet Attacks
  • AMR
  • Magic Submitter

Tracking your Website`s Traffic

Google.com/analytics is the best tool which is free to track how many visitors your site gets, from where, and from which keyword from search engines, it is the best, and most website owners use it. There is a plugin called “Google Analyticor” for WordPress which will allow you to put the Google Analytics code very easily, I really do recommend it (I already listed it in the plugin list above).

The Top Best WordPress SEO Plugins

20 of the Best SEO Plugins for WordPres

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With more than 120 million blogs in existence, how do people find YOUR content on the Internet? The key starts with great search engine optimization (SEO), which is an art and a science that helps search engines discover your content and understand how relevant it is to specific search queries.You can blog your heart out, but if you don’t have good SEO, then odds are you won’t have many readers.  Luckily, the WordPress plugin community values SEO and has developed a number of plugins to help. Here are 20 of the best SEO plugins to help you choose the right tags, tell search robots what to work on, optimize your post titles and more.Have another SEO plugin to recommend? Tell us more about it in the comments. 

 

all-in-one-seo-pack-options

All in One SEO Pack – One of the most popular plugins ever for WordPress, this plugin does a bit of everything for you from helping choose the best post title and keywords, to helping you avoid duplicate content and more.

Automatic SEO Links – Automatic SEO Links allows you to choose a word or phrase for automatic linking, both internal and external, set anchor text, choose if it should be “nofollow” or not, and more.  One of the best features of this plugin is that it will only do this for the first occurrence of a word in a post so you don’t have to worry about spamming your post with numerous links to the same thing.

Google XML Sitemaps – An essential tool in any blogger’s armory of SEO tools.  While the name only mentions “Google,” this plugin creates an XML-sitemap that can be read by Ask, MSN and Yahoo also.

HeadSpace2 – This plugin allows you to install all sorts of meta-data, add specific JavaScript and CSS to pages, suggests tags for your posts and a whole lot more.

Meta Robots WordPress plugin – An easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page you choose on your blog.  You can use it to make your front page links into “nofollows,” prevent indexing of search pages, disable author and date-based archives, prevent indexing of your login page and numerous other features.

 

nofollow

Nofollow Case by Case – This plugin allows you to strip the “nofollow” command from your comments, and then you can apply it to only the comments you don’t wish to support.

Platinum SEO Plugin – The Platinum SEO Plugin offers you such features as automatic 301 redirects for permalink changes, auto-generation of META tags, post slug optimization, help in avoiding duplicate content and a host of other features.

Redirection – For any number of reasons you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, but then you risk losing that page’s status in search results.  Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more.

SEO Blogroll – Do you worry that the people you link to in your blogroll are feeding off of your PageRank?  With SEO Blogroll you can make separate sections for various groupings of links, with an unlimited number in each, and all of them will receive the “nofollow” attribute.

SEO for Paged Comments – With the introduction of paged comments in WordPress 2.7, there was a potential problem with search engines thinking you had duplicate content as the post would appear on each page.  This plugin aims to take care of this issue for you until the folks at WordPress change things up.

SEO friendly and HTML valid subheadings – Some themes for WordPress will confuse your sub-header tags based on the page they are to be displayed on, but this plugin will automatically reset them to make them more SEO friendly by moving them down one spot in the hierarchical tree.  In other words, h2 becomes h3, h3 becomes h4 and so on.

SEO Friendly Images – Images can be a great source of traffic as people search for images of various subjects, and this plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.

 

seo no duplicate

SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin – If you must have duplicate content on your site for whatever reason, SEO No Duplicate will allow you to state which version of the post search engines should index while ignoring the others.

SEO Post Link – The post slug is the blog title you see in a browser’s URL bar, and if it’s too long, search engines won’t take a liking to it.  SEO Post Link comes with an already populated list of words to cut from a title when it turns into a URL to make your post addresses that much friendlier.  You can set it so that it’s limited to a certain number of characters, cut short words, cut unnecessary words and more.

SEO Smart Links – Interlinking your blog can be the key to getting more people to read more of your posts, but it is time consuming and tedious to do it by hand.  SEO Smart Links does this for you automatically when you tell it what words to link to what URLs, and it also allows you to set “nofollow” and “open in window” comands for the links.

SEO Tag Cloud Widget – Love ’em or hate ’em, a lot of people use tag clouds on their blogs.  Since their inception they have been fairly unreadable by search engines, but with this plugin they will be converted to an SEO-friendly HTML markup that can be indexed.

SEO Title Tag – Your tags are an important part of your site for making sure that search engines know where to place your posts, and SEO Title Tag focuses exclusively on this.  Unlike some other plugins, and WordPress itself, this extension will allow you to add tags to your pages, your main page and even any URL anywhere on your site.

 

simple tags

Simple Tags – An extremely popular plugin that focuses on helping you choose the best tags for your posts by offering suggestions, auto-completion of tags as you type, an AJAX admin interface, mass tag editing and a whole lot more.

Sitemap Generator – This is a more customizable sitemap generator than most with options to support multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, permalink support, choices on what to display, options to show number of comments and more.

TGFI.net SEO WordPress Plugin – This particular plugin will do most of the usual SEO work of optimizing titles and keywords, but it adds a unique twist as it is mainly directed at people who use WordPress as a CMS.

30 Black Hat SEO Techniques You Can Use Ethically

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Black hat SEO is both a myth and a reality we have to face sooner or later as SEO practicioners. While I abide by probably one of the strictest SEO codes of ethics around and SEOptimise is a clean white hat SEO company company itself we still can’t deny that there is black hat SEO.

The sheer existence of black hat SEO techniques must be acknowledged for several reasons.

As Rishi Lakhani noted on his new SEO blog: You need it at least to know what to avoid or to know how competitors who perform worse than you still manage to outrank your site.

The good news is: Most black hat SEO techniques can be used in a clean, ethical white hat way as well.

They are like knives: You can slice bread with a knife but you can kill with it as well. It’s your decision how you use the knife. Also consider the problem with overall perception of the SEO industry. Your hat can be whiter than snow and still people will treat you as the guy with the virtual knife.

Personally I think black hat SEO is for the weak.

The black hat logic goes: When you can’t win the game you have to cheat. It’s the same dilemma as in sports though: When everybody cheats how are you going to win? That’s why reputable and successful SEO experts don’t have to use it.

OK, long story short, here are the 30 black hat techniques you can use ethically as well. Take note how I am explaining only the positive way of using each technique. I do not advocate the use of it in it’s original black hat context. Use these knives as kitchen knives:

black hat by googlisti

Hidden text – Create modern CSS based websites with JQuery effects. They often hide large portions of text in layers to display them on click or mouse over for usability reasons. Example: CSS pagination.

IP delivery – Offer the proper localized content to those coming from a country specific IP address. Offer the user a choice though. Shopping.com does a great job here.

301 redirects – Redirect outdated pages to the newer versions or your homepage. When moving to a new domain use them of course as well.

Throw Away Domains – Create exact match micro sites for short term popular keywords and abandon them when the trend subsides. Something like tigerwoodssexrehab.com

Cloaking – Hide the heavy Flash animations from Google, show the text-only version optimized for accessibility and findability.

Paid links – Donate for charity, software developers etc. Many of them display links to those who donate.

Keyword stuffing – Tags and folksonomy. Keyword stuff but adding several tags or let your users do the dirty work via UGC tagging (folksonomy) every major social site does that.

Automatically generated keyword pages – Some shopping search engines create pages from each Google search query and assign the appropriate products to each query. You can do that as well if you have enough content.

Mispsellings – Define, correct the misspelled term and/or redirect to the correct version.

Scraping – Create mirrors for popular sites. Offer them to the respective webmasters. Most will be glad to pay less.

Ad only pages – Create all page ads (interstitials) and show them before users see content like many old media do.

Blog spam – Don’t spam yourself! Get spammed! Install a WordPress blog without Akismet spam protection. Then create a few posts about Mesothelioma for example, a very profitable keyword. Then let spammers comment spam it or even add posts (via TDO Mini Forms). Last but not least parse the comments for your keyword and outgoing links. If they contain the keyword publish them and remove the outgoing links of course. Bot user generated content so to say.


Duplicate content on multiple domains – Offer your content under a creative Commons License with attribution.


Domain grabbing – Buy old authority domains that failed and revive them instead of putting them on sale.


Fake news – Create real news on official looking sites for real events. You can even do it in print. Works great for all kinds of activism related topics.


Link farm – Create a legit blog network of flagship blogs. A full time pro blogger can manage 3 to 5 high quality blogs by her or himself.


New exploits – Find them and report them, blog about them. You break story and thus you get all the attention and links. Dave Naylor is excellent at it.


Brand jacking – Write a bad review for a brand that has disappointed you or destroys the planet or set up a brand x sucks page and let consumers voice their concerns.


Rogue bots – Spider websites and make their webmasters aware of broken links and other issues. Some people may be thankful enough to link to you.


Hidden affiliate links – In fact hiding affiliate links is good for usability and can be even more ethical than showing them. example.com/ref?id=87233683 is far worse than than just example.com. Also unsuspecting Web users will copy your ad to forums etc. which might break their TOS. The only thing you have to do is disclose the affiliate as such. I prefer to use [ad] (on Twitter for example) or [partner-link] elsewhere. This way you can strip the annoying “ref” ids and achieve full disclosure at the same time.


Doorway pages – Effectively doorway pages could also be called landing pages. The only difference is that doorway pages are worthless crap while landing pages are streamlined to suffice on their own. Common for both is that they are highly optimized for organic search traffic. So instead of making your doorway pages just a place to get skipped optimize them as landing pages and make the users convert right there.


Multiple subdomains – Multiple subdomains for one domain can serve an ethical purpose. Just think blogspot.co or wordpress.com – they create multiple subdomains by UGC. This way they can rank several times for a query. You can offer subdomains to your users as well.


Twitter automation – There is nothing wrong with Twitter automation as long as you don’t overdo it. Scheduling and repeating tweets, even automatically tweeting RSS feeds from your or other blogs is perfectly OK as long as the Twitter account has a real person attending it who tweets “manually” as well. Bot accounts can be ethical as well in case they are useful no only for yourself. A bot collecting news about Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake would be perfectly legit if you ask me.


Deceptive headlines – Tabloids use them all the time, black hat SEO also do. There are ethical use cases for deceptive headlines though. Satire is one of course and humor simply as well. For instance I could end this list with 24 items and declare this post to a list of 30 items anyways. That would be a good laugh. I’ve done that in the past but in a more humorous post.


Google Bowling – The bad thing about Google bowling is that you hurt sites you don’t like. You could reverse that: Reverse Google bowling would mean that you push sites of competitors you like to make those you dislike disappear below. In a way we do that all the time linking out to the competition, the good guys of SEO who then outrank the ugly sites we like a lot less.


Invisible links – You’d never used invisible links on your sites did you? You liar! You have. Most free web counters and statistic tools use them. Statcounter is a good example. So when you embed them on your site you use invisible links.


Different content for search engines than users – Do you use WordPress? Then you have the nofollow attribute added to your comment links. this way the search engine gets different content than the user. He sees and clicks a link. A search bot sees a no trespass sign instead. In white hat SEO it’s often called PageRank sculpting. Most social media add ons do that by default.


Hacking sites – While crackers hack sites security experts warn site owners that they vulnerabilities. Both discover the same issues. Recently I got an email by someone who warned me to update my WordPress installation. That was a grand idea I thought.


Slander linkbait – Pulling a Calacanis like “SEO is bullshit” is quite common these days. Why don’t do it the other way around? The anti SEO thing doesn’t work that good anymore unless you are as famous as Robert Scoble. In contrast a post dealing with “100 Reasons to Love SEO Experts” might strike a chord by now.


Map spam – Instead of faking multiple addresses all over the place just to appear on Google Maps and Local why don’t you simply create an affiliate network of real life small business owners with shops and offices who, for a small amount of money, are your representatives there? All they need to do is to collect your mail from Google and potential clients.

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