Wordpress is an excellent site building tool and once it is setup properly, you can concentrate on adding great content to your site.  Wordpress will then take care of the rest, including all of the linking, creating pages, sitemap etc.  If you need more convincing, read my article on “Advantages of Using Wordpress for Affiliate Sites”.

The big question here is how do you set up the site?

The way I like to build a website is to have a homepage and some main pages.  The main pages cover the various sections of the niche.  I’ll then add content to the site, with each article fitting nicely into one of the sub-niches covered by a main page.  Here is a diagram I created a few years ago to explain how I structure a website:

You can see from the diagram that the homepage links to the main pages, and a sitemap.  You will of course want to add some of the following: privacy, disclaimer, terms & contact us pages, and these will also be linked to from the homepage.  The articles on the site then link to the related main pages, so that the content on your site is linked together by topic.  Wordpress makes this type of site very easy.

The homepage is obviously taken care of, though you do have a choice – do you use a static homepage, or the recent posts as a homepage?  Everyone has their own idea of what they want their homepage to look like.  I personally prefer a static homepage, or at least a homepage that I can control, so that I can make sure it acts as an “information centre” guiding visitors to the content they are searching for.  However, what about main pages?  How do you handle the main pages in Wordpress?

Many people teach that you use “pages” in Wordpress to hold your main page content, however, I use posts.  if you are confused, read this article on the difference between posts and pages.  In fact it would be more accurate to say I use the category pages as my main pages.  The category pages in Wordpress usually show all of the posts in the category, but I modify them slightly.  For my category pages I’ll:

1. Create a “sticky post” for each category, so that the same post is always shown at the top of the category page.
2. List the other pages in the category as plain text links to the “post” page created by Wordpress.
3. Remove the potential duplicate post page (the one that Wordpress created for my sticky post) using a redirect.

You can see this in action on the website I have been building for my Wordpress for Affiliate Sites members.  Here is the site.

Across the top of the site you can see links to the “home” and “glossary” pages.  These are pages (not posts) in Wordpress.  Underneath this, you can see three menus:  Conditions & Disease, Diabetes Treatment and Diabetic Pets.  Each of these categories represent main pages, but they are also “super categories”.  If you put your mouse over the top of these, a sub-menu opens showing a number of other categories.  Every category on this site is a “main” page on the site.

To illustrate the point, click on any of the categories. 

The page you get to is a category page in the eyes of Wordpress, but a “main” page in my site model. 

You can see the “sticky post” at the top of the category page, and this post will never change unless I change it.  In a traditional Wordpress setup, this post would be replaced when I next published an article to this category.  However, on this site, any new posts to this category will just be added as a link at the end of the page.

When you do things this way, posts are pigeon-holed into one category or another, so that these category pages (my main pages) become themed to a high degree.  The pages they link to are all in the same category, and of course, all of those pages link back to the main page.  

If you would like to learn how to create sites like this, my Wordpress for Affiliate Sites course teaches everything.  During the course I have videoed the entire process, from start to finish, so anyone can follow along. 

Feedburner is a great free service (now owned by Google).  It allows people to subscribe to your feeds, and will even email your subscribers for you whenever you post new material to your blog.  It doesn’t matter whether you post 1 or 100 new articles to your site in any given day – Feedburner will just send a single email to your subscribers notifying them of the new content.

For a free service, this is really cool.

Adding a Feedburner subscription box is actually not very difficult.  In what follows, I add one to my own ezSEO News blog.

1. Create a Feedburner account if you don’t already have one.

2. Login to your Feedburner account, and “burn” your feed. You’ll get instructions on doing this on the Feedburner site.  Generally, you can enter the following as your feed URL if you are using Wordpress:

http://mydomain.com/feed

Just add “/feed” to the end of your blog homepage.

3. Click the link top left in Feedburner to access “My Feeds”.

4. Your feeds will be listed.  Click on the one you want to add the Feedburner subscribe box to.

5. Click the Publicize tab:

6. On the publicize page, click the link in the left hand menu to “Email Subscriptions”:

7. Select the Feedburner delivery method, and then click on the “Activate” button:

8. Feedburner will give you the code that you need to insert into your template:

You might be able to paste this code into a widget enabled template using the text widget, or add it directly to a sidebar template.  In the screenshot below I have pasted the code into my sidebar template directly since my template is not widget-enabled.

.. and here is my site with the new subscription box:

If you want to be notified every time I post a newsletter to my blog, you can sign up for notifications there.

It has happened a few times to me.  The automatic upgrade plugin for Wordpress hasn’t worked.  The last time this happened was with Wordpress release 2.6.1. and it happened on all of my blogs.  Is it a hosting issue, or a plugin issue?  I am not sure, but what I am sure about is that I need to upgrade manually.  It’s one of those scary things the first time you have to do it, because you’re not too sure whether your site will still be functioning at the end of it all.  However, after having completed the procedure several times, I wanted to show you how easy it really is.

NOTE: Since writing this tutorial, I have found that manually deactivating all plugins (except the automatic upgrade plugin) before starting the automatic upgrade procedure fixed the problem with the upgrade failing.

The first sign that you need to upgrade will be in your Wordpress Dashboard.

You can see the Automatic Upgrade plugin kicking in, however, after trying this, it didn’t work.  Here is how to manually upgrade Wordpress to 2.6.1.

NOTE: Backup everything before you try this, and I accept no responsibility if things go wrong.  If you try this, you try it at your own risk.

1. Download WordPress 2.6.1.

2. Backup your database.  If you have the Lester Chan’s excellent WP-DB Manager plugin activated, backing up is very easy.

3. Backup all of your Wordpress files for the existing installation.

4. Deactivate ALL plugins.

5. You need to delete the old Wordpress installation, but there are some files/folders you do not delete.

Do not delete:

• wp-config.php
• wp-content folder, but you do delete the wp-content/cache and the wp-content/plugins/widgets folders.
• wp-images folder;
• wp-includes/languages/ folder if it exists
• .htaccess file
• robots.txt file

Delete:

• wp-admin folder
• wp-includes folder (but not the “wp-includes/languages/” folder if it exists).

NOTE: I actually don’t delete these, but simply over-write them.  I have not had a problem doing this instead.

6. Open the wp-config-sample.php file that comes with the latest version of Wordpress in a text editor.

Open up your old wp-config.php file, and enter your old MySQL Settings AND the table prefix into the new wp-config-sample.php file.  NOTE: This step is not in the online upgrade page at Wordpress.org, but it is a necessary one since in 2.6.1. the wp-config.php file has some additional lines for security keys:

Get your authorisation keys for lines 13, 14 & 15 of the wp-config-sample.php file from http://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/.  That link will give you three lines that you can copy and paste over the top of the existing lines in the sample file.

7. When you are 100% sure that your database settings and table prefix are correct in the sample file, rename the newly edited wp-config-sample.php as wp-config.php.

8. Upload the new version of Wordpress Files.

9. Run the upgrade program by typing in http://mydomain.com/blog/wp-admin/upgrade.php

NOTE: Replace the “mydomain.com/blog” part with the location of your Wordpress installation.

You’ll see this screen:

Click the Upgrade Wordpress Button, and hopefully you will see:

Click the continue button and you should be taken to your blog.

Logging into your blog Dashboard should now show that you are using the latest version.

10. At this point, you need to reactivate the plugins, and update any that may not be compatible with the new version of Wordpress.  However, the official updates instructions say to update permalink structure and htaccess files, so maybe this is necessary if you actually delete the files and folders above (instead of over-writing them as I do).

Be aware that although I have not had any problems using my “over-writing” process rather than deleting and re-uploading, there is no guarantee that this procedure will always work.

You may see this message:

This message comes from the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin.
Click the link to clean up and remove the nag.  You’ll then see:

You should now be good to go.  Happy blogging!

Wordpress Tags?  What are they and why should you be using them?

Since Wordpress 2.3, tags have become an integral part of blogging with Wordpress.

Have a look at sidebar on this page.  Do you see that large box full of words?  That’s a tag cloud.

Each of the words in this box are words I have used as “tags” in the articles on the site.  The bigger the word, the more often that tag appears as a tag in articles on this site.  You’ll see that from the screenshot, “Wordpress” is the largest word at the moment.  That means “Wordpress” has been used as a tag in more articles on this site than any other word.  That’s not really a surprise when there is a section on this site purely for Wordpress tutorials.

Internet Marketing, and affiliate marketing also have quite large size, and again, there are sections devoted to those topics on this site.

So, what exactly is a tag, and why should you use them?

Think of tags as “Keywords” for a given page.

Do you remember the old meta keyword html tag that was heavily used in the past for search engine optimisation?  It was seriously abused, and no longer affects your search rankings (at least not in a positive way).  Well, that meta keyword tag was originally used by the search engines as a way to categorise your page. Webmasters would “help” the search engines by including this tag at the top of every web page together with a list of highly related words or phrases to tell the search engines what the page was about.

Tags in Wordpress are very similar in their intended use.  To help categorise your content.  They are actually far more useful to visitors of your site than the old meta keyword tag, because of “tag pages”.  Go on, click one of the words in my “tag cloud”.  You will end up on a “tag page” that includes all of the posts that have been tagged with that keyword.  If yu are a visitor, the tag cloud is a simple way to find the most relevant content on a site.  It’s kind of like an idiot proof search box.

Tags don’t just help your visitors though.  The tags in the tag cloud get indexed with the rel=”tag” attribute, meaning search engines and other Web 2.0 sites like Technorati can actively search out the tags on your pages to help index your content.

Because search engines know these are tags, they are less likely to penalise you for duplicate content – they know what tag pages are, and their purpose (to help site visitors).

The tag cloud can be added to your sidebar easily enough if your theme is widget enabled.  The tag cloud is included in Wordpress 2.3. onwards.

Technorati, Tags and Categories

If you look on the Technorati site for a definition of tags, they say:

“Think of a tag as a simple category name. People can categorize their posts, photos and videos with any tag that makes sense”.  In fact, I recommend you read this page on Technorati, as it gives a little more information on the use of tags and getting included on the Technorati tag pages.

If you do any searching on the topic of tags and Wordpress specifically, there seems to be some confusion over the difference between categories and tags.  They do have similar roles in some ways (i.e. allows the user to click a tag in the cloud to be taken to posts related to that tag, in much the same way as categories).   What happens though if an article on your site is slightly off-topic, and does not really fit into any of your defined categories?  Do you create a new category?  Well, you could, but that would lead to a very long category listing as more and more categories are added.  Instead, you could just put it into the most relevant category and tag the article with highly related words and phrases instead.  Also, another major difference between tags and categories is that categories can be hierarchical (meaning sub-categories), whereas tags are entities in their own right and cannot be “sub-tags”.

One time-intensive process is editing tags on multiple pages if you want to change tags, since you have to load each post individually and then edit the tags, post and then edit the next one.  There is a nice little plugin called Simple Tags which can help with this.  At the time of writing this, the download pages says its compatible up to Wordpress 2.5. but I have it installed on Wordpress 2.6.1. and it seems to work well.

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Permalinks are a great way to optimize your blog post URLs.  If you read my article on Wordpress Permalinks,  you may be using the same permalink structure that I use, namely this one:

/%category%/%postname%/

With this type of permalink structure, your post URLs will look like this:

http://affiliate-minder.com/wordpresstutorials/install-wordpress-theme/

This is an actual URL from this site.  See that the %postname% is replaced with the name of the post, and the %category% is replaced with the name of the category.  I know, its fairly obvious, but bear with me.

What if you used nested categories?

Suppose you have a category called “blue-widgets”, that you setup to be a sub-category of the “widgets” category?

Well the post URL would now look like:

http://mydomain.com/widgets/blue-widgets/the-post-name/

See how Wordpress includes the full category path to your post?

That’s great for SEO, especially if you create your categories carefully to make sure that categories are grouped into “silos”, where you have the main category at the top, and all of the highly related categories as sub-categories of that main one.

However, there is one thing that you need to be aware of.

Wordpress sets up “category” pages, which all posts in that category are posted to. An example is the Wordpress Tutorials category on this site.  Click the Wordpress Tutorials link in the top nav bar.

You are taken to this page where you can see the most recent posts in the category:

http://affiliate-minder.com/category/wordpresstutorials/

Look at the URL.  Because this is a category page, the word “category” is used by default in the URL before the actual category name (“wordpresstutorials”).

Now there is a plugin you can use called “Top Level Categories” that will remove the “category” word from these “category page” URLs.

The above URL would then look like this:

http://affiliate-minder.com/wordpresstutorials/

Much better, right?

Well….. There are some limitations to this plugin, and one is that it wont work when your permalink structure is set to:

/%category%/%postname%/

Why?  I have no idea.  But if you use the same permalink structure I do, this plugin is no use.

You do have another option.  You can specify a word to be used instead of the word “category” in these category page URLs.

Login to your Wordpress Dashboard, and click on the Settings –> Permalink menu.

(Click to enlarge).

There is a box where you can enter the Category base.  If this is left empty, Wordpress will use the word “category” when displaying category pages.

My advice here is to insert a word that covers your main niche.  That way all of your category pages will have an extra keyword in them.

For example, it your site was one dogs, you could enter the word “dogs” (or maybe if your domain already had that word in it, you could enter “canine”, “mans-best-friend”, or something similar, but preferably a word or phrase that is searched for).

As with all things SEO, don’t overdo this optimization.  If you cannot think of a word to use, simply leave it blank.

WP Secure is a script that can restrict access to your WP-Admin folder based on IP address. That means no-one can login from any IP address other than your own. Here is how to set it up, and how it works:

Online Videos by Veoh.com

You can buy WP Secure here.

Since we want to create a well-structured web-site, we need to set Wordpress up so that it creates SEO friendly URLs for your posts.  To do this, we need to edit the Permalink options.

Literally speaking, a permalink is link that doesn’t change.  e.g. when you write an article for your website, it is given a URL.  This URL is what you will link to if you reference your article somewhere else on the web.  You certainly do not want the URL to change - it needs to be permanent.  Get the idea?

Permalinks are the permanent links to your articles.  In Wordpress, we can configure how those will look.

To change the permalink structure for your site, click on the Settings menu, and select Permalinks:

You will be taken to the Permalink screen that gives you various options for permalink structure.  Here are the first 4 with examples of what your links will look like:

Default http://mydomain.com/blog/?p=123

Day and name http://mydomain.com/blog/2008/08/01/sample-post/

Month and name http://mydomain.com/blog/2008/08/sample-post/

Numeric http://mydomain.com/blog/archives/123

We are interested in the 5th type of permalink - Custom, because it allows us to define how we want the links to be organised.  There are a number of variables you can use to define your permalink structure:

%year%

The 4 digit year of the post

%monthnum%

Month of the year

%day%

Day of the month

%hour%

Hour of the day

%minute%

Minute of the hour

%second%

Second of the minute

%postname%

The name of the post (words separated by a dash)

%post_id%

The unique ID number of the post

%category%

The category of the post.

%author%

Author name.

You can combine these variables into a custom permalink structure.  Most of them are not very useful for an affiliate site.  What is useful to use is the %postname% and %category% variables.

Select , and enter the following:

/%category%/%postname%/

Scroll down and save your changes.  You can ignore the optional settings at the bottom.  Now, your posts will look something like:

http://mypetshop.com/dogs/beagle

Where beagle is the name of the post, and dogs is the category you posted it in.

The title is slightly misleading.  These “essential” pages are not just for Wordpress sites, but for ALL web sites.

The pages are:

1. Terms of Use

2. Privacy

3. Disclaimer (I have seen Terms of Use and Disclaimer combined onto a single page).

4. Contact Us

The first three pages listed here are legal documents to keep you out of trouble.  If you doubt the need for these, I recommend you read this page:

http://ezseonews.com/awlp

Since these documents are legal documents, you should really get a lawyer to help you create them, or check over your documents once you have completed them.  A cheaper way is to buy a package like the one above.  These documents are written by lawyers with a good knowledge of Internet Law.  If you are serious about your online business, I highly recommend you create these pages.

To create the pages in Wordpress is simple.

Go to Write -> Page in the menu bar at the top.  A blank page will open.  Type in a title of “Terms”, and write (or copy and paste) your terms content in the main box.  When you have finished, publish the page.

Repeat with Privacy and Disclaimer.

These pages will now show up on your site in the menu on the right.  In a later tutorial, we’ll move these to the footer bar, and also add a “nofollow” tag to stop the search engines ranking the pages.

O K, the final page you need to create is a Contact Us Page.

For this one, the easiest method of implementing a contact us page is to use a plugin.  Here is the one I recommend:

WP Contact Form III

Install the plugin.  If you need a reminder on how to install plugins, watch the Installing Wordpress Plugins video.

Once installed, go to the Write - Page menu item to create a new blank page.  Enter a title (I recommend “Contact Us”).

In the main content area of the page,  type in the following:

If you are using the All In One Adsense and YPN plugin, I recommend you also include the following text in the main body of the contact us page:

This will just prevent Adsense showing up on the contact form.

Publish the page.

Again, this page will appear in the site menu.  There will be a contact form on the “Contact Us” page, and information submitted on this forum will be emailed to you.  Below is a screenshot of the contact form.

If you have installed Wordpress  and the plugins recommended in my Top 10 Wordpress Plugins article, you ‘ll currently have a blog that looks like the generic Wordpress blog, containing a hello world post, and an about page.

Note: You can click images to enlarge them.

We still have a fair bit of customizing to do, but I want to show you how to add a homepage for your site.  When this is up, it will mean that the search engines can at least get some meaningful content to index, and you can tweak this over the coming weeks as we complete the Wordpress to Affiliate Site customizations in preparation for adding more content.

Before that, I recommend you watch a new video I uploaded giving a brief overview of the Top 10 Wordpress plugins that you have installed, and what they do. 

You can view the video on the Top 10 Wordpress plugins page.

Scroll to the bottom of that page for the video.

OK, back to the homepage.

Login to your Wordpress Dashboard.

Click on the Manage -> Posts menu at the top to open up a list of existing Wordpress posts.

You’ll see a post with the title "Hello World".  This is the post that is seen on your Wordpress blog after initial install, and was put there by Wordpress to get you started.

If you click the title of the post, it will take you to the editing screen where you can edit the post.

If necessary, click the back button on your browser to go back to the Manage Posts screen.

Click the check box at the beginning of this line, and then click the Delete button (above the list of posts on the left).

If you go back to your blogs homepage (you can click the View Site button), you’ll see that the homepage has changed.  It now says "Not Found - Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here."

That’s because you have deleted the only post in your blog.

OK, back in your Wordpress dashboard, click the Manage - Pages menu at the top of the screen.

You’ll see an About page exists.  I recommend you delete that as well at this stage.  We will be recreating all the "support pages" we need later in the tutorials.

You have just deleted the only content your blog had.  We need to add some…

We are going to add a homepage. 

We’ll explore the differences between pages and posts in a later tutorial, but for now, click the Write -> Page (NOT Post).  We want to create a PAGE for the homepage.

Now you are on your own for a bit. This is the page you’ll see (click to enlarge):

Enter a title for the homepage.  This is going to be the title of the visible page (not the title in the meta tags).

Enter in the content of your homepage.  I would recommend just adding text at the moment.  What you are trying to do is setup a homepage that the search engines can index now.

I recommend that you click the Full Screen button in the WYSIWYG editor, so that you have a little more space. 

NOTE: On occasions, when saving information into a post or page, my computer returns with an error as if my network connection had timed out.  This resulted in loss of data on more than one occasion.  I always recommend saving your work as you go, or the alternative is to create your content in a text editor, and then copy and paste it into your Wordpress Dashboard.  There are even some applications that run off-line that can post to your blogs, and if interested, I would recommend you look at the free one by Microsoft called "Windows Live Writer".  Mac users can no doubt find alternatives.

Microsoft Live Writer allows you to format content, add images, select categories for posting, etc, and then publish when you are happy with a click of a button.  Its very cool.  The only downside is that you will need to login to your Wordpress Dashboard to fill in the meta data accepted by the Headspace plugin you installed.

When you are happy with your content, enter 4 or 5 tags in the box provided. 

Think of tags as words that define your content.  If you were to file your content away in a filing system, what categories would you put it under?  These are the types of words to put in the tags.

Scroll down the page a little more, and enter the Headspace Title and Description.  These will be used as the meta tags in your homepage, so take time to get them right.

As you scroll down, you’ll a section called Comments & Pings. 

We’ll look in more detail at these two concepts, but for now, click the little arrow to the left of the "Comments & Pings" section to open it up, and then uncheck "Allow Comments".  We don’t really want comments on the homepage, but that is your choice.  If you do, you can leave it checked.

OK, that’s it for your homepage at the moment.  Scroll back to the top, and look for the "Publish" button.  It’s right next to the Save button that you hopefully used while writing your content.

NOTE: There is also a preview button that opens the page you are working on in a new window.  This is useful to check your content before going live with it. e.g. are images showing up properly?  Are the paragraphs laid out properly, do links work, etc.  

You have just created the page to be used as your homepage, but if you click "View Site", you wont see it there yet.  You will however see a link to it in the right hand sidebar.

To get Wordpress to use this page as your blog homepage, you need to tell it to do so.

Click on the Settings -> Reading menu at the top.

You’ll see the fist item on the page is "Front Page Displays".  This tells Wordpress what you want to display on your homepage.

Click the radio button to enable "A Static Page".  Open up the "Front Page" drop down box, and select your newly created homepage.

Scroll down and click the "Save Changes" button.

Now when viewing your blog homepage, you’ll see the homepage content you just created.

This video shows how to install a plugin into Wordpress. The plugin installed in this video is a Google XML Sitemap generator, but the principle for installing any plugin is the same, so follow along with this one, and you should be able to install any plugin you want.

Installing a Wordpress Plugin Video:

Any questions or comments, please leave them below as comments.