Now that you have a domain, hosting and some keywords sorted, it’s time to set this thing up. There are a few different steps to setting up your site and different steps you need to take for different types of sites. So I’m gonna break it up into 3 sections for you.

1. Theme
2. Content
3. Tracking

Each section might be quite long so grab yourself a drink and some snacks ;)

Theme
The theme is basically how your site looks and its backend features, different themes have different features that allow it to do certain things. Most of these things can be added to any theme via wordpress plugins, I’ll tell you more about them later.

You have a few different options available to you when it comes to themes, you can either get a free one, buy a premium one or build your own. If you are going to create a lot of sites (you probably will as not all sites will make it) the best option is to create your own themes, the best way to do this and the way I do it is to use a program named Artisteer (affiliate link), it allows you to create themes and gives plenty of options, this is what I use for all of my sites.

Your theme is very important as it can seriously alter your conversion rate (the number of people that buy your products or click your ads). I have written a guide on how to use it HERE!

You can get a lot of free themes online but I have found the best option to be Woo Themes (affiliate link), they offer some great free themes as well as premium options if you want to t=step up and get a proven theme rather than a home made one, I do this for some sites that have bad conversion rates with my themes.

Installing your theme is simple, you just need to click appearance in the side bar, then themes, then upload themes, pick your theme from the menu and voila, it will look exactly how you planned it. To make alterations to your themes once it is uploaded (without going back into Artisteer (affiliate link), and editing it that way) it requires a little CSS knowledge but this is for advanced users and we don’t really need to worry about that yet.

The things that we do need to worry about are as follows:
Permalinks – In the settings/permalinks menu, go down to custom structure and type “%postname%”, this makes the addresses of your pages nice and neat, things like internetmonehs.com/yourmum instead of the default internetmonehs.com/09/10/11/id-342524. This is important for the link building process later on although not absolutely necessary.
Plugins – There are some plugins that are must haves for your site, simply go to the plugins menu and click add new, type in the following names anc activate them.

All in one adsense and YPN – this theme will allow you to add adsense to your site so you can start to make some money, there is more about this in my monetisation article. The plugin is pretty straight forward and easy to use. To use this plugin you will need to sign up to google adsense

Ezine – This allows you to submit your posts directly to ezine articles, which will give you some powerful back links, more about this in the backlinking article.

All in one SEO – Gives plenty of automatic SEO options, allows you to do stuff like easily update your meta data, this is important to rank well in google which is our entire aim here.

Contact form 7 – Creates an instant contact form for your site.

Easy privacy policy – Creates a privacy policy that your site requires if is using google adsense.

Viperbar – This is a free bar at the top of your page that allows you to collect email address, this is very important in creating authority sites. It is provided by one of the only guys who I trust online Glen at Viperchill, you might notice that I have one at the top of this site. If you have noticed it go and put your email address in IMMEDIATELY.

GA analytics – This lets you track your visitors and gives you a lot of information about how they behave on your site. I will tell you more about this later in the article. Sign up HERE

Content
Okay so this is the meat of your site, you can have the best theme in the world but if you don’t have great content then the search engines will ignore you and any traffic that you do get will not return.

I build my sites with 4 initial pages, a home page that focuses on my main target keyword (this should be the same as your domain name). A blog page that will contain all of my posts and 2 pages for other related keywords , the pages should be named the same as the keyword you are targeting.

So a few basic rules that I like to use (not so much on this site because the aim of it is not to rank well, this is more of a hobby for me).

H Tags – Google loves proper use of h tags, and using them will help you to rank much higher much quicker. My general rule is, put the keyword in h1 tags at the top of the page, and 4 h2 tags containing the keywords in sentances throughout the article, like this:

pumpkin pie

What is pumpkin pie?

Use the h2 as headings for sections of your articles. When writing articles I immediately write down 4 headings and then write at least 100 words under each heading, this gives you a nice 400-600 word article (which is the perfect length for google).
Add a few images to the page and make sure there al tags are the same as your keyword, this means that instead of looking at the image google reads it as your keyword, making it more relevant (don’t worry, wordpress lets you add alt tags as soon as you upload an image.

Do this for each page and you site is ready to go. If somebody came to visit your site it would look attractive, full and informative. Make sure that your content is good or people will not come back, the entire point of websites is to be informative and give the searcher what they’re looking for.

You can then start adding more pages to your site as it ages, if you are using adsense to monetise then more pages = more revenue so the more you have the more you earn. It is also important to know that the whole aim of making sites like this is to keep people on them, the more time people spend on your site the more monehs you will make. This leads me perfectly to my next section……

Tracking
So how do you know how many people are looking at your site?, how they are finding it, what keywords they are using, how long they are spending on your site, what pages they are looking at, which pages make them leave your site and many many more things that you can find out if you can be bothered analysing.

The answer is google analytics, sign up for this free service, and input your tracking code that it give you into your GA Analytics that I told you about earlier and you are ready to go.

Other things to sign up for (to get the most out of your site sign up to these too):

Google webmaster tools – This lets you have more specific tracking data as well as giving you options to geographically target your site and what position your site is showing up in google.

Bing webmaster tools – Not a lot of people will tell you this but Bing owns Yahoo and ranks things in the same or similar positions, although these 2 search engines aren’t worth optimising your site for, they can bring in some decent traffic and traffic is worth money so it is worth the 5 minutes it takes to do this.

Adding your sites to Bing webmaster will get it indexed in Yahoo and Bing and start sending you traffic almost immediately. I make a lot of money from Yahoo visitors, for some reason they like clicking more of my ads than google visitors do……WEIRD!

Anyways, that’s it, do you do things differently? Let me know what you do at this step, I’m always up for refining my techniques.

At this point I want to mention a product that I no longer use because I know how to do things without it, but when I was first starting out I used a service called WordPress Direct, it basically sets up your blog for you (including installing analytics). Check it out if the above is too confusing for you or if you’re lazy. It is free for 60 days then you have to pay to use it but you do not lose any of the things you have done in those 60 days.