WordPress is a fantastic blogging tool and publishing platform, but is it optimised out of the box for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)? Well, despite the fact that the search engines tend to love websites built on the WordPress platform, it isn’t particularly well optimised with a default installation. In the default WordPress installation, it does not include meta tags such as meta description and meta keywords. If you want to supply search engines with specific information, relevant to your websites pages, you are going to have to add the meta tag data yourself.

From my own experience with WordPress and getting WordPress based websites ranking well in the search engines, here are my Top 5 SEO Tips for WordPress:

1. Title Tags

The title tag will probably always be one of the most important factors in on page search engine optimisation to achieve high rankings in the search engines. It has been shown that just “tweaking” your title tags a little can help increase the number of times your link is clicked in a search engine. The title tag should contain specific keywords or key phrases relevant to the page content.

Originally WordPress placed the blog name before the post title. For example: “My WordPress Blog » Hello world!” In more recent versions of WordPress, the post title appears before the blog title like “Hello world! » My WordPress Blog”. There has been some debate as to whether it is necessary to have your blog name tagged onto the end of your post title, some people have even reported that removing the blog title from post titles can help improve your rankings on the search engine results pages (SERPS). The main advantage of not including your blog title in the post title, is that it keeps the length of your title at a more reasonable number of characters. Where possible, I always try to keep my titles to less than 70 characters or so. Obviously, having your blog name on the end of your page title may dramatically increase the number of characters in your title.

To change the way your title tags work on your blog, I would strongly suggest using one of the following WordPress plugins: All in One SEO Pack or Platinum SEO Pack. Personally, I use the Platinum SEO Pack, although both plugins are very similar. To change your title tags with Platinum SEO Pack, simply go to your WordPress Admin page, and click the “Platinum SEO” link in the left hand sidebar. Here’s how I have set the main three title settings for this website:

Home Title: Small Business Search Engine Optimisation
Post Title: %post_title%
Page Title: %page_title% | %blog_title%

I would suggest you have a look at the other options this plugin provides and tweak them to your requirements.

2. Meta Tags

There are three main components to meta tags: meta title, meta keywords & meta description. The meta title will be taken from your post/page title and if you are using appropriate, relevant titles, there is little need to adjust this with one of the previously mentioned plugins. When looking at the results for your query in search engines, you will see a section of content from your page beneath the page link. By customising the meta description tag for the page, you have control over what is shown in the search engine results. Your meta description should be concise and relevant, remember, after the title (link) to your page in the SERPS, your post description needs to encourage people to click the link to your site, so make sure your meta description is appropriate to your content. This is also a good opportunity to include one or more of your keywords/keyphrases. Try to limit your meta description to less than 200 characters.

*It is worth pointing out that a few months ago, Google announced that it no longer takes into account meta keywords when ranking websites.

Despite this, I still think it is good practice to accurately specify your keywords for your post or page. Platinum SEO has a nifty little option that will allows you to use categories or tags for meta keywords. This may be useful to some users, but if you only post in a few categories, you may be better specifying your meta keywords on a post specific basis. Try to be focused with your keywords, aim for 4 – 6 keywords per page, although you can specify more meta keywords if you desire.

3. Heading Tags

As I have discussed in this blog post: The Importance Of Heading Tags, Heading tags are a crucial part of a well optimised page. Where possible, you should only include one H1 tag in a page (usually the title), but you may have multiple occurrences of tags H2 – H6. In rare circumstances, it may be appropriate to have more than one H1 tag within a page, for example where you discuss two equally important, clearly defined topics.

The H1 tag should surround the main heading/title of the page relevant to the content and should be positioned at the top of the content (not in the header or sidebar, but at the top of the main content area). For example, if you sell fruit, and you have an article or page about “Apples”, this should be in your H1 tags. If you discuss various types of apples within this page, you might use H2 or H3 tags for these sub-headings eg “Golden Delicious” or “Granny Smith”.

Using Heading tags will help the search engines determine the importance of the words in your content when it crawls your site.

4. Permalinks

Permalinks are URLs that point to specific blog posts and remain the same indefinitely. A permalink is what another blogger may use to link to your blog post, article or category, or how you might send a link to your blog post in an e-mail. More importantly, it is the link the search engines will use to identify your blog post, page or article. It is commonly accepted that keywords in the permalink can help contribute to a pages, posts or articles position in the search engines.

Optimizing the WordPress permalink structure is one aspect of WordPress Search Engine Optimisation that most users can do to configure a more desirable, readable permalink structure.

There are three basic types of WordPress permalinks: default, mod_rewrite & pathinfo.

Default WordPress Permalinks

The default WordPress permalink looks like: http:// exampledomain.com/?p=N

Where N is the Post ID number. It works on all server environments, but it doesn’t look as nice as some of the other options.

mod_rewrite WordPress Permalinks

Using mod_rewrite you can produce much nicer permalinks. There are many different formats, but the most common, and most commonly used looks like http:// domainexample.com/category/post-name/

This permalink structure is sometimes referred to as “Pretty permalinks” and is most commonly used on Apache web servers with the mod_rewrite module.

Pathinfo WordPress permalinks

Pathinfo permalinks look very much like mod_rewrite (pretty) permalinks but they have /index.php inserted before them, for example: http:// domainexample.com/index.php/yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/

Otherwise, they are the same as the “pretty” mod_rewrite permalinks, and are similarly flexible.

It’s very easy to change your WordPress permalink structure by going to Settings -> Permalinks in your WordPress admin panel.

You can select one of the options using the radio buttons on the screen. To use “pretty permalinks”, you need to select the “Custom Structure” option and specify how you want the structure to be. WordPress provides numerous options for the custom structure but the most commonly used custom structure by bloggers is: /%category%/%postname% /

Permalinks are easy to set up and can influence how your blog is found & seen in the search engines.

5. Sitemaps

The generation and publishing of website sitemaps is quite often underestimated. There are basically two types of sitemap, one is a HTML sitemap which is readable for human visitors and helps them navigate throughout the website, the other is a XML Sitemap which helps the search engine spiders navigate through the site.

There are many advantages to using sitemaps, for example:

- they help simplify website navigation for both visitors and search engines
- they help the search engines accurately index your site content
- they help advise the search engines how frequently your content changes and when it was last modified

Sitemap generation in WordPress can be achieved easily using one of various plugins available. One of the most popular plugins for generating Google sitemaps is: Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask etc to better index your blog.

Usage of this plugin is nice and straight forward, simply install the plugin, then navigate to Settings -> XML-Sitemap in your WordPress admin panel and build the sitemap the first time. The plugin will automatically update your sitemap every time you publish a new post. It also worth telling Google exactly where your sitemap is, you can do this using the Google Webmaster Tools.

In this tutorial we’ll go through how to get WordPress running on your own PC (running Windows) so you have your own personal WordPress installation to experiment with or learn from. Yes you could experiment with WordPress on your live website but if you don’t have a web host or don’t want to play around with your live WordPress blog then this tutorial is for you.

Firstly we need to install your own personal web server to run WordPress. WordPress requires a web server, a MySQL database and the PHP scripting language to run. Installing and configuring these in the past was hard work but there’s now an application called WAMP (Windows – Apache – MySQL – PHP) which installs and configures everything to get your own personal web server up and running.

Normally you’d pay a web host to host your website or blog and they’d provide the web server, database server and scripting but we’re going to install our own personal web server so we can do anything we like in our own personal WordPress test lab at zero cost.

Visit the WAMP site and download the WAMP Server. Once the file has downloaded double-click it to install the WAMP software.

Once the install begins accept the license agreement and all the default installation options and select to create a desktop icon at the end of the installation.

Once installed and running you’ll have a WAMP icon down in the system tray in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen (it looks like a semi-circle)click the WAMP icon down in the system tray and select phpMyAdmin – if the phpMyAdmin page displays then this tells us that the webserver is running and the php script can connect to our MySQL database so you’re up and running.

We now have a functioning WAMP web & database server running on our PC. This server provides practically all the functionality that a paid hosting account offers but costs nothing and is for your personal use or use on an internal network if you’re teaching WordPress. It would be possible to use WAMP to host your live blog but we’d advise that it’s much better for your live blog to be hosted at a web hosting company rather than allowing people to connect to your own PC running WAMP as there are security, speed and availability issues in running your own publicly accessible web server.

We have our web server now all we need to do is install WordPress. If you haven’t already started WAMP start it by double-clicking the WAMP desktop icon. Open ‘My Computer’ or Windows Explorer and navigate to C:/WAMP/WWW and then create a new folder in the WWW folder called wordpress.

We then need to download WordPress so go to the WordPress web site and download the latest version of WordPress. Once it’s downloaded extract/unzip the installation file and copy the contents of its ‘wordpress’ folder to c:/wamp/www/wordpress.

If you’ve downloaded WordPress and successfully copied the WordPress files into the correct folder you can open a browser and go to http://localhost/wordpress – you should see a WordPress page asking you to create a configuration file. So go ahead and click ‘create a configuration file’.

WordPress then asks for the database hostname, username and password to connect to your MySQL server. WordPress is a dynamic content management system so anything you post in WordPress is stored in a MySQL database so when a visitor visits your blog or you edit a post WordPress dynamically pulls this information from the database displays it. In order to do this we need to create a blank database with a username and password so WordPress can connect to it. WordPress will do all the hard work of populate this database with all the correct tables but we have to manually create the database and username and password before WordPress can do this.

Click the WAMP icon in the lower right hand corner of your screen and select phpMyAdmin. phpMyAdmin should now load in your browser so then in the ‘create new database’ box enter wordpress_db and click ‘create’.

Now we need to add a user to the database. In phpMyAdmin click the ‘Privileges’ tab then click ‘Add a new User’. In the ‘user name’ box enter wordpress_user (or a username of your choice) and enter a password in the ‘password’ and ‘re-type’ boxes. Ensure that under ‘database for user’ the option ‘Grant all privileges on database “wordpress_db”‘ is selected and then click ‘Go’ down at the bottom right.

Now if we go back to the WordPress installation screen we can enter the database name, username and password we just created using phpMyAdmin. The database host should be localhost and we’ll leave the table prefix as wp_.

Now click ‘submit’ and WordPress should say that it can now communicate with the database. Click the ‘run the install’ button. We then can fill in the options for site title, username and password – this username and password is the WordPress username and password that you’d like to use to administer your WordPress blog so you can make up your own username and password which can (and should!) be different from the database username and password we created earlier.

Click ‘install WordPress’ and WordPress should then say you’ve successfully installed it and if you click the login button and enter your WordPress username and password you’re up and running!

Just remember to make sure your WAMP server is running first otherwise you won’t be able connect.

WordPress is turning 7 years old this year and is currently the most popular blog publishing application available today. Over 200 million websites are using WordPress, but it can be a bit difficult to tell because of how easy WordPress customization is. Through the use of templating and widgets integration, WordPress blogs can be customized to the web master’s liking and they do not even need to know PHP and HTML coding although those that know can benefit even more. Therefore it is important to make full use of the WordPress customization techniques to make the most out of your blog.

Benefits of WordPress Customization

While the default WordPress theme is simple and elegant, customizing the theme allows you to give your site a personality and identity. You can put business logos or brand names to give people a better idea on what blog they are reading. It also serves as the basis for what color scheme to use since color schemes often revolve around the logo.

By combining creativity with WordPress customization, you can impress your visitors with a unique design that encourages them to subscribe to your feed or come back to check out some more content when you make updates. If you already have a fully designed website, you can utilize the WordPress customization features to enable your blog to integrate perfectly with your web site’s theme for complete branding.

How to Obtain WordPress Themes

Starters can begin by looking for the many free WordPress themes made available for download on the web. WordPress’s very own website has its own search bar where you can look for WordPress themes that are linked from other WordPress blogs. Social bookmarking websites often post links to free WordPress themes as well. Downloading is as easy as clicking the download link and saving it to your desktop. Themes are usually ZIP files that contain several PHP files and a style.css file.

Another way to get WordPress themes is by buying them from sites that sell premium WordPress themes. These types of WordPress themes look more professional than the free ones and offer greater WordPress customization possibilities. Some free templates may suit your site’s theme well, but it is better to check out the WordPress premium themes and move on to a better design to create a better impression.

Installing WordPress Themes

Whether the WordPress theme is premium or free, installing the WordPress theme is also easy. Just extract the ZIP file to a folder and then upload that folder to your “themes” folder inside the “wp-content” folder. You will need an FTP program to do this or utilize your web host’s FTP tool. Once the upload is finished, activate the template by logging in to your WordPress via wp-login.php. Go to “Design > Themes” and you should see the new theme in selection. Click the “Activate” link and refresh your website.

Review your website and see if you need to do anymore WordPress customization adjustments. Remember that you can always edit the template files once you learn the structure so you can end up with modified and unique designs based on your favorite templates.

If you have never built a website before, one of the quickest and easiest ways to get your first domain live and operational in only minutes is to install WordPress on your website.

WordPress is a blogging platform that allows you to have a pre-built website for free that will allow you to focus on the more important items like content, and if you desire it, sales and profits.

WordPress Benefits

In more than a decade online, I have literally built dozens of websites, many from the ground up… But since I discovered the ease of use and powerful flexibility of the WordPress platform, I am building most of my newest websites under this Content Management System (CMS).

The reasons I prefer the WordPress blogging platform are many, but I will sum it up with the following five key benefits:

1. Quick and Easy Installation – If you have a web hosting company that runs cPanelX as your webmasters’ control panel (many of the more popular web hosting companies do), then you will find an option in your control panel called, “Fantastico De Luxe”. When you click on the Fantastico icon, you will be taken to a page where you can add a multitude of free applications to your website, by following some simple instructions. Just click on the WordPress link to install WordPress on your website. The software will ask you some basic general information, then do the full install of one of the most recent WordPress builds into your website.

2. Website Themes – Few webmasters want to use the generic WordPress Theme that ships with WordPress. The default WP Theme is plain Jane, and to my taste, perfectly drab. There are many people who design custom WordPress Themes that you can easily upload to your domain, to change the appearance and feel of your WordPress website. Some of the WP Themes are paid versions, but most of them are free. There are more than one thousand themes loaded directly into the WordPress website ( wordpress.org/extend/themes/ ), from which you can choose, although you are not limited to just the themes loaded into the WordPress website.

3. Website Functionality – Just like with the WordPress Themes, if there is a specific functionality you want your blog to perform, there are programmers out there who have made WordPress Plugins that will do for you those things you would like to do. There are nearly 8,000 WordPress Plugins on the WordPress.org website ( wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ ), and thousands more that are not in the WordPress database. If you find a Plugin you want, just download, unzip, and upload it to the appropriate Plugin directory on your blog. After you have uploaded the Plugin, simply go to the Admin area of your Blog to activate the software.

4. Open Source – WordPress has been built in PHP, and its source code is visible to everyone who wants to look at it. On top of that, WordPress has included comprehensive documentation and a range of functions to help programmers work within the WordPress Codex. Anyone with a minimal knowledge of PHP can program WordPress Themes and Plugins, without too much effort.

5. Self-Updating – In recent versions, WordPress has included a feature that will notify you if upgrades are available for the basic WordPress operating system or your chosen WP Plugins. When upgrades become available, you will be notified, and often you only need to click a link to automatically install the upgrades and updates.

I have a friend who is a PHP coder by trade. I try not to mention WordPress in his presence, because every time I do so, I get an ear-full of “WordPress Sucks…”

To be honest with you, I still like WordPress… I like it, because it is easy to install and maintain, and I can improve it easily by using templates and plugins.

I am a coder, but life is too short to spend all of my time coding new websites… I am happy to spend my time creating content that will lead to sales… So for me, WordPress is good, and I am happy to put it on as many websites as I need to do…

If you are new to the Internet, then you might agree that WordPress is a blessing to those of us, who have more important things to do than to recreate the wheel…

Are you currently stuck on your results do to the lack of traffic that you are receiving? If this is your problem, then you should know that there are ways to improve your AdSense revenue simply and easily. Blogger makes it easy for you to incorporate Google AdSense onto your blog but this ease doesn’t necessarily mean that you will earn a lot of money with it.

You have to find new ways to get traffic to your Blogger blog if you want to earn a nice residual income with AdSense. It’s a good idea to have an email newsletter also since this is a great way to bring visitors back to your blog. Hopefully you’re operating in a niche because this is a great way to build a list of rabid subscribers, and is also a great way to get relevant ads to show up on your blog.

Now that you know that traffic is important, let’s take a look at some ways that you can get traffic to your blog. If you want to improve your AdSense income, then you will follow the advice listed in this article. Here’s tip number 1.

1) Article marketing

I know you’re interested in getting traffic for free, so this article will focus on the techniques that can get you free traffic. The first is article marketing. Some say that article marketing is dead but it can still bring you a lot of traffic to your website. The trick with article marketing is staying at it. You have to put up a lot of articles to see the results that you crave, and you should strive to write 5-10 new articles a day if you want to see your efforts pay off.

After writing your 300-500 word article, you will want to submit them to the top article directories. The top 5 article directories rank well in the search engines and can deliver to you a lot of traffic to your blog. This is a free way to get traffic and to earn money with AdSense on your blog, but like I said earlier – you will have to stick with it in order to see the results that you desire. Here’s another free way to get traffic.

2) Forum marketing

You can really skyrocket your traffic by joining a high traffic forum in your niche. When joining a forum, you will want to stick with giving great ideas that the members will find useful. Sometimes people join forums just to use it as a vehicle of spamming their message across the forum boards. This is something that you don’t want to do. Instead, stick to giving helpful advice. Most forums allow you to advertise your marketing message in the signature of your forums, so this is where you want to place your blog information at.

3) Classified advertising

Don’t overlook the power of using classified advertising to bring traffic to your blog. There are a ton of people using Craigslist to drive a ton of traffic to their website, and you can do the same. There’s another site called usfreeads.com that you can use to drive traffic to your blog. You can use it to back link to your blog posts to increase their rankings in the search engines. Classified advertising still works but like anything, it takes a while for it to deliver the results.

All in all these techniques can help you to earn the money with AdSense that you desire.

If you’re blogging on the WordPress platform,the first thing you’ll probably do is to install a new WordPress theme. Even if you’ve been blogging for years you may still be a theme “addict”, wasting a lot of time doing minor modifications that when summed up merely distracts you from blogging itself.

It’s actually easy to see why this single aspect of running a blog demands so much attention. With the correct theme, you can accommodate all the nifty little widgets and codes, and may also mean better search engine rankings and tons of fresh traffic every day.

So what are the factors you need to consider to make theme-hunting easier? Here are five important ingredients:

1) Theme Width and Columns

Typically, WordPress themes come in 2-column or 3-column formats, with widths ranging from 500 pixels to 960 pixels wide. If you’re blogging for non-profit purposes, a 2-column theme can look more compact and reader-friendly. Since you have less images of products or links to other sites to display, you can focus exclusively on the content without leading readers away from your site.

On the other hand, if you’re blogging for profit, you may want to consider a 3-column WordPress theme that will be able to accommodate your Google Adsense, Chitika and Text Link Ads codes comfortably without squeezing everything in the content area. 3-column themes allow room for expansion, but in the event that you’ve filled up all available space with ads, then it’s time you removed the non-performers and use only the advertising services that work for that particular blog.

2) Use of Images and Icons

A theme with images and icons can look good, but it rarely increases your web traffic or subscriber base. In fact, most “A-list” bloggers have plain vanilla themes with a simple logo on top. Reducing the amount of images also means faster loading time and less stress on your servers. This vital aspect of server load become apparent only if you have tens of thousands of visitors a day, but it’s worth designing for the future.

A image-laden theme also distracts readers from the content itself. This is the reason why blogs like Engadget and Tech Crunch use images intensively in the content areas to add value to a post, but the theme itself is simple and rather minimalist.

Ideally, a theme should allow you to use your own header image for stronger branding purposes, yet replace images and icons with links and text, or just not use them at all unless absolutely necessary.

3) Compatibility with Plugins

Another time-sucking activity is installing plugins that improve the functionality of your site. There’s a plugin out there for almost everything you want to do with your blog, but while most of them are free and easily obtainable, it’s not always easy to install the plugins and insert the codes into your WordPress theme.

If your theme is too complicated, it may be a headache to even insert that one line of code you need to make a plugin work. This is often the case with advanced AJAX-based WordPress themes that have too many files and heavy coding. I’ve always preferred a simpler themes that stick to the default WordPress theme as much as possible, so I can cut back on the learning curve and just get on with my life.

Remember that the purpose of your blog is to deliver timely, relevant content to your readers, Any theme that preserves or improves the reader experience is good, any theme that subtracts from the experience is bad.

4) Search Engine Optimization

A lot can be said about search engine optimization, but at the end of the day if you have content worth reading eventually you’ll get the rankings you deserve. That doesn’t mean that you don’t need SEO; all it means is that what you really need to do is to make sure:

(a) Your

(b) All your blog content titles use the H1 tag, with the main keywords used instead of non-descriptive text for better SEO relevance

(b) Your theme has clean source codes, and if possible all formatting is linked to an external CSS file which you can edit independently

5) Plug-And-Play Ease of Use

Can the theme be installed easily on an existing blog without having to move things around? Can the same theme be used and customized easily on your other blogs? These are some additional things you may want to consider when theme-shopping, especially if every minute of downtime on your blog may mean lost revenue.

While it’s hard to make comparisons due to the sheer amount of free and paid themes out there, it’s still a good idea to have a test blog site. Test any theme you plan on using, and make sure your test blog is also fitted with all the plugins and miscellaneous widgets used on your real blog. The last thing you want is for your readers start seeing weird error messages on your blog.

At the end of the day, a theme is just a theme. Instead of spending your time installing them, it may be wiser to outsource the task and focus more on your readers. Alternatively, you may also want to consider buying “plug-and-play” themes for a reasonable price. Dennis De’ Bernardy of ProWordPress.com has probably one of the best themes around, but if you’re short on cash there are certainly cheaper alternatives.

Knowing how to upgrade WordPress is an important skill that you will need to have if you want to keep your WordPress blog up to date.

There are many reasons you want to keep your WordPress blog up to date. Most importantly are security issues. Keeping your WordPress installation up to date will ensure that you have plugged up the latest security holes in your blog.

Of course there are always new features, templates and plugins that come along with each new WordPress upgrade. Being able to take advantage of new WordPress plugins, features and themes will ensure your blog is always on the cutting edge of technology.

*Important! Before upgrading WordPress either automatically or manually you must:

1. Check the requirements to make sure your host is running the required versions of PHP and MySQL.
2. Make a backup of your database so you are sure that you don’t lose any of your posts and pages.
3. Make sure your plugins and theme will work with the upgraded WordPress installation.
4. Disable your plugins for the upgrade process by using the Bulk Action to deactivate all your plugins at once.
5. If your plugins or theme will not work with the new WordPress installation you will either have to wait to upgrade until the plugins and theme are upgraded also to work with the new WordPress version, or you will have to forgo using the plugins and/or theme.
6. There have been times where I have used a plugin or theme that was not upgraded to work with the latest WordPress version. Sometimes I was successful and sometimes I wasn’t. I do not recommend using plugins or themes that have not been approved with the upgraded WordPress theme if you want to have a stable WordPress installation.

Manually upgrade WordPress

First I will go over how to upgrade WordPress manually.

1. To upgrade WordPress manually you will need to download the updated WordPress version.
2. You will also need to unzip WordPress to a folder on your hard drive (try not to forget where you put it).
3. Now you will need to open up your FTP program and log into your site.
4. You will want to note where you WordPress is installed. Whether it is in your root folder or whether you have installed it in another folder such as /blog.
5. Once you have located your WordPress installation folder on your web site, you will want to navigate to the updated WordPress files you unzipped on your hard drive (you did remember where you put it, didn’t you?).
6. You will then need to upload the upgraded WordPress files on your hard drive (folders and all) to the corresponding folders on your web site. Important! The wp-content folder is the only exception to overwriting the files. If you have any special WordPress themes or plugins you are using you will not want to overwrite this folder or you will lose your WordPress theme and have to re-upload them.
7. After you have uploaded all your WordPress files, you will want to go back to your browser and log into your WordPress blog on your site.
8. If your database needs to be updated also then WordPress will display a link to update your database that you can click on and follow directions.
9. At this point you will want to make sure everything is working properly as well as check the WordPress version to make sure you uploaded everything correctly and your WordPress upgrade took effect.

Automatically install WordPress theme

If you like to take the safe and easy route like me then you will want to let WordPress do all the work for you and upgrade WordPress automtically.

1. To put WordPress to work you will need to first log into your blog.
2. Once you are logged in you should see a message at the top of the screen stating you need to update WordPress if you have an out of date installation. If you don’t see a message you will want to go to your dashboard and click the updates option.
3. You will see your version of WordPress displayed with a message as to whether or not you need to upgrade WordPress.
4. WordPress will ask you for your connection information and proceed to update once you have entered this information.
5. Note: If you customized the default or classic theme then you will need to back up these files to re-upload one the WordPress upgrade is completed or you will need to manually upgrade WordPress.
6. Once you are sure everything is working correctly you can go in and enable your plugins.

Once you get the hang of it, updating WordPress is not that difficult. It is not something you will be doing daily but as people find new security holes and add new features, you will find that you will need to know how to update WordPress periodically.

Blogging has become a very popular method for sharing knowledge, discuss viewpoints, personalize your business and increase the opportunity for inbound links and traffic. Given the increasing popularity of blogging today, it has become imperative that you choose the perfect medium for posting your blogs. Blogger and WordPress are two leading blogging platforms that have gained in popularity over the years.

Blogger can be described as a popular free hosted blogging platform while WordPress is a popular self hosted blogging platform. However, recent times have seen a switch to more WordPress blogs than Blogger. In order to understand the reasons for this shift and whether it makes sense to switch or not to WordPress, it is important to understand the innate differences between the two and the advantages of one over the other.

WordPress allows you to freely host your blog site onto your hosted website or anywhere else for that matter, which is not possible with a Blogger blog. WordPress hosted on your own server under your own domain will help much more with SEO than having a Blogger account at a separate Blogger URL which directs traffic to them and doesn’t keep them on your site.

The amount of control you exercise over your blog site is limited in Blogger as you do not have the option of choosing your content etc but in a WordPress blog, you are given complete control of your blogging content, which makes the latter more compatible for those wanting to market their businesses.
WordPress blogs provides you with more options for customization than Blogger blogs. While this may be intimidating to a novice, it is not very difficult to learn or master.

Changing your layouts and templates using WordPress is very simple and can take place even if you are not aware of programming or coding. However, this is not the case with Blogger blogs, where you need to understand coding, if you want to make changes to your template.

While both WordPress and Blogger offers the user a variety of plug-ins and widgets to use from and create a blog site, it is important to note that WordPress offers more variety and types in comparison to Blogger, whose options are pretty limited in the area. Moreover, the kind of widgets offered by WordPress are more sophisticated than the Blogger ones, like those that allow you to keep track of traffic to your website or even allow you to put up spam filters and the like to ensure good traffic to your website.

It is interesting to note that with WordPress, you can create static pages and generate SEO friendly links with the click of a single button, which again is not possible with Blogger, although many may argue that Blogger is more recognized by Google, as it is owned by Google.

Though both blogs are easily picked up by RSS feeds, a WordPress blog can actually help you monitor your tracking statistics, which makes it more attractive in the long run as the same is not possible with Blogger.

WordPress is an easy to use blogging software, and has quickly become one of the most widely used blogging formats out there. You have a choice whether to set up your blog through WordPress.com or WordPress.org. Below is a guide to choosing the right WordPress software for your small business needs.

WordPress.com pros
WordPress.com offers a fast and easy way to set up your blog. It is a free multi-user source to sign up and publish your blog immediately. You are given a selected number of themes from which to choose.

WordPress.com is backed up and managed by WordPress, thus you don’t have to worry about backing up your posts. Your blog is hosted on hundreds of servers, so you never have to worry about it going down. You also don’t need to worry about spam, setup, upgrades, or security because it is all taken care of for you.

WordPress.com cons
You are not able to upload your own themes and pug-ins. In addition, WordPress.com will not allow you to post Google AdSense ads or affiliate links. However, WordPress may on occasion show Google text ads on your site.

WordPress.com does offer a VIP program that allows you to run custom themes, custom PHP code, and plug-ins. This is offered to blogs with high traffic and that are high profile.

WordPress.org pros
WordPress.org allows you to install any of the plug-ins and themes available. You have complete control over the way your site looks and will not be viewed as another run of the mill site. Also, WordPress plug-ins expands the functionality of your site.

WordPress.org cons
You need a hosting provider that allows you to use MySQL databases and FTP access. Typically a host provider will cost you less than $7 a month. You can find these services at GoDaddy.com or Bluehost.com.

WordPress.org requires a significant amount of technical knowledge to set up and run. You are also responsibly for backing up your content, handling spam issues, and issues with down sites due to high traffic. Essentially, it places full responsibility on your as the blogger.

Choosing between the two
Your best bet is to start at WordPress.com to learn the Dashboard and how WordPress works. The start up is free and you can then decide if you want to blog or host your own website. Once you understand how WordPress works, you can export your content to your self-hosted WordPress site.

If you want your blog to appear more professional, WordPress.com offers you upgrades for a low cost that allow you to host a domain through them. So, instead of your website appearing as abc.WordPress.com, it will appear as abc.com.

Though WordPress.org has limitation on support, they offer a great forum filled with useful information to help you keep your site running smoothly. You also have options for plug-ins that allow emailing newsletters and other information to your client base.

WordPress.com pros
WordPress.com offers a fast and easy way to set up your blog. It is a free multi-user source to sign up and publish your blog immediately. You are given a selected number of themes from which to choose.

WordPress.com is backed up and managed by WordPress, thus you don’t have to worry about backing up your posts. Your blog is hosted on hundreds of servers, so you never have to worry about it going down. You also don’t need to worry about spam, setup, upgrades, or security because it is all taken care of for you.

WordPress.com cons
You are not able to upload your own themes and pug-ins. In addition, WordPress.com will not allow you to post Google AdSense ads or affiliate links. However, WordPress may on occasion show Google text ads on your site.

WordPress.com does offer a VIP program that allows you to run custom themes, custom PHP code, and plug-ins. This is offered to blogs with high traffic and that are high profile.

WordPress.org pros
WordPress.org allows you to install any of the plug-ins and themes available. You have complete control over the way your site looks and will not be viewed as another run of the mill site. Also, WordPress plug-ins expands the functionality of your site.

WordPress.org cons
You need a hosting provider that allows you to use MySQL databases and FTP access. Typically a host provider will cost you less than $7 a month. You can find these services at GoDaddy.com or Bluehost.com.

WordPress.org requires a significant amount of technical knowledge to set up and run. You are also responsibly for backing up your content, handling spam issues, and issues with down sites due to high traffic. Essentially, it places full responsibility on your as the blogger.

Choosing between the two
Your best bet is to start at WordPress.com to learn the Dashboard and how WordPress works. The start up is free and you can then decide if you want to blog or host your own website. Once you understand how WordPress works, you can export your content to your self-hosted WordPress site.

If you want your blog to appear more professional, WordPress.com offers you upgrades for a low cost that allow you to host a domain through them. So, instead of your website appearing as abc.WordPress.com, it will appear as abc.com.

Though WordPress.org has limitation on support, they offer a great forum filled with useful information to help you keep your site running smoothly. You also have options for plug-ins that allow emailing newsletters and other information to your client base.

If you’re new to blogger then you’ll be happy to know there are some simple blogger tricks and tips that you can use today while using Blogger and WordPress free.

Getting traffic is one of the biggest challenges for making money in affiliate marketing.  One of the best ways to increase your search engine rankings, and to start driving traffic to your affiliate sales sites is to create a web or funnel of sites within your market.

Let’s take a look at using Google’s Blogger to create a free blog that helps us create our sales funnel.  If you have a Google Gmail account, you can go to Blogger.com and setup a new blog in just a few moments.  If you don’t already have a Google Account, it will take you a few more minutes to create an account, but you will still have a new blog up and running in less than 10 minutes.

Even though Blogger offers you an opportunity to “Monetize” your site, I usually avoid this.  The monetize portion of Blogger places AdSense ads on your blog, and for an affiliate marketer, that detracts from moving people through our funnel to the offer we want to promote.  I use Blogger to host a few articles related to my niche, usually choosing topics with lower search results and low competition for my posts.  I keep my highest quality content, and phrases for my money making sites.  I create links to my primary affiliate sales sites from my Blogger sites, using my targeted keywords as the text of the link.  You should social bookmark your blogger posts, to make sure the search engines locate the posts.  Since I’m working on very low competition phrases, these pages sometimes rank well, passing more relevance on to my main sites.

Don’t worry too much about the appearance of your Blogger site, we are primarily using it to pass people and search engine ranking onto our affiliate marketing sites.

You should also take the time to create a free WordPress blog at WordPress.com.  I use it in almost an identical manner to Blogger.  One of the big difference between Blogger and WordPress.com, is the monetize feature.  You will not find a monetize feature on WordPress.com, but unless pay for a Premium account they may display their ads to your visitors.  Again, this not a big thing to worry about.  We are using the WordPress.com blog to increase the number of back links to our main sites, and to be able to target phrases we may not want to use on our main money making sites.

If you are using WordPress for your affiliate marketing web sites, then you’ll be very familiar with the WordPress.com interface.  You will have less features on your free blog, but they are not features we need for creating links to our affiliate sales pages.

Adding free WordPress and Blogger pages into your web of sites will bring traffic into your sales funnel, and increased ranking to your affiliate marketing sites.  Both WordPress and Blogger are regularly crawled by Google, which helps your main money site be found and regularly crawled, also.

Using the power of Blogger and WordPress free blogs, can help you produce more traffic in your sales funnel, which creates more opportunity to make higher profits in your affiliate business.  These blogger tricks and WordPress tips are easy to implement and a great way to get started.