WordPress is Free, Simple & at the same time very attractive.
WordPress is a free service and it’s easy to use and with it’s user-friendly dashboard, it’s liked by the newbie as well as the experts.  Below you will find why WordPress is important :

• Free
  WordPress can be downloaded for free and it is very easy to download it on your website with minimal instructions. Moreover, WordPress offers a variety of free themes for all kinds of websites – not limited to blogs. You can also find thousands of free themes for download from the web. So, even without any knowledge of coding, you can create beautiful websites in minutes with WordPress.

• No Coder Required
  I am not joking. It is extremely easy to make an attractive website without any assistance from a coder.  I must admit here that you will learn things which you never knew.  For a complete newbie, it might be a totally new experience and can take some time to get used to it.  If you will follow the WordPress Tutorials, I can bet that you can learn a lot in a matter of hours.

• Not Just for Blogs
  WordPress is known among bloggers.  I must tell you that it is not only meant for bloggers.  It’s not just one blogging platform.  You can create a variety of websites with WordPress and there are a number of free and paid themes available to help you with creation of websites.

• Super SEO Friendly
  This is one of the best thing about WordPress.  WordPress is designed in such a way that it is completely seach engine friendly.  You won’t find any other Content Management Systems as SEO-friendly as WordPress.  For a newbie, he might not even now about what is SEO?  The best option for a newbie to set up a website is to use WordPress which will help a lot in dealing with the SEO issues.

• Highly Customizable
  WordPress is such a great platform that you can customize it the way you want.  You can mould it to your requirement and if you can hire a coder, he will create themes for you which will suit your exact requirements.  You are not limited to the free or paid themes available on the internet.

These are the reasons which makes WordPress a great choice for small businesses with less budget. You will get a website which is free, simple and attractive. WordPress provides you with everything that will keep your cost low and create a great website which you can be proud of.

Varghese David runs a blog ClickArticles.net and invites you to read this post – Adsense Analytics Integration. This article was written by a guest author. Would you like to write for us?

Careful of Automated Installations
Automatic installation tools like Fantastico enable people with few technical skills to set-up WordPress and have it running in a few minutes.  But, they also open your website up to malicious attacks.  Manually installing your WordPress is safer and enables you to customize its settings.  Auto-install programs automatically add the prefix “wp” for tables.  Making a custom prefix for your table names will make your blog more secure.  You can do this by editing the wp-config.php during installation.  Or, you can use the WP Security Scan plugin to change the default prefix.  And, changing the default Admin username for administration roles will protect your site and make it difficult for hackers to make changes.  Wordpress’s default Admin username is known by most hackers.  You can create a customized Admin username by adding a new user and giving it administrative privileges. 

Plugins Can Let You Down
Plugins are often an area that hackers will try to exploit to gain access to your site.  Since plugins are not officially products of WordPress, but rather third parties, they are not always coded as securely or updated as frequently as WordPress to cover security holes.  Always do your research on WordPress plugins and look for reputable sources that recommend well established plugins.  For example, if you are looking for a WordPress image gallery plugin or a video gallery plugin, don’t install the first plugin you find, but look to see what others are using, whether they are frequently updated and maintained, and that there is some community feedback demonstrating its reliability.

Add A Little Salt
Salting a password will protect your blog against forced attacks.  Salting appends complex hash strings so they look different on each page.  You can do this manually by copying the eight lines of code below your database credentials into the WP-config.php file.  If you have default secret keys in your WP-config.php file from a previous installation, they should be changed.  Chap Secure Login is a zero configuration plugin that can help with secret key authentication.  It will hash out your password with a complex MD5 algorithm and there are no configuration changes.  

It is always good to have more than one layer of security to protect your blog from unauthorized access.  The plugin Login Lockdown WordPress will block IP addresses from failed login attempts.  It will block their IP address for one hour after 3 failed attempts.  You can also secure your blog by assigning optimum folder permissions to your folders.  The plugin Security Scan will scan your system to determine which folders need attention. 

Your WPConfig File
The most important file during your WordPress installation is the wp-config.php file.  It contains the administrator credentials hackers need to gain access to your database.  To protect this file you should add a protective code to the .htaccess file.  You can find it in your root directory or you can create a new one.  Another important step in securing your installation is to make a backup.  Because securing a site is not 100%,  it is important to have a backup of your databases encase you need to restore your information.  There are several plugins to protect your blog against data loss.  Wordpress Backup, WP-dbmanager or WP-db-Backup will restore information to your database.  These plugins can customize tables not in the default backup, download backups to your computer or schedule backups. 

Open source programs like WordPress are easy for hackers to compromise and change the content.  If you install WordPress manually with security plugins,  you will add an extra layer of protection against hackers and other types of malicious attacks.  

Mark Daoust is the owner of Quiet Light Brokerage, an internet business brokerage firm. Please contact us today if you would like a free valuation of your profitable website. This article was written by a guest author. Would you like to write for us?

What People Are Looking For:

1. Caching Plugins
   Caching plugins are really useful at minimizing WordPress load times and it is crucial that you use an efficient one. Every single time that someone visits your blog, WordPress goes through a lengthy process in order to build what you will see. On the first visit, the PHP code is going to make a lot of calls to the database and then output the HTML that your browser sees. The blog can even make 200 calls for one page and this can make your WordPress site load really slow. In order to avoid this, the caching plugin will save cached data so that only the first visitor will have to wait for a longer period of time. The following visitors will see a cached version of the page and this will make it load much faster. The most popular WordPress Cache plugins are WP-Cache, WP Super Cache, WP Widget Cache, and DB Cache.

2. Using a Secondary Server
   Sometimes, your server is going to have to handle too many processes when a WordPress blog is loaded. You can use another one in order to hold the images and various assets like Javascript and CMS codes. You see, at times your host is not optimized for the actions that the script will perform and that is why using another server will lower the loading time.

   This also helps speed up loading time because a browser shouldn’t make more than two simultaneous connections to a server. You are allowing the browser to connect to two different servers and your blog’s content can be downloaded much faster.

3. Analyzing Plugin Speeds
   You ought to know that there are plugins that are going to slow down the load time of your pages. In addition, if you have many plugins installed, they are going to slow the load speeds too. You should only use plugins that are proven not to slow down your site. It is recommended to use a test site before you install on the main page and if there is a plugin that you do not use, deactivate and delete it. In the event that you can use code instead of a plugin, do that too!

4. Hosting Quality
   You absolutely need to check the quality that the hosting provider offers. Sometimes, there will be too many sites hosted on one server and this will slow down your WordPress site. It is recommended to use a hosting provider that will host as few sites as possible on one server.

5. Using a Good Theme
   We all know that some individuals end up using WordPress themes that look really good but will have too many elements. It is necessary to sometimes sacrifice visual aspects in order to improve user experience and load time. Always check that the theme is properly built and that it is going to load as fast as possible. If not, it is better to choose another theme. Also make sure that you will optimize all images used for fast loading!

Jeet loves to tweak his websites and blogs to get them a 100/100 score on Google’s pagespeed. He also runs a small link building company (still in 80s because of some external scripts). This article was written by a guest author. Would you like to write for us?

What People Are Looking For:

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 markets itself as just a simple contact form but it is truly so much more than that.  Coming with over thirty five language translations for websites around the world it offers Ajax powered submissions, CAPTCHA and even built in spam prevention.  It is all done with just a simple markup to make it easy for even the most novice WordPress developer.

Google Analytics for WordPress

Everyone wants to know more about how their visitors get to their website and what they are doing on their website.  It helps bloggers create more enticing content for their visitors.   Google Analytics does just that for webmasters.  Google Analytics for WordPress expands Google Analytics even more for WordPress users giving a view of today’s traffic in the WordPress admin dictionary.

But then there is so much more including the ability to keep the people who write for you off analytics so you are only tracking your visitors as well as the ability to track links out and downloads.  It uses the fastest Google Analytics code possible and it is highly optimized for WordPress powered websites.

GTranslate

You can now use the power of Google Translate to translate your website to fifty eight different languages around the internet.  This accounts for ninety eight percent of the world’s internet users.  Users can translate content with one simple click to their language making your blog able to reach a much more global market on the internet.

All In One SEO Pack

The All in One SEO Pack for WordPress is exactly what you think it is, it optimizes websites for search engines.  This is the supreme WordPress plugin for Search Engine optimization.  It includes all the features your going to need to make your website optimized in the best manner for search engines and for people who are new to search engine optimization and WordPress it includes a very important feature – you just have to install it and it starts working.  You can configure it for better optimization but it will just work right out of the box so to say.

W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is another very powerful plugin for WordPress.  When a WordPress powered website gets heavy traffic to it there is often a very significant drain to the servers as well as a significant slowdown in the amount of time it takes users to load your web page.  W3 Total Cache caches your website internally to speed up the processing of your website.  It also can take care of external content delivery networks to make the drain on your server even less and the content delivered to your users even faster.

What People Are Looking For:

No Internet Explorer 6 Support

While you can still browse WordPress powered sites with Internet Explorer 6 you will not be able to use the WordPress Dashboard which is the backend shown to writers, editors and wordpress Administrators.  So if your still using Internet Explorer 6 than you need to upgrade your internet browser!

Redesigned Dash Board

The WordPress Dashboard has been significantly redesigned to incorperate a much more streamlined look.  There is also now a non distraction writing mode that allows your writers the ability to write without anything else showing up on their page but the content they are writing.  This is great for people who are overwhelmed with all the Search Engine Optimizations, tags and other things offered by WordPress to its users.  All you can see is what you type.  The other options are made availalbe to you in the settings menus, but by default everything is hidden from you.

Twenty Eleven

The new default theme succeeding the Twenty Ten theme released with WordPress 3.0 last year is now Twenty Eleven.  It offers a much more modern layout that is more visually modern and looks great on screens from any size to Phones, iPods and then desktop monitors.  Its a very impressive theme both visually and technologically.

Raising The Technical Bar

The technical bar is now being raised by WordPress when it comes to what the minimum technical requirements are.  Wordpress is no longer supporting older servers.  This means users of PHP 4 are now going to have to upgrade to PHP 5, and MySQL users are going to need to upgrade from MySQL 4 to MySQL 5.    The basic requirements for WordPress as of WordPress 3.2 are now PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0.  If you have not made the switch (which you should of because this requirement change was announced over a year ago by the WordPress development team) than you are going to have to.  Most major hosts have already made the change to support the minimum technical requirements.

If you want to check and see if your server meets the minimum requireemnts before upgrading your WordPress installation you can install the WordPress Plug in Health Check.  It will let you know if your server has the appropriate versions of PHP and MySQL installed in order to run WordPress 3.2.

As WordPress Grows

As WordPress Grows many developers are having a hard time keeping up with the new features and requirments of WordPress.  It is not uncommon to see plugins and themes that are being left behind b

• Hosting a domain or a site name for a website
• Providing storage space for all the files, media, and web pages of a website
• Providing support for various languages and scripts such as PHP, SQL, and any other such service required by the blogging package such as WordPress
• Providing access to the visitors or viewers to read or view the content posted by the owner of website through web pages or media files.

There are innumerable cheap web hosting providers hosting their services and hence it makes it quite difficult at times for many people to select the right provider who will help them with their WordPress blog. Good web hosting providers will make sure that the site stays running.
One should look for the following in a web hosting provider if one is primarily interested in hosting a WordPress blog:

Price: Today cheap web hosting can also be as reliable as expensive hosting. So keep price in your mind when choosing a host.

Guaranteed Storage: A person who wants to host a WordPress blog must make sure that the web-hosting provider provides fixed amount of storage and bandwidth per month. If a person is planning on storing or uploading videos and many other documents, they must see to it that their provider provides them with the required storage and bandwidth.

Secure Hosting: All web hosting providers must let people upload files to the shared server. They must provide people with various easier and safer ways to upload and download files. The provider must allow people to create sections on the website to contain people or perpetrators from visiting the site by instilling a password.

Customer Support: It is extremely necessary for the web-hosting provider to provide better customer service for all people interested in hosting a WordPress blog. Customer service should be provided in different languages in order to make it easier for people to converse with them about their difficulties and queries based on technical issues relating to the blog.

Email Accounts: The web hosting provider should provide a person with a number of email accounts that are almost the same as the word press blog hosted by the person. These accounts allow one to send and receive emails.

Sufficient Bandwidth: As the word press blog grows and tends to become more complex, in due course of time, due to excellent responses from readers, the web-hosting provider should also provide the host with the benefit of upgrading the storage capacity and the bandwidth.

Regular Updates: The web-hosting provide must also provide updates about the site regarding the number of visitors and what links are accessed by them on the site etc which can be very useful for the host.

Requirement Flexibility: The web-hosting provider must leave it up to the host to decide what database and programming languages need to be used and must also guide them in the process. The database and language selected must support the specific tools and versions that are used by the host

First Things First

When you first set up your blog the first thing you want to do is go into your general settings and properly name your blog and give it a description. This is one of the most important things that you’re going to decide, so decide carefully. Next you should select a theme.
When you select your theme there are several things you should keep in mind.

• Attractiveness – Is your theme attractive to the human eye, is their too much white space, is it too bright, are there too many distractions? These are all questions you should ask yourself.
• Search Engine Optimization – Does your theme come with built in search engine optimization or are you going to have to install separate search engine optimization plugins.
• Cost – Is the theme free or will it cost you some money? Does the theme come with support if you are paying for it?
• Speed – Not many people think of this but you should think of how fast your theme loads on browsers. Is it full of images, flash and java or mostly text and CSS?

Search Engine Optimization

I previously talked a bit about search engine optimization. It’s when you organize your website in a manner that optimizes it and makes it much more attractive to search engines. You should consider doing this because this is how your site will most often be found. The following are some tips to help you optimize for search engines from the start of your WordPress blog.

• Use Permalinks – if the URL in your page is full of keywords it makes it more attractive to search engines.
• Use Good Page Titles – Using good page titles, that are separately named then the blog post itself can increase the chances of you getting good visitors to your webpage.
• Backlink In Your Own Blog – When you start making post reference some posts from the past in order to make your website much more delicious to search engines.

Caching

Many people do not understand caching but I recommend using a Caching plugin. There are many plugins out there for Caching your wordpress website but I highly recommend W3 Total Cache for caching your website.

Caching allows you to serve your website much faster and decreases the load on your server. This is important should you get a ton of traffic at once if your website makes the front page of a big social media network or even the news.

Most of All – Research

The biggest part of starting a new blog is to do your research. Find out what things have worked well for other bloggers, know your niche well, and know the ways of being a successful blogger by reading sites like TechnoZeast and others.

Activate Akismet Spam Protection

Akismet is a spam filter plugin for comments. It is automatically installed with WordPress, so you simply need to go to your WP Admin Dashboard and click on Plugins, find Akismet in the list and click Activate. A message will appear asking for your WordPress.com API key, simply click the link and create a WordPress.com account and then copy and paste the key back into your Dashboard.Read Stop Comment and Trackback Spam with Akismet.

Install WP-Cache Plugin

When a page is accessed on your site, WordPress performs some database lookups and executes a bunch of code. Ordinarily this isn’t a problem, however if you happen to have a lot of traffic all at once, this can slow your site right down. WP-Cache is a plugin that caches your pages periodically to dramatically reduce the load on the WordPress server.Read WP-Cache WordPress Plugin Review.

Once installed, click on Plugins in the Dashboard and click Activate. You then need to click on Options in the dashboard menu and find WP-Cache in the menu. This leads you to a page where you can enable the caching. Don’t enable just yet, because it’s best to do this after you install your theme and have everything working, otherwise you can sometimes have trouble testing changes.

Note that to get WP-Cache working you may need to create some directories for it to write to. The plugin will give you details of
what to do.

Set Permalinks

Every post you create has a permanent web address that WordPress creates called a permalink. You can select how WordPress should structure your Permalinks by clicking on Settings in the dashboard menu and then clicking on Permalinks.

There are five options to choose from:

1. Default – The default URL structure is a mix of odd characters and ID numbers
2. Day and Name – Suitable for news and time centric blogs
3. Month and Name – Suitable for news and time centric blogs
4. Numeric – An incrementing number rather than the post’s actual title.
5. Custom – By specifying a variable in %% signs you can choose the structure

A good format to use is to click on Custom and write:

/%category%/%postname%/

This will create links that have the category of the post and title of the post in the URL. These links will not only be more readable and memorable, but are also better for search engines.

WordPress uses a file called .htaccess to create the permalinks, if this is not writable by the server, WordPress will give you instructions on creating the file yourself.

Update Your Profile

Click on Users > My Profile in the WP-Admin menu and take a moment to fill out your profile. You may wish to untick ‘Use Visual Editor When Writing’ if you prefer to write in HTML as the Visual Editor has been know to mess with code, though more recent versions of WordPress are getting better in this department. This is just a preference however.

After you click Update, go back and find the select box which reads “Display Name as” and select a new option other than ‘admin’.

Make Sure File Uploads are Working

One of the neatest things about using WordPress is that when you are creating a Post you can upload files directly in WordPress and not need to ever touch your FTP program. This is great if you have multiple writers or non-tech writers, however you may need to double check that uploads are working on your server.

In WP-Admin, click on Posts > Add New to bring up the Add New Post screen then click the image icon to add assets using WordPress’ Uploader. Enter a file and try uploading. If all goes to plan the file will appear there successfully. If not, you will most likely need to create a directory for the upload facility to upload to, or set permissions for the directory to be writable. You can do this through your FTP program, the error message will tell you what folders to create.

Options for the uploads are controlled via Settings > Miscellaneous in the Dashboard.

Install Sitemap Plugin

The Sitemap plugin automatically creates an XML sitemap prepared to Google’s specification and then contacts the Google servers every time you create a new post or change the sitemap.Read Google XML Sitemaps WordPress Plugin Review.

Clear WordPress and Create Categories

WordPress comes with a lot of default content in the form of a sample Post, a comment, categories and a blogroll. Although these can be quite good for testing, generally speaking you will want to go through, delete them all and then create your own content.

The 7 things described above are the essential things which should be done after installing wordpres.

What People Are Looking For:

WpThemeBest is a site which offers best and free wordpress themes from around the Internet and they list them in various categories by which its so easy to find the best free wordpress theme.

One can choose themes of various styles or by their provider name or even by category as per their use like business, personal, magazine and so on.

There are so many plugins available which are very useful and handy but there are plugins which helps to build traffic so here today  we have compiled a list of top 10 traffic builder plugins, do check them out and use them on your own blog.

1.ALL in One SEO Pack:It is best wordpress plugin to optimize wordpress blogs very easily, just install the plugin, activate and go to its options panel in blog’s dashboard and cunfigure as per your need.

2.Google XML Sitemaps:This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.

3.SEO Friendly Images:SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set.

4. Sociable:Automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites! WordPress 2.6 or above is required.

5.Headspace2 SEO:HeadSpace is a powerful all-in-one plugin to manage meta-data and handle a wide range of SEO tasks. With it you can tag your posts, create custom titles and descriptions that improve your page ranking, change the theme or run disabled plugins on specific pages, and a whole lot more.

6.Platinum SEO Pack:Platinum SEO Pack is another all in one plugin that allows you to optimize your blog for search engines. Its features include automatic 301 redirects, canonical URLs, optimized post and page titles, and meta-tag generation.

7.SEO Smart Links:It provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more. SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

8.SEO Slugs:This plugin removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve search engine optimization.

9.Keyword Statistics:With this plugin you can optimize your WordPress blog for search engines.It can automatically generate meta informations (like keywords and description for example) needed for the search engine optimization (SEO) of your blog.

10.cbnet Ping Optimizer:Did you know your WordPress blog pings unnecessarily every time you edit a post? Ping Optimizer lets you control your pinging so the search engines don’t view your site as spam. When you create a new post, your blog will notify all of the ping services that it has been updated, which encourages search engines to index your blog properly.

The plugins above are very useful traffic builder plugins for wordpress.What’s your favorite traffic builder plugin for wordpress or which wordpress plugins do you use on your blogs to build traffic please do share with us in comments.

What People Are Looking For: