In the previous articles I explained how I did research a niche, bought a domain and found a web hoster. The next step was to setup WordPress and add a few plugins to the blog. You might be wondering why I decided to use WordPress and not some static html pages. The simple answer is time. I can setup WordPress in five minutes and have the site up and running. There are so many free themes to choose from and plugins to pick that I have a wonderful unique site in less than an hour of work. This makes it possible to concentrate on writing articles and SEO instead of building some html pages.

I won’t explain the installation of WordPress which really is as easy as it can get. Just edit the config file with your MySQL settings and upload everything to the ftp and run the installation script afterwards. That’s all there is to do.

More important than that is the choice of a nice theme and the installation of some SEO plugins. I decided to choose a free theme because of my tight budget which still left me with the option to purchase a custom theme once the site is earning enough revenue to justify that expense. There is nothing wrong however to use the free theme forever.

WordPress plugins are a great help and I have a handful that I’m installing in every blog that I setup. Here is the list of those plugins:

All in One SEO Pack – a great plugin. You can generate custom meta tags, titles for the articles and the like.

Simple Tags – probably the best tagging plugin for WordPress. Tags are submitted to Technorati for instance.

Those are the two that I install all the time. I tend to install some others that increase the usability or exposure. Some of those are Most Popular Posts, WP AJAX Edit Comments and the like. You can browse the official website for lots of plugins.

One of the most important aspects of setting up WordPress correctly is the use of pretty permalinks. Permalinks are available in the WordPress options. You might have noticed that the default post structure looks like www.url.com/?p=6 which is bad for SEO and for the usability.

A better way would be to use the page title and category instead, like www.url.com/category/title/ which is better for SEO. To do that use this code in the custom option: /%category%/%postname%/

What I also do is add my blog to Feedburner and use their widgets to display RSS and Email subscription options. I prefer email in product related blogs because that makes it easy to send your subscribers a monthly newsletter with some special offers.