Appliedi.net Windows Web Hosting Blog

In our earlier videos in this series we’ve covered the follow topics.

• Install WordPress with just one click via the control panel.
• How to configure the basic settings for wordpress, including Search Engine Friendly URLS.
• How to upgrade WordPress to the latest version manually
• How to automatically upgrade WordPress if you’re running 2.6 or later.
• Most Recently, How to change your theme in WordPress.

In this video we’re going to install some core plug-ins to extend our blog and make it a more powerful Search Engine Optimization and Marketing tool.

Plugins are a powerful way to add additional functionality and features to your blog. They include everything from protecting your blog from spammers, changing the way your headers and meta tags display, to even embedding videos or widgets into your blog.

The Plugins We’ll Cover

In this tutorial we’re going to cover the following plugins:

1. Akismet: to keep those pesky spammers at bay
2. Sociable: for making your blog social website friendly and making it easier for your visitors to tag your blog
3. All in One SEO Pack: to make your blog standout in the search engines and tweak your settings and features to make them more search engine spider friendly.

The Video

The video steps you through the process of installing Akismet, Sociable and the “All in One SEO Pack”. Once installed you’re able to extend your blog and these topics will be covered in depth in Rapid Domination.

[flv]http://www.appliedi.net/blog/uploads/wordpress-plugins.flv[/flv]

Getting Started

The first step in this process will be to access our site via the WordPress Dashboard. This is usually found by going to your site at http://www.domain.com/blog/wp-admin/ where domain.com your domain name and blog is the folder you’ve installed wordpress in. The WordPress Dashboard looks like the image below:

Once inside your dashboard, you’ll click on the Plugins option in the left column menu and this will bring up the Plugins Manager screen:

Finding plugins to install.

If you scroll down your screen you’ll see a link for the new “Plug-in Browser/Installer” using this tool we’ll be able review available plugins on the wordpress site and install the plugins we’d like to use. We’ll click that link and soon our blog will look similar to the below image:

Once we’re on this screen, we know the plugins we want to install so in the search box we’ll enter:  “Sociable” and when the listing comes up we’ll select the install link under Actions for the plug-in we want:

The screen will change like below and we’ll select the option “Install Update Now”

The program will start automatically installing your plug-in for you and after a few minutes you’ll see a screen like below:

You can now activate the plug-in or find another plug-in to install. Go ahead and repeat this process now to install “All in one SEO Pack” but putting in the search terms “SEO Pack” and following the above process for this plug-in.

The other plug-in we’re installing is Akismet and it’s installed by default.

Activating your plugins.

Once your plugins are installed, it’s really easy to activate them.  You’ll navigate back to the plugins page and click the activate link next to each plug-in you want to activate:

If you find things go wrong with one of these plugins you deactivate it by clicking the deactivate link:

If after activating a plug-in you find wordpress won’t load and you’re not able to deactivate the plug-in. Just FTP into your site and navigate to the folder wp-content/plugins under your blog folder and delete the folder for the plug-in in question.

Keeping your plugins up to date

From time to time you’ll log into your blog and find that you have a little number next to the plugins. in the left. This means there’s that many plugins that need to be updated:

Clicking on the plugins link will take you to the plugins manager and you’ll be able to see exactly which plugins need to be updated:

Just like installing plugins automatically we can also upgrade automatically. Simply click on the upgrade automatically link and the plug-in will be downloaded, upgraded and reactivated automatically:

and if all goes well you’ll see the plug-in was reactivated successfully as highlighted above.

Conclusion

In a later installment on this blog we’ll cover how to get the most benefit out of these plugins. In the meantime I’d encourage you to check out some of the other plugins available for your wordpress installation. Some of my favorites are:

• headspace
• odiogo
• Wassup
• fickrRSS
• StatPress
• NextGEN Gallery (great for creating family photo galleries).

Popularity: 9% [?]

In our earlier WordPress tutorials we covered how to:

• Install WordPress with just one click via the control panel.
• How to configure the basic settings for wordpress, including Search Engine Friendly URLS.
• How to upgrade WordPress to the latest version manually
• How to automatically upgrade WordPress if you’re running 2.6 or later.

In this video we’ll cover how to update your WordPress blog with one of the million+ custom themes available from the WordPress website.

The Video

Here’s a video that you’ll be able to use to watch as I install and configure a couple themes in our fictional/development blog at acme-hosting.net.

[flv]http://www.appliedi.net/blog/uploads/themes-final.flv[/flv]

Getting Started

To get started you’re going to want to log into your WordPress dashboard, this is the area you’ll use to administer your blog. It’s found at www.domain.com/wp-admin where www.domain.com is your actual domain name and it usually looks something like the below picture:

After you’ve logged in you’ll click on ‘Appearance’ in the left hand column which will bring up the Manage Themes options:

Testing & Activating a new theme

By default you’ll only see two themes in your installation the Classic theme and the Default theme. But these are good enough to demonstrate how to test and then activate your theme. In my image above I have two themes you probably don’t have japan-style and Pixeled, I’ll explain how to get these themes in the next step, for the time being though we’ll try to activate the Pixeled theme.

To select a new theme design just click on it’s thumbnail image and you’ll get a popup window showing you what your blog will now look like with the new theme applied:

To accept the new design, just click on the Activate “Theme Name” in the top right corner:

If you prefer not to use this theme design, then click on the ”x” in the top left corner:

and select another Theme.

Once you’ve activated your theme you’ll now have a fresh new look for your blog and can begin experimenting and tweaking it as you please.

Getting More Themes

WordPress has over a million FREE themes available in their repository and many more available across the Internet as premium/paid themes for a small fee. You can access the theme directory at: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/.  You’ll want to find a theme you like and then click the download link to download that theme to your local computer as a compressed ZIP file. You’ll then extract that folder to your hard drive and upload it to your website.

You’ll upload the theme to the wp-content/themes folder under your blog folder. For my blog site at acme-hosting.net this folder is shown here:

As you can see I FTP’d into my site, navigated to the wp-content/themes folder and then copied over my theme folders (japan-style, pixeled and ZZZZ). Once I’ve uploaded my themes to my wordpress site I can then go back to the wordpress dashboard and refresh the Appearance option and should see my themes appear for use on my blog.

Conclusion

I hope you have found this tutorial useful. There’s millions of great themes out there for your wordpress blog and with just a little web experience they are extremely easy to publish and use on your wordpress blog.

Popularity: 2% [?]

In this video we’ll walk you through upgrading your WordPress installation from the 2.6 version to the newer 2.7 version.  As with any web application it’s important to keep the software up to date and free of any software defects (bugs) or security vulnerabilities.  WordPress is in wide use and actively developed against and as such this is a process you’ll find yourself doing from time to time.

This video is a demonstration of one method to upgrade your WordPress installation.

[flv]http://www.appliedi.net/blog/uploads/wordpress-upgrade.flv[/flv]

Popularity: 3% [?]

It has been widely observed that Google likes domains that are aged. You might have heard the term, ‘Google Sandbox’ thrown around in marketing and SEO forums. This term refers to the amount of time it takes from when a site goes live to when it begins to receive Google rankings. Wikipedia has a great explanation of this.

Here’s the Hot Tip!

Do you own domain names that are just sitting and not being hosted? Have you been wondering what to do with them? Maybe you’re currently building out a site for them? Maybe you’re waiting to build them out?  These domains are the perfect opportunity to utilize a blog!

By putting a blog on your domain while you are in the process of building out your site, you will cut down on the time you spend in the ‘Google Sandbox’. Then when your site goes live, you will be ready for ranking.

It is also a good idea to put up a splash page on your main domain, www.domain.com. You can say ‘Coming Soon’ or ‘About Us’ and add a link to your blog. (Don’t forget, be sure to place your blog in a subfolder with a keyword like: /keyword-blog/).

Remember, you must use the blog and post to it regularly. At first, the content does not matter so much as you are really using it to escape the dreaded ‘Sandbox’. This is a great way to use those domains that you have thought about but haven’t decided what to do with yet.

It’s Simple but Effective.

This tip is simple but it can make the difference between launching a successful site that starts to rank in organic searches or one that waits months for FREE traffic.

Where to go now?

In Conclusion, If you have a domain not being hosted it is not benefiting you in any way. Hosting the domain and putting up a blog adds value to the domain and gets it ready for when you want to use it. You can also monetize off this domain immediately. By implementing something like Google Adsense on your blog.  By building traffic, this also makes it much more desirable if you are thinking about selling the domain down the road as you can show revenue and traffic. We will take about buying/selling domains and monetizing your blog in future articles.

So what are you waiting for? Dust of those domains that are just sitting dormant and get them hosted! For the small investment in a shared hosting account will give you big returns in the future. Best of all your shared hosting account probably includes support for multiple domains already.

Popularity: 5% [?]

The first series of Rapid Domination videos and articles is covering the installation and configuration of WordPress as a blogging tool. WordPress will provide the framework we’ll use to leverage Social Networks and Search Engines to gain exposure for our websites through RSS feeds, Syndication, Podcasting and even viral video distribution.

In this next video we discuss the basic configuration of WordPress and provide a basic overview of some of the settings in WordPress.

[flv]http://www.appliedi.net/blog/uploads/basic-wordpress-config.flv[/flv]

Step 1. Defining the URL.

The first thing we learned was that when installing a blog on your website for Rapid Domination it’s advised to publish the blog to a subfolder with a name of “keyword-blog”.  For example, on the acme-hosting.net blog, we would want to target the keyword “web hosting” we should use one of the following possible URLs:

http://www.acme-hosting.net/webhosting-blog/
http://www.acme-hosting.net/web-hosting-blog/

By building the URL in this fashion we’re positioning our most important search engine keyword “Web hosting” to the left most position of our address bar letting the search engines know that this folder is about “web hosting” first and foremost.  We also used dashes “-“ to separate words. There are many different recommendations on whether to seperate words or not separate words in this manner. Some recommend a structure like this in fact:

http://www.acme-hosting.net/WebHostingBlog/

We prefer to use dashes because we feel it makes it easier to read for your visitors.  When optimizing your site for search engines it’s important to also remember you’re ultimately developing your site for humans and although the search engines are important, you want to make your easy to navigate and accessible for your visitors so they buy your products or services.

Step 2. General WordPress Settings

When you log into the WordPress Dashboard and access the Settings tab you’ll find a few General Settings you’ll want to adjust:

Blog Title: You’ll want to set this to the title of your blog.

Blog Tagline: Just a short description about your blog. Something like “Web Hosting and Web Application Technologies Discussions and News” would be fitting for the acme hosting blog.

WordPress Address and Blog Address: should already be set for you.

E-mail Address: This is the email address you’ll get notifications from.

Membership: This is important and will help protect against blog spam. We recommend Users be required to register and be logged in to comment.

The other settings relate to localization, date, time, etc and can be set to what’s most comfortable for you (usually the defaults are fine).

Step 3: Writing Settings

These settings are typically set already be default. There are two things we’ll want to adjust though but that can be done now or later. One is the default post category. Once you’ve started adding blogs you’ll want to categorize them. As you publish articles you can save a little time by setting the default post category to the category you find yourself using the most (Web Hosting News, General Items, etc).  The other setting we want to go ahead and change now is to enable XML-RPC. This will allow us later to publish to our blog using remote post editors like Windows Live Writer.

Step 4: Discussion Settings

One of the things you may want to adjust in the Discussion Settings is how Avatars appear next to comments. Each comment can have a custom icon next to it. These used to be seperate plugins for wordpress but are now built into the core system:

Step 5: Privacy Settings

It’s really important you make sure your blog is visible to engines:

Step 6: Miscellaneous Settings

We’re stepping a bit out of order here but the Miscellaneous settings we typically don’t change but as each website is unique you may find you want to change settings here at some point.

Step 7: Permalinks Settings

Configuring Permalinks is really the key concept in this article in the first Series. A permalink is a permanent URL that your users will reference to get to your blog article.

The settings we’re going to recommend you use for permalinks are in the image below:

The Custom Structure we’re using:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

Will give us a URL like:

http://www.acme-hosting.net/webhosting-blog/2008/12/02/sample-post/

Once you’ve set your permalinks settings here and saved the changes. There’s one other step we need to take and that’s to configure/enable Isapi-Rewrite 3.0 from HeliconTech.com.  Isapi-Rewrite is included free in all shared hosting plans at Applied Innovations so it’s something you already have included in your hosting account at no additional cost.

In order to configure isapi-rewrite you’ll create a blank text document called htaccess.txt and in that file you’ll put the following lines:

You’ll want to change the highlighted area to reflect your blog’s URL. You’ll then use an FTP client to upload this file to the folder your blog resides in (keyword-blog) and rename the file from htaccess.txt to .htaccess.  Once you’ve done this your permalinks will work. Please note it’s VERY IMPORTANT to upload this file to your site or permalinks will not work correctly and your blog may become inaccessible until you disable permalinks.  For more detailed instructions on this step please watch the video at the beginning of this article.

Upcoming Videos & Tutorials

In our next videos in this tutorial series we’ll discuss the blog theme and how to change it, how to enable plugins and finally how to publish to your blog remotely.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Two hours ago we announced Rapid Domination, our newest customer education/marketing effort. The name we admit, takes a little time to grow on you. But when you consider the premise behind this is to provide you (the AppliedI.net hosting customer) the tools and advice you need to quickly become successful at online marketing, it starts to make sense.  Yes it took me a few hours too to understand it was not only a good name but the only name that really described the service correctly.

So does Rapid Domination actually work?

The obvious question is going to be, is this actually going to work or is it just a clever marketing gimmick? We believe it will work and there’s no better way to demonstrate that then with a little screenshot proof.

We published the first blog articles about Rapid Domination just 2 hours ago and were already indexed by Google and currently rank #1, #4 and #5 on the first page of Google out of 4.1 MILLION Results. Here’s a screenshot to show you Rapid Domination is more than a clever marketing name:

Popularity: 1% [?]

Adding a blog to your website will give you numerous benefits to your search engine ranking.

Two of the most important aspects of a blog are the ability to easily add content to your website and building links to your content which will cause search engines like Google to index your site more frequently. Before you begin you must decide where to install your blog. You have several choices:

• Install your blog on a sub-domain (example: http://blog.domain.com)
• Installing your blog in a sub-folder (example: http://domain.com/blog/)
• Installing your blog as its own website on a new and entirely different domain name (example http://domainblog.com)

For the purposes of this blog entry we will be discussing the effects of installing your blog within a sub-folder or on a sub-domain and later we will discuss the advantages of adding an additional blog on a separate domain (option 3) at a later date.

Option 1: Installing your blog on a sub-domain

A sub-domain in Google is considered a separate site for SEO purposes. For example, Google sees myblog.mydomain.com as being different from www.mydomain.com/myblog.

For this reason, when initially setting up your blog it will benefit you to set it up with a sub-folder. At a later point we will discuss why setting up your blog on a sub-domain could be beneficial.

Option 2: Installing your blog in a folder within a sub-folder

We recommend installing your blog in a sub-folder within your primary website. Installing a blog directly on your site in this manner will help your main website www.mydomain.com to increase your rankings the search engines by building several links to your main website and providing fresh content on your main website to keep the search engine spiders frequently visiting your site.

We support numerous different blogging applications and tools. One of the most commonly used though is the opensource and free WordPress. Through this series of articles we’ll use WordPress, ofcourse these same principles apply to other blogging platforms.

A great feature in our control panel is the Application Packs installer. With the Application Packs installer you can install several different applications with just a couple mouse clicks.

To learn how to install a blog directly on your website, such as the free blog platform WordPress in your web hosting control panel, watch the easy to follow video below.

[flv]http://www.appliedi.net/blog/uploads/applied-wordpress-rapid110408.flv[/flv]

Over the next few articles in this first series we will be taking a in-depth look at how to customize your WordPress blog and maximize its SEO benefits. We’ll also discuss how to use use your new SEO friendly blog to increase your rankings in the search engines and much much more. So in the meantime, it’s a great time to follow the video and install your WordPress blog.

Stay tuned to learn more about your new WordPress blog.

If your are not currently a customer of Appliedi.net and would like to receive more information on blogging or our services, please contact us today at 866-706-8691 or visit us at http://www.appliedi.net

Popularity: 19% [?]

Appliedi.net announces the FREE new resource Rapid Domination that we’re making available to all clients. You may be asking what is Rapid Domination and why are we offering such a valuable resource for FREE?

Rapid Domination is a free resource for all of our current and future clients that will include expert SEO and Marketing advice to help you reach your business goals. Some of the topics we will be covering include:

Basic to advanced search engine optimization (SEO)

• Link Building
• Pay Per Click advertising
• The importance of utilizing social media marketing
• Blogging
• Podcasting
• Creating professional Videos
• Marketing tactics
• And so much more!

This will truly prove to be a valuable resource that will help you achieve top results in the search engines, drive traffic to your website, increase your conversion ratio and rapidly dominate your competition.

Why are we giving such valuable information away for FREE?

We always strive to go above and beyond our clients’ expectations and offer service and support that is unparalleled in the web hosting industry. With the recent downturns in the economny, it’s more important than ever to focus on your marketing efforts and grow your business while your competitors stand still. We want your business to grow.

Over the next few weeks our hosting clients will receive a username and password allowing access to a private members-only area. In this private area you will find latest tactics in SEO and Internet Marketing that go beyond the very basics to some of our experts best kept secrets.

With the introduction of Rapid Domination, we will also be developing other valuable resources such as video tutorials, webinars, site reviews, offering question and answer forums and much more.

This is also an exciting time for Appliedi.net users.

We recently launched our Windows 2008 shared hosting platform and at the same time launched the availability of shared SQL2008 hosting and upgraded our listmanager service. In addition we’re busy preparing to roll out an even broader range of new products, services and partnerships to help you continue to build your business.

Popularity: 2% [?]