Module 3

Website Setup

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Table of Contents
Welcome to Module 3 .......................................................................................................................... 3
Installing Wordpress ........................................................................................................................ 3
Basic Setting ...................................................................................................................................... 6
Change Permalink’s to Friendly URLs ............................................................................................ 8
Time to Choose a Theme ................................................................................................................ 9
Premium Themes ............................................................................................................................ 10
Where to Get Them........................................................................................................................ 10
Bespoke Themes............................................................................................................................. 11
Plug-ins............................................................................................................................................. 11
Essential Plug-ins ............................................................................................................................ 12
Wordpress SEO ............................................................................................................................... 13
Time to Start Building .................................................................................................................... 14
Customizing Your Homepage and Blog Page ............................................................................. 16
Widgets ............................................................................................................................................ 17
Menus ............................................................................................................................................... 18
Conclusion........................................................................................................................................ 20

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Welcome to Module 3
When it comes to building your site, there are number of platforms that
you could use. In SEO Enigma we are going to concentrate on
WordPress as discussed in the introduction module.
Of course WordPress isn't 100% perfect and true web designers will
always have something negative to say about it, but the fact remains
that there is no better platform for SEO purposes.

WordPress is also incredibly flexible, powerful and customisable.

The only exception I would tend to make to this rule is within e-

commerce. That is to say sites that exist mainly for the purpose of
making online sales (eg: Amazon) and could contain tens, hundreds or
thousands of products.

Although WordPress has improved dramatically in recent years with e-

commerce plug-ins from the likes of Woo and WPMU to take just two,
Magento is still the king. After all e-commerce is what Magento was built
for.

If E-commerce is your thing, I would strongly suggest using Magento for

your e-commerce store and attaching WordPress to it for the blog.

Installing Wordpress

Installing WordPress is an absolute breeze providing you are using a

hosting company who provide you with C panel.
C panel is a backend management system for your website domain. You
will know if your host provide you with C panel because when you try to
login to the back-end of your domain, it will be branded C panel.

Personally this is the sole reason why I don't host with GoDaddy,
because they do not offer C panel as part of their platform. However all
of the other main hosting companies (HostGator, HostMonster, GVO) all
provide C panel. The chances are that your hosting company will do too
(unless of course it’s GoDaddy).

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To access your C panel you need to browse to:
www.YourDomain.com/cpanel (obviously, you need to replace
YourDomain.com with your actual domain address).

This will take you to the login screen of C panel. Your hosting company
should have provided you with login details for your C panel, if you did
not create them yourself when you are setting up your hosting.

Now simply login to C panel, and scroll towards the bottom to the section
labelled software. You are looking for the program Fantastico De Luxe

Fantastico is a fabulous little program that sits in most Cpanel

installations and allows you to install a variety of platforms onto your
domains with just a few clicks. You will use it to install WordPress quickly
and easily.

On the next screen, locate WordPress from the column on the left hand
side and simply click on it.

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Now simply follow the instructions, and complete the information in the
boxes provided.

In the installation location settings, you have a choice of where to install

WordPress on your domain.

It's possible to install multiple installations of WordPress on a single

domain.

For example you will want an installation to act as your main site, but
you may also want to put an installation on a subdomain, for example if
you want a secure area, membership area, distributor portal or forum
etc.

For now, you probably just want to set up your main site especially if you
have just purchased the domain. In this case you should leave the
settings in installation location alone meaning WordPress will be
installed on your root domain (i.e. yourdomain.com)

You will also need to create an admin username and password in order
to access the back-end of your WordPress installation. Whatever you
do, do not create the username as "admin" because this is a known
security risk

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Finally in the base configuration settings, enter your e-mail address, site
name, description and admin nickname. These are optional settings
which I leave blank because I rarely use them except for the e-mail
address which is important so that WordPress can notify you of any
problems or updates.

Congratulations! You have just installed WordPress.. :-)

Now you can navigate to your WordPress backend by browsing to

www.YourDomain.com/wp–admin and login using the admin username
and password you just created.

Basic Setting
Now we have to make a few basic setting changes to our new website.
From the WordPress dashboard, navigate to settings in the left-hand
column and select general. Enter your details in the boxes provided and
change your time zone settings to your current location. Change any
other settings as you see fit, although these are optional.

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From the same settings menu now select writing:

WordPress can notify an unlimited number of ping services every time

your blog/website is updated. These ping services alerts web spiders
and web crawlers to come and investigate the new content.

By default your installation of WordPress contains just one ping service.

Hey! The more the merrier. The more ping services we notify, the
greater the chances of alerting the spiders and crawlers and the greater
the chance of our pages and posts getting indexed both fully and
quickly.

In our Valut section of SEO Enigma you will find a.txt file called
pingservices.txt. Simply open up this txt file, copy the contents to your

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clipboard and paste them into the box provided underneath "update
services". Don't forget to save at the bottom of the page.

Now every time you create a new page or post, or in fact update one,
you will be notifying over 100 of the web’s most popular ping services.
This will greatly enhance your SEO efforts and assist with getting your
pages indexed quickly. In fact, it's not uncommon to have content
indexed and appearing in the search engines in just two minutes!

Change Permalink’s to Friendly URLs

In the previous module about website structure, we discussed the
difference between friendly and non-friendly URLs and how friendly
URLs can dramatically improve your SEO efforts. Now we are going to
change the settings in WordPress so that we implement a friendly URL
structure.
Again in settings, choose the submenu Permalink's. You can choose
from one of the default settings or choose a custom method. I
recommend that you use the custom setting as shown in the screenshot
below.

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Time to Choose a Theme
Now you've got the basic settings done, you can start thinking about how
your site is going to look. One of the great features of WordPress is the
huge amount of themes that are available for it.
Themes in Wordpress are simply the way your site is going to look and
feel. Compare it to a car – what is underneath is essentially the same,
but the bodywork changes from model to model. Themes cover a variety
of variables from colours, templates, design and much more.

There are literally thousands and thousands of themes available for

WordPress. Many of these you can use for free at the WordPress
directory or alternatively there are plenty of places to buy premium
themes, which we will cover shortly.

In order to install a theme, from the WordPress dashboard navigate to

"appearance" select “themes”. Now you can view the theme directory
and make a selection based upon your branding. If you have purchased
premium theme, you can upload this by selecting the "upload" tab,
browsing to where you have saved the file on your computer and
uploading it.

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Once you have selected (or uploaded) your theme, you now activate it.

Premium Themes
There are many great free themes in the WordPress directory, however
you may decide that you want something a little bit more unique with
additional features.
This is where a premium theme may suit your purposes better. Typically
premium themes are made by third-party designers and developers who
sell them for profit. You tend to find that premium themes are much more
flexible and customisable than the standard themes in the WordPress
directory.

Where to Get Them

 ThemeForest.net is one of the largest and most well respected
sites for purchasing premium themes (amongst many other things,
including plug-ins, graphics and flash animation).
 My personal favourite is Genesis by StudioPress, which is actually
a robust framework that fits over the top of WordPress and is
incredibly powerful. When using Genesis, you can choose from a
wide range of Child themes that fits over the Genesis framework to
customise your site.

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  Be aware that occasionally themes can cause issues and conflicts
on your site, especially when WordPress updates. This is another
reason why we recommend Genesis because the framework and
the child themes are all designed to work perfectly with each other.
This dramatically reduces the chances of issues or conflicts.
 Woo themes are very well-known WordPress theme developers,
who have some amazing premium themes for sale. They also
provide Woo Commerce for use in e-commerce/online stores.
 If you are looking to build sales pages or landing pages, there are
many exceptional products available that will create stunningly
professional sales pages with ease. My personal favourites are
Optimize Press by James Dyson, who has recently launched
version 2 of the product which is mind blowing. I also highly
recommend Instabuilder.
 WPMU have a great range of both themes and plug-ins.

Bespoke Themes
If you want to be completely unique, you can also have a custom theme
designed and developed soley for you. This is great as it allows you to
still use Wordpress, but will give you a theme based purely on your
design and functionality specifications.
If you are interested in having a bespoke theme built for your business,
contact me here

Plug-ins
Plug-ins are my absolute favourite part of WordPress. There are literally
thousands of them available offering enhancements to your site covering
every possible angle you can think of. From SEO to security, analytics to
auto responders – you name it, it's probably available.
Plugins simply install via the dashboard of your WordPress installation
and they can be used to customise and enhance your site.

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Like themes, WordPress has a large directory of plug-ins that you can
simply install on your site for free. In addition there are premium plug-ins
which you can find being sold all over the Internet.

You can get very carried away with plug-ins (I've done it so many times
myself) and if you're not careful this can get excessive. Having too many
active plug-ins on your site can cause problems, so you should try to
limit these to the absolutely essential ones for your needs.

Installing plug-ins is pretty much the same as installing themes, only

through the plug-ins area of your WordPress dashboard, which can be
found under appearance.

Essential Plug-ins
 WordPress SEO by Joost De Valk of Yoast fame, is the most
comprehensive and powerful SEO plug-in available for WordPress
today. We will spend quite a bit of time talking about this plug-in
during SEO Enigma.
 Analytics for WordPress also by Joost De Valk is a very powerful
plug-in for linking your website to your analytics account so that
you can track activity on your site
 if you use an auto responder (e.g. MailChimp/Aweber) for your e-
mail marketing, you may want to check if your auto responder has
a plug-in. Certainly MailChimp and Aweber do, and this makes
connecting your accounts to your site very simple.
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  You will also want to find a contact form plug-in for your contact us
page. I have used many over the years, but I always come back to
the same one – Contact Form 7
 if you are a local business and you are keen to take advantage of
Google places (see local module), then you would be well advised
to install a plug-in that adds a Geo site map to your site. This will
greatly enhance your local marketing and local SEO. I use Geo
press by Darren Jackson which is available from the plug-in
directory.
 You should also install a plug-in that adds microdata to your site.
Adding microdata is like adding hidden code that Google may then
take and display in its search results (called rich snippets). Google
itself recommends you actually use this microdata on your site,
which is in accordance with Schema (html tags, that webmasters
can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search
providers). I recommend either Microdata for SEO by Optimum 7
or Schema creator by Raven.
 Finally and most importantly of all, you need to install a social
sharing plug-in. There are many to choose from but personally I
like Digg Digg (which is also used by Mashable on their site).

Wordpress SEO
As mentioned earlier, this plug-in is incredibly powerful. It's a true
heavyweight that does an awful lot, but it does have an awful lot of
settings which can be very confusing. Fortunately however, the plug-in
also allows you to import and export the settings. We have therefore
included a recommended setup for the plug-in in this module. You can
simply upload the file (settings.zip) to the settings area of the plug-in.
Once you have imported the recommended settings, you will need to
make some changes particularly to the titles and descriptions of your
homepage and also various social settings. We will, cover this in more
detail in the next module.

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Time to Start Building
Now we've laid the foundations correctly for our site, we can finally start
building it and putting it together.
Using the mindmap that you created from the structure module, start
adding pages to your site as per the mind map.

To add a new page, hover over the pages menu from your WordPress
backend dashboard and a submenu will popout. Simply click on "add
new" and WordPress will open a new blank page template.

The first thing to do is give your page a title. Remember that we want the
maximum SEO benefit, so where appropriate call your page after the
most relevant primary keyword for that page. Obviously it is not going to
be possible to do this for all pages (e.g. about us/contact us etc), but
certainly do it where possible.

Because of the way we structured our Permalink's (friendly URLs) the

URL for the page will be taken from the title that you give it. It is possible
to change the URL of each page after you have given it a title, but doing
so can lead to problems for the search engines if an indexed page URL
is suddenly changed.

The solution to this is to create a permanent 301 redirect from the old
page name (URL) to the new one (The 301 status code means that a
page has permanently moved to a new location), but this is something
only to be undertaken once you have a lot more experience. Therefore
try to get it right when you initially create and name your page.

In the box underneath the title, is where you will add your content for that
particular page.

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At this stage we don't want to be adding the content, just building the site
according to our structure. This is because we will discuss content and
how to write optimised content in the next module.

Over on the right hand side of your new page template is a box called
"page attributes". The first drop-down box is to choose the parent of the
page you are creating.

If for example your site has a product page and sub pages such as
product1, product2, product3 etc, then as you are creating the pages
related to product1, product2, product3 you will want to select the parent
page as being "products" in page attributes.

If you are creating your primary categories (about us, contact us,
products/services etc) then you would leave the parent category as "no
parent".

Many themes offer different layouts and templates within them. An

example of this would be a page with a right-hand sidebar, fullwidth
page with no sidebar or a page with a left-hand sidebar. Depending on
what layout your theme offers, you can select the template from the
default template drop-down also in page attributes.

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Customizing Your Homepage and Blog Page
Depending on your theme, you may have to select which page you want
to show as both your homepage and your posts (blog) pages. This is
more common in themes taken from the WordPress directory rather than
premium themes, although that is not always the case.
To set your homepage and blog page, again access the settings area of
the WordPress dashboard and then select reading. From the pages you
have created using the drop-down box, simply select the pages that are
going to act as your homepage and your default blog page.

Many premium themes however have the homepage built into them and
you are required to customise it using widgets (see below). In this case
you will need to leave your reading settings as the default (your latest
posts) as the theme will take care of everything for you.

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Widgets

Depending on your theme, you will have the choice to place widgets in
different parts of your website. From the widgets menu which can be
found under appearance from the WordPress dashboard, you will see
the widgets that your theme has made available.

Widgets are great for customisation and are very simple to use. On the
right-hand side of the widgets page is a list of the areas on your site
where widgets can be inserted.

These should all make sense, for example using the screenshot above,
inserting a widget into the header right area will make that particular
widget show in the header of my site on the right-hand side of the
homepage. Widgets inserted into the primary sidebar area, will show on
pages where I have set the template to show my primary sidebar.

To insert the widget into any particular area, simply click the drop-down
arrow to the right-hand side of the widget title area and an empty box will
drop-down.

Drag the widget that you want to display from the middle area of
available widgets into the box that has dropped down.

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Depending on the widget, you may then have to customise how it should
work.

If you now visit your site and look at the appropriate area where you
inserted the widget, you will see it showing.

Menus
The final thing we need to do now is to create our navigation, so that
visitors can get around our site. Some premium themes have
independent navigation options in the theme options and if this is the
case, you should use these.
Most themes however use WordPress Menus, which can be accessed
from your WordPress dashboard by hovering over appearance and
selecting menus.

Once you are in the menu settings, WordPress will tell you how many
menus your theme supports (n.b. if you want to show additional
navigation, you can do this by inserting the custom menu widget into one
of the widgetised areas e.g. primary sidebar)

To create your menus/navigation, start by giving your primary menu a

name. You can simply use "primary menu" or something that you can
easily remember and distinguish it from others. Remember to save. If
your theme supports secondary menus repeat this process for menu two
(obviously calling it "secondary menu").

Now we need to tell WordPress which menus to show where. On the top
left-hand side of the screen on the theme locations, use the drop-down
buttons to select your primary and secondary navigation that you've just
created. Again remember to click save.

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Next we want to allocate some of our pages to the menus. To do this
simply select the required menu tab (primary menu/secondary menu)
and select the appropriate pages from the left-hand side and click to add
to menu.

Those pages will now appear on the right-hand side of the screen under
your menu. Arrange the pages into the menu order you want them to
appear simply by dragging and dropping them.

If you want to change the name of the page as it will be viewed in the
menu click the down arrow of the appropriate page under your menu
and rename it. You can also delete pages from this drop-down box.

If you want to create a sub page on your navigation, drag the

appropriate page underneath its parent and over to the right to indent it
slightly (see above).

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Don't forget to save!

Some themes will create a homepage for you automatically or have it

available in the list of pages for you to select.

However some themes don't do this. You are going to want a home
menu item for your primary navigation so your visitors can always get to
your homepage.

To do this create a custom link in the box provided. In the URL type your
website address e.g. YourDomain.com and label it Home. Then add it to
the appropriate menu and position it where you want it to appear
(usually first on the list).

Conclusion
Following the procedure in this module, you should now have everything
setup how you want it and most importantly for maximum SEO benefit.
In the following module we will look at adding the content and optimising
our site further to complete our on-site optimisation.

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