Step-By-Step WordPress Installation Plugins, Configuration and SEO.
It is said that a new weblog (blog) is created every second of every minute of every hour of every day. 

Everyone from large corporations and small businesses, to your average Joe are using blogs these days to get their message out. 

This is the most detailed and complete report you can find online about WordPress installation, plugins, necessary tweaks, basic SEO and advanced SEO. 

If you are new to WordPress, this will teach you to do it right the first time. If you already have a blog, you will learn many golden nuggets and take your blog to the next level. 

I wish it existed when I first got started with WordPress. Frankly, it contains $2,000 of information, free. You can spend months online learning this stuff just like I did. This report has everything you need. 

If you are a marketer with serious intentions, a WordPress blog, perfectly configured as a mean marketing machine and worshipped by the search engines is a “must have” tool for massive lead generation and MORE SALES. 

Using a blog is not only becoming absolutely necessary, but it’s also a down-right smart strategy to generate, captivate and cultivate masses of new prospects. 

With a blog it’s not extremely difficult to reach the top 10% within your niche and even the top 1%. If you are in marketing, it’s imperative that you install a blog immediately. 

Your blog is your central hub online.  

Having your own blog to represent your brand is undoubtedly one of the most foundational and vital steps to online success. 

Your blog is the front-end communication center between you and your audience and it’s the core of your entire business. Here you express who are, what you do and what you think. You provide information that is of interest to your followers. 

Providing information about yourself, your views, training, news and updates will give you a significant, competitive edge. 

A blog is the place where you “give,” information, gain trust, establish expertise and also offer affiliate products related to your business. 

It’s also essential for generating leads from social media, article marketing, video marketing, SEO, press releases and other Internet mediums. Generating leads cannot be done right without a blog. 

In this report I will give you the knowledge, tools and SEO secrets you need to create the ULTIMATE WordPress blog. 

After reading this, not only should you be able to install and configure WordPress with no problems, but also have a real kick-butt blog that can generate traffic like no other. 

Should you want a “blow-by-blow, just follow me and “watch over my shoulder” video tutorial; I make it available at the end of this report. 

Something about me you should know: 

I’m a marketer, I build my business online and I became a blog and SEO expert out of necessity. 

After getting ripped off several times from different so called “gurus,” I decided to hunker down and learn the craft myself in order to control my own web presence and expand my business. 

After purchasing several expensive SEO and WordPress courses from top, reputable experts, reading over 2,000 pages, watching 40 hours of video, spending TENS of thousands dollars in private consultations and grueling months of researching, learning, trying, tweaking and experimenting, I can share important details that make the difference, help you simplify the process, have a great blog and win the search engine game. 

There are no tricks or blackhat stuff. Search engines have become way too smart for that. Just purely knowing how to set up WordPress correctly and doing the SEO “just right” is the secret in itself. 

   

Choosing the Right Blogging Platform 

Choosing the software in which your blog will run is extremely important. If you choose the wrong one you will be missing out on a great deal of useful features and it will be a nightmare to switch over to another once your blog is established. You basically have 3 options; WordPress, TypePad or Blogger. 

Each platform offers two different options to use their software. You can host it on your own domain or you can get a free blog and they will host it. 

The quickest and easiest option is to get a free blog that is hosted by them. However, I HIGHLY recommend that you host it on your own domain. Here are a few good reasons for that: 

• 1. You have complete control over your blog. No one can suspend your account etc. It’s your blog; you’re just using their software!
• 2. If you ever decide to sell your blog, you’re out of luck if you’re not hosting it on your own domain … you don’t own it so you can’t sell it!
• 3. Are people really going to take you serious if you’re using a free blog that you’re not even hosting yourself? You can lose credibility. Many people may think you’re not serious enough about your own blog.
• 4. Free blogging platforms restrict you from accessing files like the .htaccess file, which is a very important file to control for many reasons and especially when your blog becomes popular!

If you’re going to make a serious effort at this, you should pay $10 or so each year for your own domain. As harsh as this may sound, if hosting a blog on your own domain is too big of a step for you, you should stop reading this e-book right now. It’s THAT important. 

The best platform online is WordPress. The reason WordPress is so incredibly popular is because it allows you to easily install plugins. There are LOADS of free plugins that will do just about anything. 

WordPress also automatically solves a ton of SEO issues. I highly recommend WordPress and so does Google. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-for-bloggers 

Here’s Is What You Need To Do  

Installation and settings: 

1. Make a folder on your desktop called Blog. Inside this directory make two folders: Plugins and Theme. 

• • Go to #5, page 18 to see my recommended plugins; copy them in your plugins folder.
• • Download your preferred theme to your theme folder. The way your theme looks is very important. There are a gazillion of free themes online (just search Google). Image is important, but frankly, I never found a free theme that impressed me. You can spend countless of hours searching for the right theme. It will drive you crazy. Free WordPress ThemesAlso consider that at times free themes have a less than a clean professional code, are subject to bugs, require modifications and adjustments and can be difficult to customize. Without knowledge of HTML, CSS and PHP it can be difficult to make your blog look right.I recommend the “Fresh-News Theme” from Woo Themes, it’s the preferred choice of many marketers and it’s designed by one of the most respected WordPress Theme companies online. It has a professional code, powerful look, great layout, you can put fairly large videos in the sidebar and it’s easy to customize. This theme can go the distance. See how it looks then click this link to get it Woo Themes 

2. Install your blog in the root directory of your domain www.yourdomain.com If you don’t have a domain/hosting yet, I recommend using BlueHost.com 

• • Always choose a .com domain. The second best is .net and then .org. Never choose .info. or .tv or .biz or others. I recommend your name. If you choose different, I recommend getting a domain based on a keyword that has between 3,000 and 10,000 searches a month.You can research the keyword with this tool: Google’s Keyword Tool.
  BlueHost is the preferred company of many top marketers. The hosting is $6.95 a month for an unlimited number of domains. Their domains are only $10 and go active immediately (no 48-hour propagation time). They have a nice cpanel and a 5-star customer service. Also the reason I like BlueHost is because they take care of link cloaking with their redirect service. You don’t need to buy a link-cloaking software.

This is good so the ugly product links like www.thisproduct.com/?hop=clickwave&page=default can look like www.yourname.com/recommends/thisproduct, which will double or triple you click-through rate.

 

Chose you 

 

•  Users – Set your profile. A blog can have different users. Set your profile and change the settings so that your name shows on every post instead of “admin.”
•  Settings/general. Set your blog name, tagline, date format, time zone, blog email and change the computer generated password to one that you can remember.
•  Settings/reading – Set your home page. When arriving at your blog, a visitor can either see your latest post or a static home page. Set this for what is best for your business.
•  Settings/writing- Set posting preference, default category and POP3 account info. Fill this information if you plan to post remotely through email or smart phone when you are away or on vacation.Under writing there’s something else that‘s very important, the “Update Services.” This is where you add URL’s to all the ping services that you want to alert when you publish a new blog post. WordPress automatically uses a service http://rpc.pingomatic.com, which automatically notifies the following services:

 

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://www.feedsubmitter.com

http://blo.gs/ping.php

http://www.pingerati.net

http://www.pingmyblog.com

http://geoURL.org/ping

http://ipings.com

http://www.weblogalot.com/ping

  

I added the following list to my blog:  

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://www.bloglines.com/ping
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc/

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080

http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping
http://pingqueue.com/rpc
So why would you want to be on these sites? One word: traffic. 

•  Settings/media – Adjust media settings. WordPress auto-sizes your main content column in your posts and pages. If your theme allows 500px or 600px for the posts/pages width, and the default for a large picture is 1024, you have a problem. Change the setting to your desired maximum picture size for your posts.
•  Settings/discussion – Configure comments. I could write a whole 30-page report on this topic, but let me just hit a couple of crucial points.You want folks to comment on your blog. You just don’t want the Viagra, porn pushers, “bad bots” and other spam-happy jerks to invade the place.Set up comment moderation in a way that you are in full control of the comments. Set the number of comments and links that a visitor can place (a common characteristic of spam is a large number of hyperlinks). 
•  Settings/permalinks – Change the Permalinks structure. Nobody knows why, but WordPress default settings for URLs is just plain awful.Make sure that your posts’ URLs look like this: www.yourdomain.com/my-home-business instead of the default www.yourdomain.com/?p213? Where 213 is the post id assigned by WordPress.This not only looks so much better, but it’s also very important for SEO. You want the title of the post to be included in the URL, so Search Engines give that post a little more weight for those keywords. In order to do this you just need to select the “Custom Structure” option and insert the following: /%category%/%postname%/ 
•  Set the Canonical URL. Your URL must be set to either domain.com or www.yourdomain.com.You can’t have both. Google looks at them as two different blogs, will consider them “duplicate content” and penalizes your search-engine ranking. Duplicate content is a serious issue and also the #1 topic of concern and discussion amongst bloggers and SEO experts. To accomplish this check the canonical URL box in the Platinum SEO plugin configuration.It will set your URL at www.yourdomain.com as it should be and if someone goes to your site at yourdomain.com (no www) it will automatically redirect the visitor to www.yourdomain.com A better way to do this would be to set this script in the .htaccess file located in the root of your domain: <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  Options +FollowSymLinks
  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomin.com/$1 [L,R=301]
  </IfModule> 

 

 

 

• Set up the Categories. It’s a good idea to give your blog a structure of the topics you plan to write about. For SEO reasons I recommend a few categories. Keep posts within one category. If a post has to occasionally be registered in two categories, it’s fine. But, try to write posts for a single category.
• Change the RSS Feed URL. Burning your Feed on FeedBurner  (free) is the industry standard when it comes to publishing your RSS feed.WordPress produces a default feed (yourblog.com/feed/), but that’s it. With FeedBurner you can track your feed subscribers, get widgets and buttons, etc. I highly recommend using FeedBurner. God forbid you ever lose your blog, you also lose your RSS subscribers. With FeedBurner you can retrieve them and reload them in a new blog.
• “Burning” your feed is very easy. Just go to http://www.feedburner.com/ enter the current feed URL (yourblog.com/feed) for WordPress along with your Username, Password and email, choose your blog title and click “activate feed.” It’s that simple. Once you’ve burnt your feed, FeedBurner will provide you with a new feed.  Now you can change the blog feed URL. Some people do this by making modification to the header.php file, but if you are not experienced everything can go wrong. Besides, the best and most recommended way to do it is adding a script to the .htaccess file. Right click the .htaccess file, it will open with Notepad, put this code in it, write your Feed Burner username and save it. 

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner    [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedValidator [NC]
RewriteRule ^feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$
http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourusername [R=302,NC,L]
</IfModule> 

You can also accomplish this through this plugin http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=78483 

If you are using social media icons images in an HTML text widget, you can code the RSS image so when clicked it goes right to your RSS feed URL. 

 

4. Install a Lead Magnet in the side bar (subscribe form). Ideally you should offer a free download. 

You could get an email subscription plugin, but I don’t recommend it. I recommend you get an AWeber account and fully control your list with all the powerful features of the #1 autoresponder and list management tool on the web. 

• Configure your AWeber or preferred autoresponder account.
• Prepare the HTML code that contains your AWeber form code, your text and image of a free report.  To accomplish this I use Dreamweaver. It’s a $399 software, but you can buy the older Dreamweaver8 version on eBay for around $50 bucks. Trust me you don’t need a newer version.
• Go under Appearance/Widgets in your dashboard and load the code in a “text widget.” Now position the widget in the sidebar. This is intuitive.
• Set the form to email your list and RSS subscribers automatically every time you publish a post.
• You may decide to set AWeber to tweet your posts and set Twitter to post them on Facebook automatically depending on your business.  You can also accomplish automated Twitter posting through a plugin instead of AWeber.
• Choose and configure the outgoing post template in AWeber with your personal information.
• Upload at least a “thank you for subscribing” autoresponder or your entire autoresponder series (recommended).

You can learn all this. If it’s not within your knowledge or you don’t want to bother, you can hire an inexpensive webmaster service at http://www.elance.com 

They will charge you around $75 or less.  However, this is important because without a form and autoresponder in the sidebar you cannot capture leads and build a relationship with them. I also explain how to do this step-by-step in the video. 

5. Install Plugins:  

Load the following plugins in the wp-content/plugins directory in their original “zip file” format. You can then activate them from the dashboard. Some plugins require settings. Click on the settings and follow the instructions. 

(1) Activate the Askimet anti-spam. Obtain an API key and activate this plugin that comes with WordPress. There are people out there with bad robots that will post automated comments with spam advertising on your blog (especially Viagra, adult and online pharmacies). 

(2) NoSpamNX. Askimet anti-spam is very good and must be activated, but is not totally sufficient at keeping the bad guys out, so install this additional anti-spam plugin. It works well with Askimet. 

(3) Chunks for URL. This plugin limits the length of the links people can leave in the comments. If someone posts a comment with a long link it can overflow and break your theme. 

(4) Trackback validation. Performs a simple, but very effective test on all incoming trackbacks in order to stop trackback spam. Checks if the IP address of the trackback sender is equal to the IP address of the web server the trackback URL is referring to. This reveals almost every spam trackback. 

(5) WP-backup. Your entire blog content is stored in the database. If it crashes, your entire blog could be lost. The WP-backup plugin allows you to set the number of backups per month, week or day. 

It’s important that your blog is backed up in an “excluded” directory (non indexed by Google) to avoid duplicate content. You can also set it up so the backup files are emailed to you. There’s another useful plug in for this: WP-database-manager. 

(6) WP Super Cache. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly. This is important because blogs can be a drag to load. Statistically people click off after EIGHT seconds! 

This is a static caching plugin that generates html files that are served directly by the server without processing “comparatively heavy” PHP scripts. 

(7) WordPress.com Stats. Tracks views, post/page views, referrers and clicks (requires an API key). This is good for a quick view right from the dashboard. However, we also add the Google Analytics plugin for a much deeper analysis. 

(8) Query posts. Displays a list of important posts permanently, like featured posts. Unlike posts that eventually disappear inside the archive based on the date, featured posts are always visible. 

(9) Upload and configure the Google Analytics plugin so you can monitor: 

• • The number of visits to your blog.
• • The number of optins.
• • Where the traffic is coming from.
• • How much time people spend on your pages.
• • How often they return.
• • Which keywords are working best.
• • ROI analysis.
• • And many other features that monitor the entire performance of your blog.

Google Analytics is free and comes with your Google account, which costs $5 one time. 

(10) Sociable. This allows people who like your posts to print or email them and share them on social media sites with other people. 

(11) Follow me. Gives you the ability to add links to your social media profiles so people can follow you there. You can add as many social media sites as you want. 

(12) Tweetly Updater. Posts on Twitter automatically and notifies your followers when you create or edit a post. Uses bit.ly for short URLs. You can set Twitter to automatically post on Facebook as well. 

I recommend you get a free Bit.ly account at www.Bit.ly.com It will track all your URLs activities. This is important to see your URL activity on your Twitter and Facebook postings. 

(13) TweetMeme. The TweetMeme retweet button easily allows your blog posts to be retweeted. The button also provides a current count of how many times your posts have been retweeted. 

(14) Facebook share plug-in for WordPress which shows the number of times the post or page has been shared throughout the Facebook just like tweetmeme button does for twitter. 

(To research more social media plugin based on your likes and needs go to: http://www.wpmods.com/11-great-social-media-plugins-for-wordpress) 

(15) Target blank in posts and comments. All links leading to external pages to other sites or your affiliate products or whatever should open in a new window so people don’t navigate away from your blog. This plugin adds a “target blank” option to the resident link configuration screen. 

(16) Post footer. Allows you to enter the HTML code for an ad or banner or text or whatever you want to say at the bottom of any post. 

(17) PageMash. Manage your multitude of pages with slick drag-and-drop style. Allows quick sorting, hiding and organizing of parenting. 

(18) WP-Sticky. A sticky post is one that always appears at the top regardless of the date/time posted. You may want to keep important posts pinned on top of the list. It helps you manage the display of posts along with the featured posts plugin 

(19) Banner and Ads. Allows you to easily add banners and display ads inside your posts or sidebar. This plugin makes it easy to also rotate, control, and track your banners and ads. 

There is also a very good paid plugin to do this. This is the one used by professional bloggers like John Chow, Shoemaker and Yaro Starak. It can put ads anywhere in the blog (text and display) you can have top  and bottom bar ads, exit popup and popunder with timer which can increase your opt in rate as much as 400%. See Video 

(20) Download Monitor. Allows you to upload .pdf, .doc and other files into your blog and track downloads. 

When you set this plugin, check the .htaccess file (drag it to your desktop and open in Notepad) and make sure it has this script in it:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^download([^/]+)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-content/plugins/download-monitor/download.php?id=$1 [L]</IfModule> 

Save it and re-drag it into the root of your domain. 

(21) Better tag cloud. Configures the number of tags displayed, the minimum and maximum font size, adds categories and other cool settings. Tags are important because are part of the SEO strategy. 

(22) Collapsing Archives. It collapses the archive list so it doesn’t take so much space on the sidebar. 

(23) Raw HTML. This plugin lets you use raw HTML or any other code in your posts. To insert different text and boxes in a post it’s usually very frustrating. This plugin overrides the current WordPress HTML and allows you to insert HTML code. You can make a blog post look like anything you want. 

(24) WP-Poll. Run a simple poll on your blog. You can do this in a post and/or leave it static in your sidebar. You can use this plugin to do that. You can find out a lot about your readers just by running a couple polls asking their experience level, online income, online business model etc. 

SEO plugins: 

(25) Google sitemap. It helps Google to index your post and pages faster and also promotes better rankings. Indexing simply means Google found your pages and copied them in their database. They need a copy of your pages on their servers before you can even hope to rank. Make sure to go through the entire list of configuration points.
If you don’t know the meaning of some points research it in Google. I go through this configuration in the video. 

26) MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer- Prevent “Over Pinging.” This plugin is important because every time you post, WordPress uses “Pingomatic” to notify other pinging services and search engines about your post. However, when editing and saving posts often, you risk “over pinging” and being banned from the search engines. 

(27) Nofollow for posts. You don’t want Google to follow links that lead to other websites and bleed Page Rank away from your blog. 

IMPORTANT – You want to set “nofollow” to your blogroll links, any internal links going to external pages or sites and those leading to your affiliate sales page. 

(28) Related posts. Automatically adds the related posts at the bottom of every post, which is necessary for good navigation and internal linking structure. SE spiders crawl your blog from page-to-page, so they have to be linked together. You should also link to other related posts and pages as you write your posts. 

(29) Platinum SEO plugin (an advanced version of the All In One SEO plugin). 

This plug in has a long list of configuration points and sets all the necessary duplicate content indexing exclusion like categories, archives, tags, admin pages, RSS, comments, trackbacks, feeds and comments. 

• • It allows Google to index only what’s important like posts and pages.
• • It allows you to perform the necessary on page optimization. Every time you write a post this plugin gives you the fields for the title, description, keywords and tags meta values that you must fill in if you want Google to index and rank the post.It also allows you to assign follow, nofollow, index and noindex attributes to each post and page. I personally set all my posts and pages to index/follow to instruct the search engines that I WANT my posts and pages to rank.

• • Permanently set the title, description and keywords for your home page.

• • Change the “title format” of posts. The WordPress default is post title | blog title.  The title is the most important tag for Google. It has to be set to show just the “post title” that you choose and not post title | blog title.

This is what show in the SERPS. Having ellipses in your title confuses the search engines and diminished your click through rate. The perfect title is your keyword with related keyword permutations. No blog name. 

 

(30) Yoast Robots Meta 

This plugin can perform some of the functions as Platinum SEO (not as intuitively,) but has a few extra features that are necessary for good SEO. 

• • Produces a non-indexing meta tag for the “noodp” “noydir.” This prevents some search engines to “make up” a different description meta tag other that the one you wrote for your posts.

• • Allows you to edit the Robot.txt and .htacess file without messing with the root-level files on the server. Nice convenience.

• • When you register your site in Google (Live Webmaster Tool) MSN and Yahoo, it allows you to enter the meta values for the verification codes without manually adding a meta tag and messing with the HTML code in the index.php

Important paid plugins: 

(31) WP-Unique. This plug in allows you to cherry pick an article in you niche off the web and re-write it so it becomes unique. This can save you a lot of time when writing your keyword-driven posts. It will change the source code so Google will consider it an original article. 

(32) Slick Social Pro WSO – This is an important plug in for SEO because it allows you to bookmark every post to over 50 sites and drive hundreds of back links to each post automatically. It has the ability to spread it out over different accounts and much more. When you use WP-Unique with Slick Social Pro together you can post and generate huge traffic fast.  If you write a post a day you can get as many as 1500 back links per month to you blog on autopilot! 

Other plugins: 

WordPress has an extensive library of plugins if you require more or different plugins other than those listed here.  http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins 

Advanced SEO configuration: 

Through plugins you can achieve a very good level of SEO, however, this is for those who want to leave no stone unturned and have the ULTIMATE professional SEO level. 

6. Configure a Robots.txt file and load it in the root directory. 

Robots.txt. syntax is complex, but when used right, it’s the ultimate SEO weapon. 

WordPress is a great platform but, because of its structure, it’s also a mess of duplicate content, which cost you penalties in the search engines. Duplicate content is one of the most discussed SEO subjects. Every time you write a post WordPress makes a copy in the categories, archives, tags, feeds, ect. 

When the Googlebot and others SE bots visit your site, they will index (copy and store in their database) everything on your site. “Indexing” does not mean they will rank you. It means they have copy of your  pages, images and files to be considered for rankings based on their alogarithm. 

Controlling exclusions and indexing can be accomplished with plugins (a lot of bloggers do this), but they are not totally sufficient because they produce a virtual Robot.txt file, which cannot be edited and don’t prevent the indexing of many other things. 

Advanced SEO is accomplished by installing a physical Robot.txt file that fully controls the blog. 

This allows you to: 

• • Eliminate any doubt of duplicate content at the root level.
• • Indexing of pages and posts only. Don’t feed Google any other junk. Prevent the indexing of unnecessary files meaningless to the search engines.
• • Indexing of relevant images only. Google sends TWO bots to your site, Googlebot and Googlebot-Image. Google likes images in posts with the ATL tag attribute.  This is positive for SEO because it strengthens the relevancy of content. But, Google doesn’t like the junk images like all the shades, arrows, icons and all the other knickknacks on your blog.
• • Disallow a long list of known “bad bots” like spammers and harvesters to further help the anti-spam plugins already in the blog.

IMPORTANT: When using the Robot.txt it’s important not to use the Platinum SEO plugin exclusion features, because the virtual Robot.txt will conflict with the real one. However, the plugin must remain installed to manually perform the post on-page optimization. When you use the Robot.txt file it’s also a good idea to set the canonical URL in the .htaccess file and not through plugin. 

Robots.txt must be programmed to exclude access to: 

Categories, archives, tags ,admin pages, RSS, comments, trackbacks, feeds, comments, trackbacks and many other files that are useful to the blog, but not for search engine rankings. Like .cgi-bin, rss, .css, .pdf,.js, .doc,. inc, and .txt files. 

Also exclude other pages that don’t need to be indexed. Like, footer legal pages, disclaimers and downloads. Must exclude images that don’t contribute to good SEO, only allow the indexing of the main images that Google likes and not the myriad of little .gifs, arrows, shades and bullets around your blog. This is done by giving Googlebot-Images specific instructions of which image directories to crawl and index. 

This assures that Google/MSN/Yahoo and other search engines don’t crawl useless directories and ONLY index your posts, pages and relevant images, as it should be. You work hard to compose and optimize these pages and you want maximum Page Rank on these pages and nothing else. 

The ultimate test is done in the Google Live Webmaster Tool. Here you can see exactly what pages are crawled and what not. When a blog checks out in Google Live then you know it’s done right. 

You should open a Google account ($5 one-time fee) this will give you many benefits including the Live Webmaster Tool. This tool will register your site, give you a meta tag code that you insert in the Yoast plugin (or directly in the header.php under the other meta tags) and then Google can tell you exactly what’s indexed. 

See the Robot.txt on my blog – You may want to make additional modifications depending on the needs of your blog. 

7. H1 and H2 hack. This is important and only a few bloggers even know about it! It’s a configuration change that must be done in the theme template. 

Nobody knows why, but WordPress comes with the “Blog Title” wrapped in the H1 tag <H1>Blog Title</H1> and the “post title” wrapped into the H2 tag <H2>Post Title</H2>, which is not a very relevant mark up for Google. 

After the title tag, the H1 tag is the next most important tag to Google for identifying keyword relevancy in a post. 

Some themes, these days, come with two H1 tags, one in the post title and one in the blog title, which may conflict. 

When the keyword of a post is searched, the H1 tag must wrap the “post title” and the H2 must wrap the blog title.
When the “blog title” is searched (for example your name) then the H1 must swap to the blog title and the H2 to the post title.  

I can’t give you a lesson in “on page optimization” right here, but trust me the post H1/H2 tags default must be fixed. It’s done with a conditional PHP code script. Every theme is different and must be customized for whatever theme you pick. 

The script must do all the necessary swapping for both cases: 

1) when the home page is a static page and 2) when the home page is the latest post. 

As you can see, you can achieve perfect SEO using this “team” of Robots.txt file, .htaccess file, Platinum SEO, Yoast Robots Meta and other SEO related plugins working together. Plus, the necessary PHP tweaks to the blog theme. 

There You Have It. A Perfect Blog Loved By Google and Configured With All The Functionalities and SEO of a Serious Traffic Magnet and Marketing Machine. 

All you have to do is make sure that you apply the correct information on the page optimization when writing your posts (your text must be relevant to a keyword). Make sure to fill in the fields for the title, description, keywords and tags and start building link popularity. 

8. Cool tools and stuff: 

http://www.thejackol.com/htaccess-cheatsheet 

An awesome .htaccess cheat sheet with examples of how to do some very cool and useful things through your .htaccess file (always make a backup before messing with .htaccess). 

http://www.wpcreations.com
Sean Lowery’s custom WordPress theme and website graphic service. Sean is one of the most talented graphic designers out there! 

http://www.lemonword
SEO tools, Googlebot simulation and other.
Coming Soon!