1. Keep in mind that appearance of the website is important to attract visitors and possible clients. However, it is no good for your website to be designed by the greatest professional out there if no one will see it.  For this reason, it is important to register your site with major search engines. Although eventually the primary search engine bots or spiders should crawl your site and index it, it will be a lot faster if you personally tell Google, Yahoo, and Bing that your site is up and running.

Give it a few weeks  and then check to see that your site has been indexed. I find that the best way to perform this is to download and install the Google toolbar, visit your page, and select the Cached Snaphost of Page option in the PageRank menu. Once you see your page left click on “text only version” to see how the spiders see your site.  The more text you see displayed on the cached text only version the better.

2. Install Google Webmaster tools and Google Analytics. Both of these services give you website feedback and errors.  Furthermore, Google Webmaster tools allows you to submit a sitemap of your website letting Google know where all the pages for yours site may be found.

3. Keep in mind that content that you put in your website can attract visitors to your site. So, keep the content interesting, informative and more importantly, original. Do not copy the content or articles from other sites. This will be unhealthy for the online business industry. And besides, some people may have already read the article and will not be attracted to do business with you.

4. It is important to use the Google keyword tool. This tool is part of Google AdWords (not to worry, no AdWords account is actually needed to use the tool). The keyword tool allows any user to see what other people are searching for in Google and how popular the search is.

5.  If you are choosing a new domain always include the keywords that your site is targeting. This will be easier for visitors to know what your business is all about. Instead of letting others know what your business name is, let them know what you are really offering through the keywords that you use in your site. It is more important to get possible clients than to let others know your business name.  In addition, this is also Search Engine Friendly and should help you rank better for the keywords you are targeting.

BONUS: Here is a bonus tip for local business; use tools like Google Places, Yahoo! Local and Bing Local. These will help you reach a wider range of possible clients by easily getting on the 1^st page of search engine results for local searches. More and more people are turning to the internet to find local business vs. the Yellow Pages.

SEO and other online skills are needed to make a business prosper through the website that you create for your online business. Do not just focus on the products or the services that you are offering. Also do an effort to make your business website as efficient and interesting as possible for you to generate the income that you want from it.

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.

• 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).

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.

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.