SEO Tutorial Part-2
Introduction

Since this is the second edition of my SEO Tutorial series, I’m assuming that you have already bought a domain, or that you own a sub-domain. For the rest of the SEO Tutorial Part 2, I will be talking about the first things you should do after you have bought a site, or you have gotten one for free from a free host like freewebs.com, wordpress.com or any other free hosting site.
I should note, that with this part of the Series I will be mainly focusing on Wordpress rather than talking about all web sites in general.

Finding a Good Wordpress Template

Before you start reading this part of the tutorial, I am assuming that you are:

• Someone New to Wordpress.
• Someone who has already downloaded Wordpress.
• Someone who’s webhost has Cpanel.
• Someone who wants to know how to find and how to install a Wordpress Theme.

If you apply to those then I suggest you keep on reading as you will find it very useful .

The first thing you should do after obtaining a domain is finding a good template, Templates are one of the most important things a web site should have because a good Template can gain the Client’s attention and make him more interested in your blog/site.

I am speaking by experience when I tell you that a web site with a good sophisticated template can gain more members than a website with a simple template. It’s like a car, if you drive an old ugly 1975 yellow wagon (Sorry to those of you that still drive those :grin:) , people won’t look at you the same way they’d look if you were driving a 2007 Rolls Royce Phantom Silver.

In order for you to find a good Wordpress layout to use you need to spend a lot of time searching for the one that fits your needs, in my case I used this layout because it’s SEO friendly, and it lets me add Yahoo’s Publisher Network’s ads more easily than adding them manually at each of my posts.

Before I found this layout I spent countless hours trying out other SEO wordpress friendly layouts, but they were just not making me satisfied, that is until I stumbled upon this layout which I consider to be one of the best free Wordpress layouts ever.

There are many web sites with free SEO friendly Wordpress layouts, because of the tutorial I will mention a couple web sites that I have found that have very good Wordpress layouts that have actually helped me gain more knowledge in coding, since I had to edit many of the layouts that I downloaded in order to install over 10 annoying plugins (If you don’t know what a plug-in is then I suggest you keep on reading), this is a list of some of the sites that contain good layouts:

Installing a WordPress Theme

Once you find a template that you like, you can go ahead and install it. There are many ways to install a Wordpress Template and one of them (the one I use the most) is by using my Cpanel.
These are the steps that you have to follow in order to install a theme through Cpanel, and I will be very specific with the tutorial, I’m sorry if I bore you but I assure you that you will find it very helpful:

1. Log in to your Cpanel (It’s usually http://www.yourdomain/cpanel)
2. Go to where it says “File Manager” or “Legacy File Manager” (It does not matter which one you use), I’d suggest you use Legacy File Manager as it loads faster.
3. Once you are in the index of your folders click where it says “Public_html”, you might have to click the little blue manila folder, or the little globe on the right side of where it says “public_html” in order for it to open the Public_html folder.
4. When you are inside the Public_html folder, you should be seeing many folders, go and look for one of the folders that says “wp-content”, and open it just like you opened the Public_html folder.
5. Once you are in the Wp-Content folder, look for the folder that says “Themes” and open it, just like you’ve opened all the other folders.
6. Now this is the hardest part of the tutorial (It’s not really hard, I’m just adding suspense to keep you reading ), once inside the “Themes” folder, go to where it says “Upload Files” and click on it, once there click on the button that says “browse” and look for the folder that you download that contained the theme that you wanted.
7. Once the folder has been uploaded to your host, click on “go back” (you might have to refresh the page) and look for the folder you just uploaded, and then click on the letters, not the folder!, when you click on the letters a little menu bar on the right should come up giving you different options, like “delete”, “change permissions”, etc. Click on “Unzip file”, once the file is unzipped you can either delete it or leave it alone.
8. Once you’ve unzipped the file go to your Wordpress admin panel and go to where it says “Presentation” and there on that page, you should be different image of different layouts, all you have to do to change the layout is click on the image and instantly your layout will be changed. And that is it! That’s all there is to it. Congratulations, you’ve managed to download your first Wordpress Theme

Downloading Plugins

Now that you’ve managed to download your first theme you might be wondering if that is all there is to Wordpress, but the answer is NO! Wordpress has hundreds of other things to make your site better, and the most used are called “Plugins”. Plugins are little web applications that make Wordpress just like you want it. There are hundreds of many different Wordpress Plugins and all of them have a special purpose.
During the course of this tutorial, I will ask you to please download some plugins that I will have listed for you that are ready to download, I will also show you step by step how to download the plugins.

The following plugins have helped me a lot, and I would highly suggest you download them because they are really good at making your Wordpress blog a whole lot better and they also make your site more attractive, and help it have more content.

• Akismet is a Plugin that automatically deleted spam from your blog. You may not think you need it now, as your blog is not big enough to receive spam, but if you follow the SEO tutorials, you’ll be glad you downloaded it.
  This Plugin is great and it has reduced my spam by about 95%, as I used to get a lot of spammers in my posts.
• All in One SEO Pack, this Plugin has saved me a lot of time!It allows you to easily add Meta tags to your posts, and to your homepage without having to go and edit your templates manually, as this plugin edits the templates for you.
• Get Recent Comments, is a pretty helpful little guy because it makes people, especially webmasters more interested to comment in your site because when they leave a comment, they can also leave a link that links back to their site or blog. And that’s not all! The best thing about this plugin is that it allows you to block certain URLS from your competitor sites! So there is nothing left for you to worry about.
• Google XML Sitemaps This plugin is just WOW. It creates an XML sitemap for you! And the best part is that it notifies search engines like Google, and Yahoo when your site’s sitemap has been updated so that their bots will come crawling in!
• NoFollow Free, is a new thing to hit Wordpress. This plugin is Great for SEO as it takes out the “Nofollow” from your wordpress site, so that every time someone comments on your block, Google will count the link from the person that commented as a backlink, gaining them a bigger Pagerank. This plugin benefits you because you’ll get more people to comment on your blog, and the more people that comment the more popular your blog gets.
• ShareThis, Small, but powerful. It allows you, and your guests to easily submit your posts to Social bookmarking sites like digg, del.icio.us, etc. This plugin also allows people to e-mail your posts to their friends, family, or whoever they want, all from the click of a button.
• WordPress.com Stats This plugin is really gonna come in handy while testing out SEO methods because it tracks the people that have come to your blog. This blog also tracks how the guests came in, it tracks the terms they used while searching on google, and it even tracks the most clicked links, and the most viewed posts from your blog. Believe me, this plugin will be really handy because it does not waste space on your server as it stores it all in the Wordpress.com site.

That’s the list of the plugins that I recommend you to use. I use all of them and they have been working very well for me they have helped me gain more members and guests to the site and it has made my users have a better experience while browsing the site.

Here is how you upload plugins (It’s basically the same as uploading themes, so I just changed a few words)

1. Log in to your Cpanel (It’s usually http://www.yourdomain/cpanel)
2. Go to where it says “File Manager” or “Legacy File Manager” (It does not matter which one you use), I’d suggest you use Legacy File Manager as it loads faster.
3. Once you are in the index of your folders click where it says “Public_html”, you might have to click the little blue manila folder, or the little globe on the right side of where it says “public_html” in order for it to open the Public_html folder.
4. When you are inside the Public_html folder, you should be seeing many folders, go and look for one of the folders that says “wp-content”, and open it just like you opened the Public_html folder.
5. Once you are in the Wp-Content folder, look for the folder that says “Plugins” and open it, just like you’ve opened all the other folders.
6. Now this is the hardest part of the tutorial (It’s not really hard, I’m just adding suspense to keep you reading ), once inside the “Plugins” folder, go to where it says “Upload Files” and click on it, once there click on the button that says “browse” and look for the folder that you download that contained the plugin that you wanted.
7. Once the folder has been uploaded to your host, click on “go back” (you might have to refresh the page) and look for the folder you just uploaded, and then click on the letters, not the folder!, when you click on the letters a little menu bar on the right should come up giving you different options, like “delete”, “change permissions”, etc. Click on “Unzip file”, once the file is unzipped you can either delete it or leave it alone.
8. Once you’ve unzipped the file go to your Wordpress admin panel and go to where it says “Plugins” and there on that page, you should be different names of plugins, click on active, and they should all be working And that is it! That’s all there is to it. Congratulations, you’ve managed to download your first Wordpress Plugin

Conclusion
Finally, I hope you have learned from this tutorial, and I hope that you’ve enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it. I will be explaining more about SEO in my next, “SEO Tutorial Part-3″. I am sorry to those of you who do not use Wordpress and were trying to learn about SEO in general, but I decided to write about Wordpress since it’s growing larger everyday and more people are getting interested in it day by day.