WordPress is a very widely used blog site. There is numerous website that uses WordPress for their content management. If you are a first-time user, there is nothing to worry about. WordPress is very easy to operate and also very simple. You need merely to follow the instructions, and very soon you would be having your blogging site.
Also Read: How To Start a WordPress Blog
Install WordPress
The first and most important step that you need to do is to setup the hosting and then install WordPress. It is not rocket science and can be done by any person who has basic computer knowledge. If you are still not sure, follow the step by step guide that is available here and does just as instructed and your installation will be done. If the installation is not complete or not done properly, then the whole idea of creating a WordPress would go for a toss.
Check the Settings
The last but not least step after installation is setting things up. Once you log in to your WordPress account, the settings have to be checked and made sure that it is as per your requirements. Care should be taken to ensure that privacy settings are set accordingly.
Theme
After checking the settings, you have to choose a theme for your website. The background, layout pattern and design should be chosen as per your likings. There are a lot of free themes you can choose. If you would like to look into more variety and then premium themes are also available.
Customize The Widgets
The widgets can be added as per your requirements. You can easily drag and drop these to the position where you want them to be. This is where you have to make sure as to what would you like your visitors to do; whether you want them to subscribe to the mailing list or follow on social networking websites, what would help the visitors or what would be of interest to them, all these can be customized in the widgets. You should make your page look in such a way that the visitors are attracted to see the most important or best articles first. This would create an interest in them and make them explore more pages.
Start Your Blog
Once everything else is set, all you need to do is to start blogging. It would not be wrong to state the contents are the heart of any website or blog. So, one should ensure that only high quality and relevant content are uploaded to the website. These contents should also be uploaded frequently so that there is new content whenever a visitor visits again. So you should keep attention to the articles you publish, its usefulness for readers, correct, keywords density, etc.
Contents are very important, but they are not all. You need to add some plugins for images as well. Adding a video is also a good option. There are a lot of plugins that are available on the market. These can ease out your work and make blogging less stressful and even more fun. The use of plugins in blogs has thus become inevitable.
WordPress SEO Plugins
Thus, the next step we will discuss is the basicĀ WordPress SEO plugins that are being used the world over. Here we have chosen the most necessary and used ones, but you always can find some others you like.
All In One SEO Pack
This is the most sought after SEO Plug-ins. There are almost 15K downloads and hence is one of the top plug-ins that is used. It has a lot of good and prominent features. If you are a newbie here and are looking forward to making big in the SEO platform, then this is the one for you. The Meta descriptions, keywords, etc. for your blog can be created by the all in one SEO pack. Automatic optimization of the titles is also one of its highlights.
SEOPressor
SEOPressor is an advanced version and hence is considered to be a very powerful SEO plug-in. It can customize your whole website. The drag and drop facility to highlight your keywords is one of the best features that are available. Another key feature is the inter-linking which can be done. Using this you can create a hyperlink for any word or a series of words.
WordPress SEO By Yoast
The WordPress SEO by Yoast is said to be one of the most user-friendly plug-ins that can help in doing all the technical optimization that is to be done on your website. This plug-in can also analyze the page; add link elements in addition to integrating with social media websites.
SEO Friendly Images
SEO is based on how Google can retrieve a website and optimizing the same. There is also a much-known fact that Google often returns images and pictorial representations. Hence the importance of SEO friendly images plugins which can enhance the chances of your website be highlighted first by Google.
Google Sitemaps
Another user-friendly and best plug-ins that are available today is Google Sitemaps. It can help in quickly creating and submitting sitemaps to the webmaster. As this is also produced by Google, it is very simple and can very well connect with the search engine to give you a good chance of a better performing website.
In addition to all these plug-ins, there are a lot of others which are doing well as there is increasing demand. I have only given you a brief about the most sought-after SEO plug-ins. Each one is unique and has some specific plus points when compared to the others. It is good to look into all these and then decide which will be suitable for your website or blog. We all hope that one day these plugins will have more features that can reduce human errors and give more value to the investment made.
WordPress Security Tips
The next very important step of your blog creation is to maintain its security. As we have already mentioned that WordPress is the most used Open Source CMS. Because of this, it is also one of the most hacked CMSās.
Below we have gathered a few tips and tricks you can use to reduce the risk of your site getting hacked.
Security Basics
When installing WordPress, donāt just use a standard username such as āadmin,ā go for something like your full name to limit the chance of anyone guessing it.
Your password should be at least nine characters with a mixture of upper-case, lower-case, special characters and numbers. Try using a password generator to get a secure password.
When you are creating the WordPress database, change the prefix of the table from āwpā to some random characters such as āt8uā. Most web hosts will be able to help you out with this, so send them a support ticket!
Keep everything up to date
One of the most usual ways hackers get into your site is by taking advantage of vulnerabilities in outdated themes and plugins.
The latest version of WordPress has the option to automatically update so this reduces the chance of getting hacked.
Check your website every time it auto-updates just in case a plugin or theme is no longer supported. The final thing you want is to come back to your site a few weeks later to find out it hasnāt been working.
Backup everything, daily
Make sure you backup your site daily. Most good web hosts will do this automatically, but you will want to double-check that it is being done.
There are also plugins you can download to take backups of your files and database and email them to you or update to another server for you to access if you need to restore a backup.
I recommend the plugin BackWPup ā it has the remote backup to Dropbox or AmazonS3 so plenty of functions for you to choose from.
With these helpful tips, you can start your blogging experience on WordPress based blog, develop it with the help of its and plugins options. And following security rules, we mentioned you should hopefully have reduced the chance of getting a security compromise to your site!
Noor Mustafa Raza
