For a new user, however, it can be a little overwhelming once they log in for the first time. The WordPress backend is a little bit heavy and offers so many tools that it can be confusing for those new to the system.

At first I was spending a lot of time on the phone talking clients through the same basic issues over and over. How do I add a new post? How do I create a new category? While these were new issues for them, I had to repeat myself over and over. So I put together a document that provides basic instructions for using WordPress and I have been providing clients with a .pdf version to help guide them through their new site.

Now I am making it available through DocStoc. Feel free to share it, embed it, pass it on, whatever you want.

Keep an eye out for my next one, a .pdf version of my Optimizing WordPress post.

Basic WordPress –

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I was brought on to ‘Another Harvest Moon’ in order to develop the website and build the social media component of the marketing campaign. This is an exciting opportunity for me to combine my interests in the film and web worlds. You can see the current website and trailer here: http://anotherharvestmoon.com/, although one of the first steps in the project is going to be a complete redesign of the site by Sauce Creative Group. Sauce will provide all the design elements and I will be programming the site using WordPress.

This is a small indie film with a very small promotional budget but we are trying to create as much buzz as possible in order to help them get distribution. So we were looking for help with organizing and implementing an ambitious social media strategy.

Please check out their sites:

Official Webite: http://anotherharvestmoon.com

Facebook: http://facebook.com/harvestmoonfilm

Twitter: http://twitter.com/harvestmoonfilm

Youtube: http://youtube.com/harvestmoonfilm

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Some Qualities to Look For:

cPanel: This is a control panel system that you (or your designer) will use to setup email, control usernames and ftp access. The technical side of things is made MUCH easier with this. I won’t work on a site without it.

Fantastico or Simple Scripts: These are services that allow simple one-click access to many of the most popular web site scripts out there, like WordPress, mailing lists, e-commerce plugins, etc. Most quality hosting services offer this.

Unlimited (or essentially unlimited) Everything: All of the services I will recommend will come with Unlimited Storage Space & Bandwidth. They either have unlimited or HUGE amounts of the following: domains, sub-domains, email addresses, MySQL Databases. Some limit you to something like 5000 email addresses, but what would most sites ever need with 5000 email addresses? It is just good to know that you can use as many as you want.

Ease of Use: No real way to tell this until you sign up and sign in. I have learned the hard way that it makes a BIG difference on the time it takes to accomplish basic tasks. GoDaddy? Horrible. Yahoo? Really bad. See more abut that below…

Some Hosting Services To Avoid:

Siteground.com: I had a client who hosted their site there and it was down so often that we had to sign up for a new account and throw away the money they had paid for the year of hosting because it just wasn’t worth having the site there any more

GoDaddy.com: A very popular and inexpensive solution, especially for domain name purchasing, but their site is SO user-unfriendly that it takes FOREVER to find and change anything. I also has a few major problems with WordPress sites so if you are looking to use WordPress at any point, avoid GoDaddy.

Yahoo.com: One of the bigger names in the internet world and they offer a pretty cheap solution that allows you to host some basic sites. It might be fine for doing your first site yourself, but to install and work on a site on a professional level, your web designer needs easy access to things that they just don’t make available or make very difficult to use.

If you host your site at GoDaddy, Siteground, or Yahoo and hire me to work on it, you will most likely end up paying me MORE than a year of hosting at some other places just to mess around with the problems of these sites. While it would seem like a waste to pay for another hosting service before your time runs out, it ends up being better to just make the switch and allow your web designer to work faster & easier (and in the end, allow them to charge you less!).

The Hosting Service I Recommend:

I used to recommend a few different hosting services, but now there is only one – Hostmonster.com

I have used Hostmonster for a couple years now and love it. They offer one-click installation of WordPress (as well as a bunch of other great scripts, like mailing list managers, e-commerce, forums, and more). Their customer service is amazing, with phone and chat support that always answers my questions.

For any potential clients – signing up with Hostmonster through this link is enough to cover the time it takes me to set-up your hosting account. Using this affiliate link allows me to keep the cost to you as low as possible.

CLICK HERE TO CHECK OUT HOSTMONSTER.COM.

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Rather than get into the scam aspects here, I will just point out this article on ‘Black Hat’ vs ‘White Hat’ SEO techniques. Let’s just say that buying your way to the top through illegitimate means can get you BANNED from Google – the exact opposite of what you were trying to achieve.

Brief History of SEO and Keywords

I am going to greatly simplify here for the sake of keeping things short. If you think back to the early days of the Internet, so much was different. Sites were static and simple. Google was just starting to crawl the web. In these early days, it was fairly easy to add a few keywords to the site’s code and jump up in the search rankings.

The problem now is that the Internet has grown. There are millions of sites and those sites are much more complex and dynamic, constantly changing and pumping new content into the search engines. Google has grown to the top search engine (by far) in large part do to the programming it uses to dissect and rank sites. This search algorithm is extremely intelligent and uses a number of factors in determining how your page ranks in searches.

But to keep it simple, you need to do two things:

• 1) Make your site RELEVANT.
• 2) Make your site VISIBLE.

Basic SEO Practices

This article does a great job of outlining some of the major factors in optimizing your site for search engines. Most of it involves working with the HTML and other coding languages involved, so it gets a little tech heavy. But if you work with a web designer, they should be aware of this stuff. The main point is that a search engine reads your site. Not the way we see it, but through the code, looking specifically for a few things: the content, the metadata (fancy word for the keywords), how the site is linked to itself (internal links) and how it is linked to from other sites (external links).

Making Your Site Relevant

To be relevant, the site needs optimized content. This means information that readers will find useful and/or interesting. It means up to date and recently posted content.

But to the search engines, it needs a few more things that are a little more complex. Search engines want Headings that use important keywords and links that refer to other sections of the site. It also means that lots of other ‘relevant’ sites have linked to you and that when they link to you, the use important ‘anchor text’ for the links. For example, if Joe from down the street (who has no visitors) links to me with the words ‘CLICK HERE’, it means next to nothing. If the biggest web design site on the Internet links to me with the words ‘GREAT WEB DESIGNER’ that means a lot and the relevance of my site just went up.

The actual content of your site, though is purely up to you. Add as much fresh and relevant content as you can, as often as you can. There are countless ways to improve your writing and that is too broad of a topic to get into here, but the key is to be relevant and recent.

Making Your Site Visible

SEO is actually just the beginning of the process in making your site visible. I have outlined a few examples of other ways to drive traffic to your site in my article ‘Why SEO is Not Enough‘ , so I won’t repeat it here. With the expansion of social networking there are plenty of ways to get the word of mouth machine moving without ever showing up in the searches. Try this post from webdevlounge.com about using social media to market your blog or this one from Duct Tape Marketing for a more detailed explanation of ways to use all the social media options in concert with each other.

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The Real Goal

Let’s start with our actual goal, which is not to rank #1 on Google, but to get more meaningful traffic to our site. Using SEO to rank higher in searches is merely one way of doing that. There are countless others. For example when I go to Geico.com, it is because I saw a TV commerical with a talking lizard, not because I searched for insurance in a search engine. When I first heard of GoDaddy.com it was because they had a memorable Super Bowl commercial with a hot spokeswoman, not because I found them online. I am not suggesting spending millions on a TV campaign, simply pointing out that there are other ways.

Before I get into solutions, let me relate an experience that will point out one of the major problems with basic SEO.

Ranking High with The Wrong Keywords Is Meaningless

I was once contacted by a potential client who wanted me to give a quote on SEO for his site. I looked over his site, put together a little proposal on a number of things I might be able to do and I also explained that SEO is actually a very complex and ongoing process. The problem is that this client was being told by someone else that adding some keywords would cost $250 per site and would guarantee #1 ranking on Google. Even after I explained that his site already HAD keywords, that it would take me all of 30 seconds to change or update those keywords and that anyone promising a #1 ranking on Google (for $250, no less!) is a scam, he decided the promise of a #1 ranking was too enticing.

Let’s look at this #1 ranking promise. There are several ways in which this little scam works. One is fairly harmless and you lose whatever money you paid. The other can actually be very harmful to the point of being BANNED from Google and you lose your money. Going by some of the estimates I have heard that go along with #1 promises, it could be a lot of money, too.

The harmful way involves illegal or at least dishonest, cloaked methods of basically spamming the search engines to think that your site is extremely popular and relevant. There is only one problem. Your site is not popular OR relevant and Google is extremely smart about this kind of thing. Once they discover it, your site is done and won’t show up in the searches at all. Let’s hope you haven’t gone that route.

The less harmful way is still a waste of time. Let’s say you get promised a #1 ranking but they fail to mention which keywords you will be ranked for. If your name is John Smith and you are a carpenter from Los Angeles, it would be ideal if you listed well when someone searches for ‘Los Angeles carpenter’ or maybe ‘Los Angeles contractor’. What if you rank #1 for ‘Los Angeles John Smith’? No one is searchng for that when they need a capenter. What is you rank #1 for ‘Las Vegas carpenter’? That is also meaningless, since you don’t live in Las Vegas. While this is not harmful to your site, it also not very helpful.

So let’s move onto solutions…

I am going to to outline a few quick examples of quick, easy ways to get some word-of-mouth flowing about your site and use some real-world examples of how they have worked or me.

COMMENTING ON BLOGS

There are many great reasons to comment on blogs.

Last week, I found an interesting article and commented on it. A while later, I was asked to write a guest blog post for the site, which will allow me to post back to my own site, sending people back to whatever page I send them to in the link. It took me all of two or three minutes to read that article and write a quick comment. I have yet to see the real results of this venture (since the guest post is not up yet) but I would like to pass along a similar experience from HowtoMakeMyBlog.com .He does a great job of spelling out how and why traffic was driven to his blog when he did a guest post.

If you spend time reading blogs (and since you’re here, I’m guessing you do), take the time to leave a comment when you find something helpful and expecially when it is a site that is relevant to what you do. If you remember from my post on SEO Basics, I mentioned the importance of having sites link back to you. Well, adding a comment is also leaving a link back to your site. While not every site allows search engines to follow the links in comments, many do. Even if the search engines don’t find you, all the people who read that post have the chance of following to your site. Just make sure you leave an added useful comment.

SOCIAL NETWORKING

A great starting point is this post from webdevlounge.com about using social media to market your blog. But there are countless social networking sites now, all of which can kick start a conversation about you and your site. The biggest right now by far are Twitter and Facebook, which can also be linked so that your Tweets show up in Facebook but those are just the beginning. One of the best posts I have seen on how to harness all of the social service together was from Duct Tape Marketing.

Alternative Search/Listing Services

A great resource for those with services that cater to local clients, webdesignfromscratch.com has put together a great list of places to list your site, all of which focus on local listings:

• People’s Guide
• Google Local
• HotFrog
• Windows Live
• Yahoo Local
• YellowPages.com
• BOTW.org
• Free Classified Advertising And Promotion
• Squidoo
• eBay

Read the full article here: 10 Ways to Promote a Business.   I would also add Yelp to this list. Check out Yelp and if no one has listed your business yet, list yourself and get some friends (or even better – clients) to give you reviews just to get the ball rolling.

This is not even close to an exhaustive resource for marketing resources online, but it is a start. Any other suggestions or sites that I missed?

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