Wordpress is a well established way to build a website or blog. Everyone from those with very little experience to those that are expert webmasters use Wordpress because it’s so easy to customize. Unlike other platforms, Wordpress lets you build the site you want in a simple and straightforward way. Wordpress actually started out as a simple way to create blogs, but over the years it’s become a lot more. One of the first questions you need to ask yourself when you’re ready to start building your site is do you want to use Wordpress as a CMS or a blog? Knowing what to use and when isn’t as hard as it sounds.

CMS stands for Content Management System. That means it’s a software designed to allow users to manage the content, pictures, video, and advertisements on their web pages in a simple, easy to navigate platform. It’s based on blocks of content that can be moved from one place to another. CMS is great for web pages that are meant to do more than just blog. You can control navigation, menus, content location, and much more. A blog typically has a static location for most of the content, even if colors and basic design differ.

The truth is Wordpress is a CMS with a fantastic blogging feature. Depending on what you plan to do with your site, Wordpress can be used to create interactive content, video, pictures, and links, along with a functional blog to increase the value you give to your reader. Wordpress gives you all the tools you need to add advertisements, products, shopping carts, or any other features you want to your website. You can customize each page for a different look, while keeping the layout consistent throughout the site. You also have the tools to add widgets and other features to your blog, making it easier for readers to keep up with what’s going on.

Starting something new always seems scary. A lot of people spend a lot of money to hire someone to build their website. You don’t have to worry about whether you’ll be able to build it yourself with Wordpress. The CMS and blog features make it easy to get a professional result from both platforms. Now that you know what to use and when, you’ll be able to make it look like you spent a fortune on your website.

This list will look at 10 of the most popular plugins which can be used with word press. These will be useful for anyone who is using wordpress and wants to make the most out of their site.

1. Twitter Tools

Twitter tools are a useful package which integrates your Wordpress blog and Twitter account. This connects both accounts together and has some useful tools.

2. TweetMeme Button

This plugin makes it easy to re-tweet your post. This makes it possible to promote your site using Twitter and also makes it easy for people to tell their contacts about something interesting they found interesting on your site. This also counts the number of times that the site contents have been retweeted.

3. Social Traffic Monitor

This is another useful plugin which will monitor all of the traffic on your blog. The plugin is able to analyze the traffic sourced from social networking sites.

4. Twitter @Anywhere

Twitter @Anywhere is easy to add to your blog and this can enable the various features. It also includes a retweet button, follow button and a tweet box.

5. Social Grid

This is a very simple plugin which can be used to organize and add links to your blog.

6. Social Media Page

This is a plugin which adds links to the social media profiles that you have on the internet. The links can be placed anywhere on the page using a simple tag.

7. Add To Any

This plugin is a complete package which makes it easy to share, bookmark and email your posts. The plugin can be set up to use Facebook. Google Buzz, Delicious, Digg and Twitter.

8. Facebook Social Widgets

These widgets are customizable. They make it possible to create a unique and interesting experience for your visitors.

9. Intense Debate Comments

This is a great plugin for promoting and encouraging people to participate in your blog. It is easy to integrate with Word Press and has its own entry on the admin panel.

10. Buzz Roll

Google Buzz is popular social networking site. This makes it possible to enable Google Buzz on your site. It’s possible to allow your visitors to share your content on Google Buzz.

What is Wordpress?

Wordpress is primarily designed as a blogging application. This makes it very easy to create, launch and manage your own blog. This is written in PHP and uses MySQL databases to store the information. It’s a completely free application but is still used by some of the biggest and most popular sites out there.

Wordpress Blog

If you want to run your own blog then a very simple way of doing this is using Wordpress. It’s possible to use this on the wordpress site without needing to download or install anything. You will be able to set up your own blog on wordpress.com and then run it on the wordpress servers.

If you’re interested in a much more powerful and customizable piece of software then you will want to download it and install it. Wordpress is designed for blogging which means it can be used out of the box. When WordPress is installed you can then set up and customize your blogs. There are many themes which are available for blogs and you can even make your own.

Wordpress CMS

Wordpress can also be used as a CMS package. A CMS or Content Management System makes it possible to control and manage the content on your site. There are many other more powerful CMS packages out there but Wordpress is perfect for anyone looking for a simple and basic tool to use. When using it as a CMS you will need to search for different themes available. These themes are suitable for many different types of CMS sites.

Installing Wordpress

It’s very quick and easy for anyone to install Wordpress on their webserver. Simply download the latest wordpress package from the internet and extract it onto your computer. The entire package can then be uploaded to your web server in the directory where you want wordpress to be located. This is very simple to do although it might take some time. The best way to upload these files to a normal web server is using an FTP client.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is a process of making your website look much more appealing to search engines. Most people use the internet by searching for things they might be interested by using a search engine.

If your site doesn’t feature in search engines then this will be a major problem because you will be turning lots of visitors away. To make your blog appealing to visitors you will need to use SEO plug-ins for wordpress. We’re going to look at 10 of the best SEO plug-ins which can be used in wordpress blogs.

1. Cross-Linker

Cross Linker is a very useful tool which can be used for SEO purposes. This can be configured to automatically create links between certain words. This is very useful for SEO and can also be fantastic if you have any affiliate schemes on your blog.

2. Meta Robots

Meta Robots for Wordpress is one of the best wordpress plug-ins for SEO purposes. This will automatically add Meta tags onto any posts which will help search engines to list them in their results. Meta tags are very important but most people will forget to enter them. That’s where Meta Robots can make your site much better.

3. Sitemap Generator

A sitemap is very important but creating one in the right format can be difficult. This plug in will automatically generate the sitemap for your site.

4. SEO Friendly Images

A picture is worth a thousand words to humans but not to search engines. Search engines will only ever consider the text on the site when making a decision about how important it is. The SEO friendly images plug-in can change that. This plug-in will simply ensure that both the title and alt tags are filled in.

5. Platinum SEO Plug-in

The Platinum SEO plug-in is one of the best plug-ins available. This has a number of features which are extremely useful. These are actually a collection of different features including automated 301 redirects, and automatically generating various tags.

6. TGFI.net SEO Wordpress

This is a popular plug-in which does a number of SEO jobs including optimizing keywords and titles. It is well suited to anyone who uses wordpress for a CMS.

7. SEO Tag Clouds

SEO Tag Clouds are very useful and popular features on many blogs. They have been used to make certain keywords stand out. This will make blogs look much more popular to the search engines.

8. SEO Post Link

SEO Post link will ensure that the post slug isn’t too long. If the slug is too long then most search engines will simply neglect to link to it. This plug-in can make your post addresses much shorter and more attractive in the eyes of search engines.

9. SEO Smart Links

If you link between your blog posts then this can encourage more people to view more posts on your blog. SEO Smart links will do this time consuming projects automatically for you.

10. SEO No Duplicate Wordpress Plug-in

Search engines really don’t like duplicated content. If there is any duplicated content on your blog then it will cause harm to your sits search engine position. This plug-in eliminates the chances of duplicate content.

1. Simple to Install

Unlike many other self hosted blog solutions, wordpress is very simple to install. There is an automatic installer which is the simplest way of installing Wordpress software on your computer. This will automatically copy everything you need and help you to set up the databases correctly.

Wordpress will run on almost any hosting account and is very quick. The hosting accounts required to run wordpress shouldn’t cost very much every month.

2. Range of Plug-ins

Perhaps the best thing about wordpress is the sheer volume of different plug-ins which are available. It’s possible to find plug-ins which are suitable for all sorts of different things. There are spam filters, templates and human checkers available.

All of these plug-ins are very simple to install and will be able to customize your blog so that you can make the most out of it. Blogs are wonderful but if they all look the same then you will find it difficult to attract anyone.

3. It’s Free

Another reason that wordpress is so popular is because it’s completely free. This means that you can download it and install it on as many sites as you want without needing to worry about license problems or spending too much money.

The fact that it’s free is encouraging many more people to start blogs because there is no risk involved. Even if their blog fails to become popular they won’t have lost anything.

4. Search Engine Optimization

Optimizing your blog for search engines can be very difficult because of the way many of them are constructed. However wordpress solves this and makes SEO very simple. Google and other popular search engines work well with wordpress and tend to rank them highly.

By concentrating on SEO you will be able to make your blog as successful as possible by attracting lots of people to it.

5. Customization

It’s also very simple to customize your wordpress powered blog. If you want it to look different then this isn’t a problem. There are various privacy settings which can be used to control who can see which sites. Plugins can also be used to expand the feature set offered as standard.

Wordpress is the perfect blogging software for any self hosted blog. This makes hosting and running your blog very simple. If you have even basic computer knowledge then you will be able to use wordpress without any trouble at all.

While these pieces of software do have some similarities they also have some differences which might affect which ones you want to use.

Wordpress

An impressive three Gigabytes of storage are available for photos and pictures. There is also a useful image viewer interface. It’s not just images which can be uploaded as documents can also be loaded if you wish. Wordpress supports post by email. This makes it possible to submit your posts by sending them to your own special email address.

One of the biggest advantages of Wordpress over Blogger is that it can be downloaded and installed on your own server. This makes it one of the best blogging solutions for anyone looking for a free and easy to use self hosted solution.

When using wordpress it’s also very easy to import posts from other blogs. This can be very useful if you’re upgrading your blogging software. If you want to upgrade to Wordpress then it is very easy to import all of your other posts.

There are also hundreds of different plugins available for wordpress. Some of these include Akismet spam protection to prevent spam comments from filling up your blog.

Blogger

Blogger makes customizing your blog much easier than wordpress because it’s possible for anyone to customize their blog. There’s no need to purchase a paid upgrade as you can do everything for free in the basic standard version.

Blogger also makes it possible to install a variety of tracker scripts from other third parties. This means that it’s possible to use Google analytics to find out exactly who is visiting your site.

When using blogger it’s possible to submit the posts by using an email address. This means that it’s very easy for anyone to write a blog quickly even if they don’t have access to their computer. The post can be sent from a mobile phone anywhere in the world.

Leaving comments on blogger blogs is a little annoying because it will open a new popup window which looks nothing like your site even if you’ve customized your site. On wordpress it’s possible to put a comment box at the bottom of any of your posts which will make it really easy for people to leave a quick comment.

Verdict

Which one you choose is completely up to you. If you’re looking for a public hosted blog then Blogger is probably the best solution. This is because it has more styles available and makes it much easier to customize the templates as much as you want. It’s possible to make a Blogger Blog look pretty much like anything you want.

Self Hosted Blog Software

Self hosted blog software is becoming very popular because it’s possible to host this on your own server. While this is slightly more difficult it does allow you much more control over your blog. The software can easily be installed on your own server hosting package and you are then free to do whatever you want with it.

Public Hosted Blog

A public hosted blog on the other hand is another type of popular blog. This allows people to set up a blog quickly and easily. This also means that you can host your blog without needing to invest in your own hosting package.

Advantages of Self Hosted Blogs

One of the biggest advantages of self hosted blogs is that you can do pretty much whatever you want. With public blogs you will rarely have any control over the adverts which feature on your blog. You will also only normally get a proportion of this.

A self hosted blog allows you to include as many ads as you want and you’ll get paid for all of them. This makes them extremely interesting options.

Add Ons

Another great thing about a self hosted blog is that you can upgrade the software however you want. There are countless add-ons which can be installed onto your blog software to improve the features.

Professional

Another major advantage of using self hosted blog software is that it looks much more professional. If you have a free blog site then the address will normally be very long. A great way to get around this is to set up your own self hosted blog with your very own domain name.

Advantages of Hosted Blogs

There are lots of advantages to using hosted blogs as well. These are much easier to use because there’s no need to invest in your own hosting account. It also gives you an easy interface to use which is tried and tested.

Unlike blogging software that you install yourself it’s possible to get a lot of help from the support team. While they will take a cut of your advertising revenue they should be able to make the site much more profitable.

Whether you want to use a self hosted or hosted blog will depend on your intentions for the site. If you’re capable of it then setting up your own self hosted blog will normally be much better.

Blogs or weblogs are the latest technology affecting the web. They consist of regularly updated posts or entries that involve everything from a person’s life and experiences to products they are interested in talking about. People can talk about vacations or their ordinary days. Blogs are personal snippets of life, unedited and very authentic and are meant to be shared with a community of people online. The blog site is the place where the blogs are located and where just about anything can be blogged on. You can put movies, photos, small video snippets, special events, feelings, thoughts or commentary on something you’re interested in. It is like a diary you put online, complete with video, documents, special links and your own personal opinion on a topic you happen to be interested in.

Blogs are about having regular people reach out to other regular people. It has its own advantages you should know about:

• Freedom to express what you want to express. If you want to have people read you, you will have to do some networking and create a blog they want to read about.
• Networking is important. A blog is a platform for people to exchange their personal ideas so you can market a product or give your point of view on that product.
• Blogs are good ways to advertise. Blogging can allow you to advertise your product and give your own opinion on how it works. It is a cheap way to advertise what you’re interested in selling.
• You can get people’s opinions on your products. You can get responses by means of comments from viewers and can get an idea of public opinion on what you have to sell.
• You can communicate internally within your company by blogging to them and giving them information they need to know.
• You can use SEO or search engine optimization in order to get your pages ranked by search engines so a lot of people can read what you have to write.

There are a lot of blog hosting services on the web. Which one should you use to begin your blogging experience? You might be a clueless beginner but you can take a look at the services offered by the various blogging hosts. You can wreck the whole process by choosing a blog host that can augment your blog rather than stifling it.

Your company may elect to start up its own web blog hosting site, if it is big enough for that. You can also pay someone to host your blog or you can have each employee set up his or her own hosting site and have a “blog aggregator page” that puts them all together. Many blog sites are free so they won’t have to pay anything to write on them.

Business blogs need the latest in features for their blog so they can maximize the blog for SEO and use the maximum amount of marketing a site can offer.

A blog needs to have these basic things in order to be successful:

• It needs a comment section. Comments give you a chance to hear what people feel about your blog. It is good for customer feedback comments if you run a business. You can talk back to the customers as well.
• You need trackback. This helps maximize product and company exposure. Customers can get back to you easily and find your blog on the web over and over again.
• Tags and categories can help you classify your blog searches so that the site is easier to navigate. Categories are like libraries that classify posts according to their subject matter, like distance learning, business, online auctions or e-commerce. Tags aid in classifying blogs so that new customers can learn about what your blog is all about.
• You need RSS Feed. This is an easy way to syndicate your blog and is how your blog content gets picked up by newsreaders and aggregators.

If you are planning to establish your own blogging program, you need to have a lot of decent options. Free blog hosting is a good idea for your employees but free blog hosting online currently is best for personal blogs. Paid blogs have amazing packages for your company. Check out some blogs that already use the hosting service to see if it’s what you want out of the hosting site and to see what the other blogs look like. Consider, too, what the technical support is like on the blog site.

When you select your blog host, you should collect a team of people that can create what the blog will look like and what it should involve. Such a team needs to:

• Create styles that fit with audience needs
• Have credibility to your website
• Make sure the blog is updated at least once per week
• Make sure there are web links imbedded in the blog
• The posting should be in the first person
• Make sure you have a business perspective
• Have the blog be conversational, honest and personal

Make sure that the blog has the style, content and look found in your company’s schemata so that the blog reminds people of your company.

If you start your own blog from scratch, you will likely have a better chance of having your blog picked up by search engines. Google runs “Blogspot” and spends time every day crawling through the web pages, indexing the various blogs by keyword. You will get easily ranked by Google if you sign up to Blogspot. By being picked up by search engines, you don’t have to promote your blog very much. Your marketing can be very minimal or nothing at all.

If you get a big readership, you may want to change the location of your blog away from the more amateurish free site and to a paid site or connect the blog to your own personal domain. High profile blogs need to be in high profile locations so moving your site to your own domain gives you a great deal more credibility. It makes your sight look more professional and gives you a leg up on the competition. You can find a company to host your blog for free or for very little. You can also sell ad space on your blog so that you can earn a bit of money while blogging. It doesn’t pay to do this, however, until you have a large group of readers who will follow you wherever you happen to be.

Beginning to blog on a free blogging site will help you gain that large following you’ll need to move to your own domain. You can practice the art of blogging risk free in a comfortable and easy setting. You’re your blog gains popularity, you can then consider moving it to your own personal domain and ask your readers to follow you. Blogspot, Blogger and Eponyms are kind of the nursery schools that allow you to ply your trade easily with chances for future advancement always possible.

Know what your priorities are.

Do you want easy customization or just a simple way to put your thoughts down? Most that are highly customizable are more complicated to use than simple blog platforms. You may want to sacrifice the ability to put what you want in terms of appearance and font in lieu of being able to simply put down your words and perhaps a picture. If you happen to be a great web designer, on the other hand, you might find simple hosting sites to be too frustrating.

There is no such thing as a “best platform”.

It really does depend on your needs. Blogging is a lot about individuality and there is individuality in choosing the platform that fits best for you. There are a lot of platforms to choose from. Each meets the needs of a different type of blogger. This is good, because you can find one that fits with your technical ability—one that isn’t too confusing but has what you want in it.

It’s true that no two bloggers will need the same two things out of a blogging platform so finding the exact right match for you can be a bit confusing. Read a few reviews on blogging platforms, keeping your personal priorities in mind when you read the reviews. Find out the position that the reviewer is coming from when you read the review. A bad review for an easy site might come from a computer programmer who obviously will find the hosting site too easy. A beginner might find a complex site much too overwhelming. Look for the best platform for you and stick with it. You will learn a lot and will soon be blogging to the internet if you have a site that works for you.