Appliedi.net Windows Web Hosting Blog

The highly anticipated and much talked about Rapid Domination blog is finally here.

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:

• Basics 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

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.

Accessing the Rapid Domination blog is very simple.

If you are a shared or reseller hosting customer login to http://control.appliedi.net and click on the Rapid Domination icon located on the right lower portion of the User Main Menu Screen.

If you are a VPS or a  Dedicated hosting customer login to https://secure.appliedi.net  and click on the Rapid Domination icon below the extra features section in the user main menu page.

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 economy, 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.

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.

Popularity: 7% [?]

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% [?]

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% [?]