John Chow dot com in particular is the best of the bunch. He shared tips on how to make money online and he backed it up with results. What I find the most resourceful however is not how he makes money online (I’m sure it will be handy one day ); but tips on how to improve my site. His e-book is a must read. Go to his site and download it for your own viewing pleasure.

Some Of His Tips That I Implemented

1. The favicon

I have implemented this in the past on my other site which I took down because of TOS; but I’ve never thought of creating one for this site. He did point out that making your own favicon is a unique way of branding your site and I couldn’t have agreed more. My icon is kinda fuzzy (I just don’t know how to create an .ico file from a jpg) so I will seek help from my brother who is the Everything-Eririn.net webmaster.

2. Subscribe to Comments

I thought this comes standard in wordpress 2.2 but I was wrong. The readers will get a notification when their comments are being replied to. This plugin can also be a useful advertising tool. There are readers who would just post comments and then disappear into thin air. The notification will entice them to come back to the site and perhaps they will check out other articles as well.

I have to tweak this plugin though. By default, the notification checkbox is placed below the submit button which makes no sense. When you are done typing a comment you would normally want to submit it immediately. If the checkbox is placed below the submit button, you will probably miss it completely. It defeats the whole purpose of having the plugin in the first place. Of course you can always have the checkbox checked as a default setting but I think this should be an opt-in feature. This article will show you how to make the change by adding a one-line code to your comment.php file.

3. Setting the Preferred Domain

I am not ashamed to admit that I wasn’t aware of Google Webmaster Tools until I read his e-book. It lets you specify which domain for Google to use. In my case, it’s either joefiro.com or www.joefiro.com. This allows Google to combine the statistic for both domain addresses into one instead of maintaining two separate statistics. When I did a google search on joefiro, it’s joefiro.com that shows up on the search. I did a google search on a few known websites, and most have www on the url. I guess I will use www because I think it’s more professional.

John also talked about how you can set this the preferred domain on your site. I encountered some problems and still working on resolving the issues.

4. Supplemental Index Issue

In his e-book, John said that lots of SEO masters believe that content that isn’t worthy end up in the supplemental index. And in wordpress environment, this is probably a duplicate content issue. Please read this article that he wrote for more details.

I also installed a plugin called WordPress Duplicate Content Cure. It adds the noindex, follow meta tag on the problem pages like this <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow”>

I installed the SEO extension for Firefox and I ran a check on my site. I have 2 articles already in supplemental index; and one of them is the main site. Whaaattt? I followed the instruction on his e-book to create the robots.txt file and uploaded it to my server. You can verify your robots.txt file from Google Webmaster Tools.

Prior Implementation (prior to John’s e-book)

1. Akismet

This plugin is the most useful of all. It detects spam on your comments. You need to get an API key from wordpress in order to activate this plugin.

2. Related Articles

I read some articles on the topics and everyone seems to agree that posting related articles at the bottom of your article is a useful tool to keep your reader around. It’ll give them a wide array of other articles to read from. I also used Wasabi plugin for this implementation. The one thing I had to do manually was to add the header Related Topics in the php files. Apparently the plugin only gives you the article with no header.

3. Google Sitemap Generator

This plugin generates an xml file that Google uses to index your site. You can name the file anything you want but the standard naming convention is sitemap.xml. You can also specify this file and its location in your Google Webmaster Tools page.

4. WP-Notable

This plugin allows the readers to submit your article to one of the many social bookmarking and networking sites. The original author didn’t include the stumbleupon on this plugin but I managed to find one that includes the stumbleupon. The bad thing is I don’t remember where I downloaded it from already. So for the time being, I will host the wp-notable plugin on my site. If you are the author or if you know who the author is, please post on the comment and I will kindly link back the plugin to the author.

Outstanding Issues That Need To Be Resolved

1. Title Page

John Chow wrote an article on how to make a custom Home Page title. After reading the comments I am not convinced using Optimal Title is the way to go. Modifying the php code turned out to be harder than I expected. I kept getting a parsing error.

2. Preferred Domain Name

I made the required changes to .htaccess. It worked well on Firefox but it didn’t work quite as well on Internet Explorer. I had to reverse the change and I will do more research before implementing this feature.

I am providing support through Ether.com on an hourly basis. Use the call button below to reach me via Ether representative.

© Joey Rosario - visit the author for more great content.

On the wordpress theme website, you can click on the TEST RUN link at the bottom of each theme to see how it looks like in your browser. When you find something that you like, download the theme to your computer. Unzip the file and upload the folder (not the content of the folder) to your <domain-name>/wp-content/themes folder or if you install the wordpress to your blog sub-directory, <domain-name>/blog/wp-content/themes. For the sake of simplicity, I assume you install the wordpress to your root directory.

You can install as many themes as you possibly want, subject to of course the storage limit of your hosting account. I doubt it’ll ever happen since the files size are normally pretty small. Once you uploaded all your themes, login to your blog administrator page at <your domain name>/wp-admin/index.php. Click on the presentation tab, and then select one of the themes available to you. Then refresh your website. Your new theme should now be visible on your website.

You can always modify the theme itself. Say you like the layout, but you do not like the banner. You can always replace the banner with the one you created yourself. When you replace an image from the original theme, try replacing it with an image of the same size. You can customize pretty much anything on your site. One thing that you should always do is giving credit to the original author by NOT removing their link at the bottom of the page.

The layout on your website is controlled by the style.css file. The file controls your font size, background color, margin, padding, height, width, border, text-alignment, etc.

The content on your website is controlled by multiple php files. You can modify these php files in a text editor. Before you modify any of these files, please make a backup. Compare the content of the file with the layout of your site and you will get some ideas what to modify.

On my site, I removed the default search function because it’s located at the top right corner which will be a problem when I add more pages. I also modified the sidebar by adding a google search functionality to it and removing some menus. You can modify pretty much anything. Again, don’t forget to backup your files before you make any changes.

I am providing support through Ether.com on an hourly basis. Use the call button below to reach me via Ether representative.

© Joey Rosario - visit the author for more great content.

Well, this is not going to be a perfect guide so I welcome all comments to make this guide more user-friendly for people who have never setup a blog in their life. Since the title says Not-So-Idiot, I am assuming you possess some computer/internet/techie knowledge. If you don’t, feel free to use the comments.

If you want to skip the hassle of setting up a blog, you can always get a free blog account from blogger.com. If you have your own domain and have a hosting account, most hosting companies offer a quick blog setup. You can always go with that as well.

But if you want your blog to be highly customizable; then these instructions will guide you through the process step by step.

1. Register a domain

If you don’t have a domain, you can register one from one of the many domain resellers out there. I bought my domain from godaddy.com. You can get it for less than $10 a year. I got a 2-year domain registration for $14.34 for 2 years after discount. There are plenty other resellers.

2. Get a Website Hosting

In order for people to find your site, your domain needs to be hosted. You can always get a hosting from the same place you get your domain. I have a deluxe hosting account with godaddy that allows me to host more than one domain.

3. Download the Blogging Software

Now you need to download the blogging software. The only one you need is wordpress. You can download the zip file from here. The latest version as of this writing is 2.2. Go ahead and unzip the file when you are done downloading it. All the files you need are located inside the wordpress folder.

4. Create a database

All those articles you write on your blog (along with other contents) have to be stored somewhere. The database is where all the blog’s contents are stored. Login to your hosting account and find the database icon. Typically it is a mysql icon.

Click it to create a database for your blog. You need to enter 3 things here. First it’s your username. You can use your domain name minus the .com or .net or .org for the username. For this example, I’ll just use sample. If you want extra security, you can use sample2 or sample3 or other variation. Second it’s your password. Mysql requires your password to have at least 1 alphanumeric, 1 uppercase letter, and 1 number. When you are done, with the second step, repeat it for the third step to verify your password. Then click on create database to create the database.

5. Updating the file with the database information

In your wordpress directory, rename the file wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php. You will need to edit this file with a text editor like notepad. Open the wp-config.php in notepad, and fill in the database information. You will need to update 4 fields.

a. Replace the putyourdbnamehere with your database name, in this case sample.

b. Replace the usernamehere with the database username, in this case is also sample.

c. Replace the yourpassword here with the database password you created.

d. Replace the localhost with your database server location. You can find your database server location by clicking on the database you created. It says 99% chance you don’t need to modify this, but I happen to be in the 1%.

6. Decide how you want to implement your blog

a. The blog is the main navigation of your site (like mine)

In this case, upload the contents of wordpress to the root directory.

b. The blog is integrated into the main navigation of your site (like this)

Rename directory wordpress to blog (most common; you can rename it to whatever directory name you choose), and upload the directory (not the content) to the root directory of your domain.

7. Run the wordpress installation script

Now you need to run the installation script to activate your blog. You will have to do this step from your browser. You need to access the wp-admin/install.php script. To do this, you type <your domain name>/wp-admin/install.php on your browser address bar and press enter. e.g. http://www.sample.com/wp-admin/install.php

Remember, if your installed your wordpress in a sub-directory, you will need to put that sub-directory name before /wp-admin/install.php

8. Blog navigation menu

You can access your blog navigation menu from the browser by typing the following on your browser address bar:

<your domain name>/wp-admin/index.php

Feel free to navigate through the menu to get yourself familiar with it.

I am providing support through Ether.com on an hourly basis. Use the call button below to reach me via Ether representative.

© Joey Rosario - visit the author for more great content.