Many online entrepreneurs develop a blog presence online because they’ve heard about the search engine appetite for blog content. And it’s true – Google and other search platforms like frequent content often provided by blog entities.

But creating a blog isn’t enough to help you rank high for your niche market. You want to know some solid, evergreen WordPress SEO tips that will help position you ahead of your competitors for traffic in your niche.

Let’s start by talking about theme design. The way your theme is created has a lot to do with how the search engine navigates it and ultimately indexes it. Before investing in a theme, make sure that it’s search engine optimized.

WordPress SEO

Using keywords in your content isn’t quite enough. You have to use them as tags for the post. And then you need to categorize the post so that Google (and your visitors) can easily sort out the topics.

There are some tweaks you can make on your blog to help it be search engine optimized. First, make sure that you set your permalinks for optimal performance. Log into your WordPress dashboard and go to Settings and then Permalinks.

It defaults to show your blog URLs with non optimized numbers like this: domain.com/?p=123 – but that URL doesn’t tell Google what’s on that page. Instead, choose the last option that says custom structure and type this into the space provided: /%postname%/ so that it makes your URL look like this: domain.com/keyword-phrase-here.

Aside from these little tricks, you can also install some neat SEO-based plug-ins to operate on your blog. Include a sitemap for Google so that navigation is clear for the search engine spiders that visit.

Also install an All in One SEO pack that helps your blog achieve the maximum ranking it can from being perfectly optimized for your relevant keyword phrases. By doing these small steps, and posting regularly, your blog will continue to rise in the ranks of the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Adding images to your blog makes it come alive. No one wants to land on a content only site – it’s boring! So adding images helps break up the text and it adds appeal to your site for visitors.

Whenever you add a new post, you can add an image. (Or freshen up older posts by going back and adding images). Click on the place where you want the image in the blog post.

So if you want it to the left of a paragraph, with the text wrapped around it, click to the left of the first letter in the first sentence of that paragraph.  Then next to the Upload/Insert section, click the Add an Image icon (hover over it to see which media icon it is).

WordPress Image Management

A window will open up for you to select the file you wish to add. You can choose from your hard drive, from a URL, or from the media gallery if you want to use an image you’ve already added to your blog elsewhere.

After it uploads, you’ll see a new window open up. Here, you can customize the image a bit. You can add a link to it, to hyperlink the image somewhere else. You can choose its alignment – align it to the left or right of the text (or in the center) so that it wraps around.

You can also choose to resize it to a thumbnail, medium, large or full size. When you add the image, you’ll be taken back to the blog post where you can see how it’s fitting into the text.

Sometimes, it won’t have a border so it will be crammed up against the text. To change anything (including spacing), click on the image and again on the Edit image icon. If you click on Advanced Settings, you can give it some spacing.

Under the Image Properties section, you have the option to give it a border or add some vertical and horizontal space between the image and the text. You can play around with it, but usually a 5 or 10 in the vertical and horizontal spaces works just fine.

When you’ve finished, click Update and see how the image works within your blog post. You can delete the image by clicking on it and just hitting your delete button on your keyboard.

You can use images in different areas of your blog – in the posts, on the pages, in your header and footer, and also in your sidebar. Just make sure you check the final output to see if it’s aligned right and hyperlinked the way you want it before leaving it alone for the public’s view.

Whenever you make a new post on your WordPress blog, you have the opportunity to categorize it. Some people don’t bother, but SEO experts will tell you this is a big mistake.

To add a new category, you can do it from the actual blog post, by clicking Add Category, or you can click on your dashboard by navigating to Posts and then Categories, which takes you to the entire categories page so you can edit and manage all of your categories at once.

WordPress Categories

Here, you can create a new category and give it a parent category if you want this to work in a hierarchy system, with sub-categories. You’ll create the slug (which is the URL version of the category). Depending on the theme you’re using, you may want to add a description because some themes show the description while others don’t.

You can delete categories here too. If you delete a category, it doesn’t do away with your blog post. Instead, it just causes that blog post to return to the default category of “Uncategorized.”

Categories help your visitors navigate your website better. Some people truly depend on them to find what they need. Tags help too, but they’re a bit different. For instance, let’s say you have a vegetarian blog and one category is vegetarian foods.

You can post a blog post about a certain brand of food and place it in the vegetarian foods category. But the tags you use might be the brand name and type of food that it is, such as “Yvess, vegetarian corn dogs.”

The only bad thing about categories is if you over do it. If you have a long scrolling list of categories on your site, it can get confusing for your visitors. So it’s better to keep them trimmed back, and possibly create sub-categories instead.

WordPress tags are very important and are similar to your categories, only they’re not necessarily there for navigation purposes. They’re more for sorting posts according to topics and identifying your content for search engines and visitors with keywords and phrases.

Tags are more specific than their category counterparts. Categories are broader, but tags dig down deeper to tell you specifically what’s inside a particular blog post. Whenever you add a new post, on the right side, you’ll see a section that says Post Tags.

WordPress Tags

If you change your mind and want to delete a tag, just click the gray X beside the tag. WordPress recommends an average of 5 to 10 tags be added to each blog post. Not having any isn’t good for your search engine optimization. Having too many only confuses the reader.

You can manage your tags from the main dashboard, too. Click on Posts and then Post Tags. You can add tags from there, delete or edit them. On this page you’ll see a massive tag cloud, too.

A tag cloud shows you which tags you use most on your site. If you see a tag you want to edit in the tag cloud, click on it and it will let you edit the words and the URL for that tag, too.

Tags and categories are both important to your site’s findability and navigation. Don’t exclude one for the other – use them in conjunction to give your blog the best SEO boost possible.

A plug in for your WordPress blog is like a little tweak to make your blog perform better (in some cases) or do something an ordinary blog can’t do. As an entrepreneur, you’ll have different needs for plugins than someone blogging for pure entertainment reasons.

Before we talk about which plugins you should consider, you should be aware that plug ins have the ability to mess up your blog, too. One that’s not maintained well can have bugs that wreak havoc on your blog.

Luckily, all you have to do is delete or make the plug in inactive, but you first have to know which one is causing the problems. Make sure you stay on top of your blog’s performance so that you’re aware whenever a problem arises. As well, it’s not a bad idea to make a backup of your blog just in case. There is a plugin of course, WordPress Database Backup is a favourite.

WordPress Plugins

Marketers are torn between All in One SEO and another similar SEO plug in called HeadSpace2 SEO. You may want to split test these two plugins on a couple of blogs to see which one you prefer, but both should make your blog rank better in Google than it would without it.

For marketers, you may want to invest in the MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate, which not only organizes your affiliate links for you in the dashboard, but it also allows you to cloak links and track clicks from this WordPress plug in.

If you want to manage your ads, images or other media items on your blog, then you may want to get a plugin like Billboard or Rotating Images, either of which do the job for you.

If you’re flipping sites or Squidoo lenses or auctioning off any other items, then you can get the WP Auctions plugin and host auctions right on your blog, without having to fork over fees to a third party site.

Contact Form 7 is a plug in that lets your blog visitors get in touch with you. It’s one of the most popular plugins being downloaded right now to bloggers around the World Wide Web. Another that I commonly use is Clean-Contact

If you have visitors from around the globe, then you might want to install the G8 Translate plug in. It translates your blog into 58 languages so that anyone can visit it – not just English speakers.

Make sure you have a sitemap creator such as Google XML Sitemaps. This helps the Googlebots find their way around your blog, which means they index more pages and posts and you ultimately get more traffic!

There are hundreds of WordPress plug ins out there available to you. Virtually anything you want your blog to do, you can find a plug in that does it – but you have to search!

As far as content goes, you can create pages or posts (or both) in your new WordPress blog. There are some differences. Let’s start with creating a landing page on WordPress and then move onto the management of the other pages and posts.

You may want to create a landing page for your blog, so that whenever someone types in your domain, this is the page they’ll see first (as opposed to a blog where the first post seen is always in order from most recent to oldest).

Log into your dashboard and click on Pages in the sidebar. Next, click on Add New. Create the landing page that you want. And publish it. After it’s live, go to Settings and then click on the Reading link.

WordPress Pages versus Posts

At the top, it will say “Front Page Displays” and this is where you can choose to display “a static page,” and it will provide you with a drop down menu of pages that you can set as the static landing page your visitors will see first.

You can do the same thing with a post if you prefer to make it a post rather than a page. If you do it this way, just make it a sticky post that stays at the top of your blog at all times, rather than showing the reverse chronological order for entries.

Pages typically aren’t listed according to any dated order. They sometimes appear in the bar across the top of the WordPress theme. If you prefer, you can add a widget in your WordPress sidebar to display the pages.

To do this, go into Appearances, then Widgets. Drag the Pages widget over to your sidebar wherever you want it to appear to your visitors. And you can create sub-pages for your WordPress blog, too.

Click on Add New to the Pages area. On the right, you’ll see an option for Page Attributes. You can assign a Parent page for it. And you can even put the pages in any order you want them to be seen.

Your sub-pages would then appear under the parent page in the URL. So let’s say you have an About page on your blog. And under it, as a sub-page, you want a page called Services. Your domain would then look like this: domain.com/About/Services.

You could add more sub-pages below that, so your URL would look like this: domain.com/About/Services/Pool-Cleaning (to use that niche as an example). Whenever someone hovers over your main page in the sidebar or header, they would see the sub-pages branching out.

WordPress Sidebar

What to Include in Your WordPress Sidebar

A sidebar shouldn’t be random clutter that you use to fill up white space. In fact, many bloggers (and their readers) love the crisp, clean layout of content with white space cradling it on either side.

But you can’t ignore the fact that it’s advertising space you could be profiting from when you’re running an online business. Especially above the fold, it’s important to test out the space you have in your sidebar to see if it can help you turn a profit.

There are five favorite sidebar items that marketers like to use to help the visitor experience and to boost financial rewards as well. You can test a variety of them to see what works better for you.

Social networking badges help you build a following on other places, besides your own website. You might put a “Follow me on Twitter” badge, a FriendFeed badge that shows the latest web 2.0 items from you, or a FaceBook badge that lets people navigate to your profile and friend you.

While social networking might not immediately seem like a revenue booster, the more you’re able to connect with your target audience on a friendly level, the more able you are to build a relationship of trust with them and convert them into long term, loyal buyers.

Banner graphics that are hyperlinked with your affiliate URL can help generate revenue instantly. If you’re an affiliate, look for an affiliate toolbox page from the product creator (or email them and ask if they have vertical banners or buttons). You can use simple HTML code to show the banner graphic and have it hyperlinked to the product with your affiliate URL.

Images or text that are placed in your sidebar for ad space sold to other marketers is another instant revenue option. But you have to be careful because if a visitor sees an ad, they’re assuming it’s you who is endorsing this product or service.

Link lists to your other sites can help turn a profit, too. While you may start out as a newbie in the business, your online empire will grow and soon you may have 10-20 websites to call your own. You can link to them in your sidebar and even write a textual description to accompany it.

Widgets that help your visitors navigate or utilize your site can be placed in your sidebar too. Letting them subscribe to your RSS feed, for example, keeps them in tune with what you have to say.

Once your WordPress blog is installed on your domain, you’ll begin the job of customizing it for your business. You don’t want to leave the default theme intact – it looks unprofessional.

So now you have a choice – do you opt for a free WordPress theme or upgrade to a premium level theme, which you’ll have to pay for? If you’re brand new to blogging, you might want to stick with the free themes temporarily and then upgrade once you know you’re dedicated to keeping the site active long-term.

Others may want to invest in a premium theme right away so that no changes have to be made once the site is underway. To access the free themes, log into your WordPress dashboard and click on Appearances and then Themes.

At the top of the page you can click on Install Themes and choose from the Featured, Newest, Recently Updated – or the option to install your own. You’ll find many free WordPress themes online just by Googling for them.

WordPress Themes

But you have to be careful because nothing is truly free – the providers of those WordPress themes will have some sort of benefit included in the theme, sometimes in the form of an unsavory link pointing from your blog to their own domain.

Premium themes are usually clean and more search engine optimized than the freebies are. You can search for those on Google too and find a myriad of options. If you buy one, download the file to your hard drive and choose the “Upload” option in your blog area. Then extract the zip file so that the theme is available for you to choose.

When you see your new theme options, simply click “Activate” on the theme you prefer. You can swap these out at any time, but it’s best to find a good theme and maintain it so that your site builds brand recognition of its own.

WordPress themes vary between crisp and clean to colorful and cluttered. You want to choose something based on your personal preferences, but also keep the reader in mind. Don’t choose a theme where the words are hard to read or the colors cause people to click out immediately.

You can also choose to have a custom WordPress theme created for you if you have deep pockets, but a Premium theme will be a great alternative and it won’t break the bank. For online marketing, many people like the Socrates option, but it’s only one of many, so you’ll have to do your homework and find one that’s right for you.

Corridor leading to the bullfighting ring, Ronda, Andalusia, Spain

If you are a professional travel photographer, chances are that you won’t get to choose the location for your next assignment. But if you are just starting out, creating your own assignments is a great way of building your portfolio and gaining some valuable experience. So how do you choose a location to shoot?

Make it interesting

As a general rule, the more interested you are in a subject or destination, the more time and effort you put into your photos. While it is often good advice to go shoot something you aren’t interested in, or even dislike, to improve your photography, an expensive trip is probably not the time.

So go somewhere you really have a passion for. If you are interested in Asian cultures and lifestyle, visit China or Japan. If not, maybe Europe. The world presents such a wide variety of cultures and climates. And not all of them are easy to travel in. It is easy to get inspired by images in magazines of exotic lands, but if trekking across the Sahara is not your idea of a good time and you can’t go more than a day without hot water and room service, it is going to show in your photos. Your attitude can greatly affect the way you see things and if you are rushing through trying desperately to get back to civilization, your eyes are closed to photo opportunities.

Make it marketable

With more people able to travel longer and further, finding somewhere, something or someone that hasn’t been covered in depth is increasingly harder to do.

Travel destinations, like clothes, go in and out of fashion. Look at magazines, newspapers, the internet and television amongst other sources to get an idea of what destinations are popular and what images are selling.

Make it cost effective

Think about your return on investment. Do you believe you will be able to make enough from the images you take on this trip to make it financially viable? You need to add up certain cost factors such as air fairs and expenses like hotels and food against how many of your images you believe you can sell and how. Do you intend to submit a few hundred photos to stock agencies with the intention of having them licensed in publications? Or do you have the fine art market in mind? Which ever way you believe works best for you, you will need to know your market and the potential of the images you create. Then you can decide if the trip can be profitable and if not, possibly alter some of your plans to make it so. Such as the type of accommodation you use, how you travel and the length of your stay.

Planning a photographic trip is a detailed exercise, especially if your goal is to make money from it, but if you start with the above points in mind, you have a better chance of being successful and moving on to bigger and better things.

Mark Eden is a freelance travel photographer and owner of Expanse Photography, a photographic services company You can see Mark’s, travel photography and contact Mark through the Expanse Photography website http://www.expansephotography.com.

In order to start your new blog, you’ll need to first have a domain name and hosting account. Some people simply register a WordPress blog on WordPress.com but the problem with that is that you’re then at the mercy of other people.

You don’t want to wake up one day and see that your hard work has been deleted by an overzealous moderator of some sort. So host your WordPress blog on your own domain where you have total control.

There are two very different ways you can install WordPress. One requires a lot more technical effort on your part, but is more secure. The other is quick and easy, but some say has vulnerabilities attached to it.

Installing WordPress

Fantastico is an automated WordPress installation feature usually included in your hosting account if you have cpanel. HostGator is one such company that offers it. It will install the blog for you once you enter a few details to register it.

But while it’s an easy install option, some people warn of its ability to be hacked by unethical spammers. Still, for newbies it’s a wonderful way to get started so we’ll cover that first.

Log into your cpanel and click on Fantastico De Luxe under the Software and Services section – it will look like a smiley face icon. Under Blogs, click the WordPress option and choose “New Installation.”

Choose the domain you wish to install WordPress on from the drop down menu and if it asks you for the directory, leave it blank if you wish it to be on the root of the domain or put “blog” without quotes if you want it located at domain.com/blog.

Grant yourself admin access with a username and password and Click Install WordPress and Finish Installation. Make sure you bookmark the login page so that you’ll know where to go whenever you want to manage or post to your blog!

Manually, the install steps for WordPress are a bit trickier. You’ll go to WordPress.org and download the software yourself. Unzip the file and follow the install instructions on their site verbatim.

Installing WordPress instructions

You’ll be renaming files, integrating it into your domain, and running the install scripts. It’s best if you have an FTP client available for this so that the process goes smoother for you.