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Las Vegas Web Developer Shares 7 Tips For Starting A Blog

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arning! I'm going to depart from my usual and get a bit more technical in this blog post on starting a blog for your small business website. If you get queasy and squeamish by anything that sounds remotely like "geek talk," take a deep breath and go slowly! The following are a handful of excellent blog tools and tips for starting a blog.

1. Install Your Business Blog On Your Website Domain

When you start a blog, make sure that either you, your web hosting company or your web designer physically installs the business blog software on your website. Although there are many free, hosted options available at places like Blogger.com and WordPress.com, using one of those options isn't nearly as beneficial.

By installing your blog on your own website domain, you're accomplishing three big things:

2. Use WordPress To Start A Blog

WordPress is an easy-to-use, robust, scalable and search engine friendly blog platform. Besides having a hosted option at WordPress.com, WordPress also has a free, open-source option available at WordPress.org for installing and starting a blog on your own website. I use WordPress for Formulis and my client sites, and it's the choice of many large companies like CNN and The New York Times.

3. Switch Your Blog To Linux Hosting

Although you can start a blog on a Windows server, I suggest you transfer your website to Linux in order to take advantage of WordPress' "Permalinks" linking and file naming (Permalinks don't play as nice on Windows). What are Permalinks? Permalinks are an automated programming rewrite of your web page file path and name so that visitors and search engines see a "cleaned up" version. For example, instead of a non-Permalink page of your site having the address of http://example.com/?p=123 your site would show something like http://www.example.com/blog-category/blog-post-title.html.

4. WordPress Themes

WordPress and all other business blog or content management systems use themes to stylize and format layout and graphics of your blog. Think of a WordPress theme as a visual template system for each page of your blog. Themes are great because they separate the look and feel of your blog from the programming side... enabling you to change the look of your website on the fly without breaking the programming of your blog.

WordPress themes are available for free, as a paid premium design, or can be custom designed and built by Formulis, LLC. Free and paid themes are great, but they're not unique. Custom designed themes are awesome because you can change your business blog to look like your current website and match your brand image. In my opinion, when starting a blog, go with a nice free or premium theme (search Google for WordPress Themes) and as your blog grows, we can put together a custom theme for you.

5. Setup Google Analytics & Webmaster Tools

When you start a blog, I recommend you setup Google Analytics to track website visitors. Google Analytics is powerful and will provide you with an in-depth look at who's visiting your website, what keywords they're using to find your site, how much time visitors are spending on your business blog and more. Google Webmaster Tools are geared towards helping your site get indexed and improving some of the more technical aspects of your website. Both tools are free. They just need to be setup and monitored so that you can improve your blog.

6. Blog Tools 101: Important WordPress Plugins

WordPress uses a flexible system of blog tools called plugins to modify the functionality of your business blog quickly and easily. I suggest activating and installing the following blog tools plugins:

• Akismet - filters blog comment spam.
• Google XML Sitemaps - tells Google each time a new web page is added to your blog.
• Sociable - enables people to use popular social bookmarking tools to promote your blog posts.
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin - displays related blog posts on the bottom of each of your blog pages.
• Blubrry PowerPress - if you'll be recording audio Podcasts or blogcasts for your business blog.
• Yoast Breadcrumbs - displays a breadcrumb navigation to help visitors understand their location on your business blog.
• Feedburner - Although this isn't a WordPress plugin, I would suggest setting up Google's Feedburner tool for promoting your blog's RSS feed.
• If your WordPress theme isn't already optimized for search engines, I've heard good things about All In One SEO and Platinum SEO.

7. Think SEO

Lastly, and most importantly, you're going to need to learn some of the basics of SEO to maximize your benefits when you start a blog. You'll need to look at search engine keywords your competitors are using to promote their websites in Google, and relevant industry keywords to help you with your business blog's structure and for writing content. Before starting a blog post, research keywords that are important to your prospects, relevant to your business blog, and are under-used by your competitors; then write your blog post using those keywords.

Michael Borowiecki