Steps to Take to Create a WordPress Blog

A blog is a great tool to help you get ranked in the search engines. This article will give you the steps to creating your own WordPress blog.

Keyword research is the first thing to do and probably the most important exercise you can accomplish unless you are going to brand your own name. If that is what your are going to do you can then just get a URL with your name.

The first tool you can use is for keyword research is Google's Keyword Tool. Just type it in Google and it will be number one. If you have a niche in mind you can start by typing in those keywords and see if there are sufficient searches. You do not want too many searches because you will not be able to compete. It would take a long time to rank for those keywords and your competition probably has deep pockets.

Next you can use the free wordtracker tool. With this tool you can find long tail keyword phrases that get enough searches and are not already taken as a domain name.

There is a toolbar that is really handy and can be downloaded at cashkeywords. It has the above keyword search tools and more all in one place. Very handy.

Next you will want to get your domain name that you have found from your research. You can find domain name sellers and pick one to get your domain. Whichever one you choose I would just get the basic domain package as that will be sufficient.

Hosting is the next thing on the list. There are many hosting companies so you need to do your homework. They have a variety of hosting plans. Once your hosting is setup then you need to go back to hosting company and do the DNS server registration so that people can find your domain on the Internet.

We are almost there. You will need to login to your website back office or cPanel. You scroll down the page and click on Fantastico. You will then see WordPress. Click on it and follow the instructions. This will install the basic foundation of WordPress in your root directory.

You can now login to your WordPress back office by typing your domain name and adding wp-admin at the end. Once your are logged in there will be two major things to accomplish. You need to get a new theme and there are plugins that you need. If you want to change to a new theme you need to download it to your computer. You then need to unzip it with a program like winzip. Once you have done that you need to upload it to the server with an FTP program. I use a free one called Filezilla which you can find by searching Google.

WordPress makes it easy to download plugins right from the back office. You do need to know which are best ones to use.

You can now actually start blogging. There are two different types of posts. One is called a page and is similar to pages on a static website. The second is called a post and posts will recede into the background as you create more and more of them. First in, First out.

So there you have the basic foundation of creating a blog. You can now start posting information about your niche and become the authority in your niche. All the best.