First Steps On A Fresh WordPress Install

Published under Featured, Plugins, SEO.

As I’m sure most of you do too, I’m now managing a good handful of sites which are running WordPress. I’ve now got a solid routine going when it comes to getting WordPress up and running and in this post, I thought I’d share it with you.

Get the backups set up

On every site I run, I’ve got a double backup combination of WordPress Backup to Dropbox and BackupBuddy for complete peace of mind. One, as the name suggests, sends a nightly backup to my Dropbox, and the other one sends me an email with the backup attached.

With some of the sites I’m running these days, losing even a day’s work would be absolutely catastrophic. For example, along with six of my friends, I’m writing a book this year and we’re using a little WordPress install I’ve got set up. Losing even one day would more or less ruin the entire project; whilst backups in duplicate might be a little overkill, it’s my way of ensuring I’ve got complete peace of mind. With your site, you might decide you only need weekly backups; whatever it is, a regular backup schedule is essential. It doesn’t really matter what tools you use, either. Just so long as you’ve got something, that’s all that really matters.

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WordPress SEO Tips

Published under SEO.

I’ve always had questions about SEO, but nobody’s ever been able to explain it in such a way that sets out what it is, why it’s important and how I can benefit from it. This post aims to do exactly that, with the help of some people much more qualified to tell you about it than I am.

My thanks to three awesome people for their help in writing this: Nathan Rice, Lead Developer at Copyblogger Media, Jeff Starr, WordPress Editor at Smashing Magazine as well as author of the excellent Perishable Press and co-author of Digging into WordPress and finally Alex Moss, Head of SEO at Banc Media and a Partner at Pleer.

So what is SEO?

 SEO: “The optimization of web pages for success with search engines.”

Jeff hits the nail on the head when he describes SEO as “The optimization of web pages for success with search engines.” That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. Alex’s definition takes us through the slightly more complex definition:

“SEO is a process where you try to make a page, pages or domain as a whole get as high up as possible in search engines for the keywords you choose to target. These keywords would be chosen through research based on how hard it would be to get to page 1. The effect of SEO is made from 2 sources – one being what you do to the site/page itself and the other is based on how other websites link to you.”

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SEO Optimization For WordPress

Published under SEO.

Today I did something I’ve never done before: I started to “SEO Optimize” my WPShout posts, seeing which posts were doing well in search results and how I can make these posts do better in search results. I also had a fiddle around with my theme to make sure it was all in fine optimised order.

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