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 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% [?]

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% [?]

I wanted to provide links to a couple SEO videos that I thought everyone would benefit from. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a hot topic for every online business and often the most confusing. Hopefully these two videos will help point you in the right direction.

This past week at MIX one of the presentations I sat in on was Advanced SEO for Web Developers by Nathan Buggia, Lead Program Manager for Live’s Webmaster Tools. Although it’s titled Advanced SEO I think it provides a good introductory overview of certain things you should and should not be doing with your search engine optimization efforts and encourage everyone to watch the video (linked to below).

Another great video is by Matt Cutts titled, Whitehat SEO tips for Bloggers, given at wordcamp 07 in San Francisco and was recorded by Jeremy Pozadzides . The video is geared towards blogging but is a great overall video for solid, clean SEO advice.

Popularity: 3% [?]