Hosting Your Own Blog

Hosting your own blog gives search engines a reason to keep revisiting

your website. It is important as I mentioned before that you update

your blog several times per week. Below you'll find some

recommended free software for hosting your own blog.

WordPress

All my blogging sites use WordPress as I believe it is the best blogging

script available. It's very easy to install and you can go live within just

a few minutes.

Download: http://wordpress.org/download/

By default WordPress gives you the ability to choose if you want

Search Engine Friendly URLS for your blog, but I've taken that a step

further. You will only be able to follow the instructions I'm giving below

if you already have WordPress installed.

If you have WordPress installed add this line of code to your

"Permalinks" section:

/%postname%.htm

Input the above code into the line that says "Custom Structure" and

ensure that you have the check placed in the "Custom, specify below"

under Common Options.

What this does is give your blog highly optimizable search engine

friendly URLS. Every blog post you make will have a keyword rich URL

based on the subject of your blog. For example if your blog post was

"Caribbean Recipes" your URL would be

http://yoursite.com/caribbean-recipes.html.

It's a nice handy trick to get more search engine friendly URLS out of

WordPress to ensure that your keywords appear not only in the

subject but also in the page URL.

Blogging Themes

Now that you've got your blog setup, I know that by default WordPress

skin may not be too pleasing to you. Let's change that by installing a

new theme. The sites below offer some free themes that you can use

and customize.

WordPress Themes Viewer

http://themes.wordpress.net/

Alex Kings' Theme Viewer

http://www.alexking.org/index.php?content=software/wordpress/themes.php


Kaushal Sheth's Themes

http://www.kaushalsheth.com/themes/


Theme Porter

http://www.themeporter.com/tags/themes/


Browse through those four websites and select a theme that you like

best. You simply download the theme and upload it to your wp-content

themes directory, then activate the theme in the admin area of

Wordpress under presentations.

Blog Pinging

Here's one of the reasons I believe that WordPress is a great option for

blogging. WordPress has a built in "Ping" option that will notify all the

major blogging and RSS feed directories that you've made a new post

on your blog. This is automatically activated in the "Writing" section of

Word Press. If you scroll to the bottom of the "Writing" section you will

see a section called "Update Services".

Below that you will see a URL link: http://rpc.pingomatic.com/.

Whenever you make a post on your blog, this option sends out a

notification to all the blogging directories that you have made a new

post and they usually automatically index it. Each time you make a

post this ping is automatically done ensuring that your feed is sent.

Blogging Regularly

Now that we've got the theme setup, the URLs for all your posts being

search engine friendly, your pings being automated, the next step is to

start blogging. Here comes the tough part, what am I blogging about?

It's important that your blog be about something you actually have

knowledge on, and can write about fluently. For example if your site is

about recipes, you can have your blog posts related to anything about

recipes, perhaps experiences you have had while preparing dishes,

etc.

When blogging remember you must be very personable, friendly and

seem easy to talk to. The reason for this is that with each post you

make you are trying to elicit a response from users. With WordPress

you have the option to enable comments. By having comments on

your blog enabled, it increases your popularity rating. The search

engines will visit and update your blog more often as it is constantly

changing by having new content. I recommend that in each blog post

you make, that you always ask questions, request feedback to ensure

that the people viewing your blog find a reason to actually post a

comment.
 
So if you’re new to this, I would use an existing blog service, which I mentioned in my pervious post.
 
I am walking you through how went from no hits a day on one of my web sites, Tatkraftsolar, to 180 plus, unique hits a day. I did this in just four days and it grew daily. I tested an Affiliate site and it went from 0 hits a day to 80 hits in the same four days.