Create A Wordpress Blog

I have been reading different posts on this and other real estate related sites for the past few years as I promote 4MySales and the RedX lead generation service. There has been a lot of discussion regarding the different blog technologies, but and a niche industry has grown up in helping real estate agents create their own custom blogs. I have been working in this medium for a while, and while this may be old information for many of you, I did wan to share the exact process to creating your own Real Estate Blog on your own URL, without the need to hire a consultant. The blog platform that I will be describing is Wordpress, and it is quite user friendly to use.

With that as the background information, let’s begin.

1) Register for your URL. Pick one that has contains your primary target keyword.

2) Register for a hosted account on a Linux platform. Choose a host that has a cPanel interface, which is just a type of control panel. I use resellerzoom’s budget hosting site. It is six bucks per month and you can host multiple sites in one account.

3) On your hosting confirmation, there will be two DNS (Nameserver) addresses that look something like ns1-fannin.nswebhost.com. These are the nameserver addresses that you need your URL to point to. You can update your nameserver with your domain name registrar, either through their website, or by requesting help from the.

4) Now that you have a hosted account with a URL pointing to it, login to the cPanel account that was set up through your host. One of the buttons on the cPanel control panel should be Fantastico or fantastico deluxe. This is a tool that automatically installs blogs, forums or sites to your account. Click it it, and off to the right site, click on Wordpress. Fantastico will ask you for the name you wish to call your blog, the username and the password that you wish to use to access it. Fill out the form and click install. It is just that easy!

5) Fantastic sets up your blog, so now you just need to login and start customizing. Login to your new blog’s adim page, it is usually your blog directory / wp-admin. From your login dashboard area, you can access all of the tools available to customize wordpress. If you are new to Wordpress, my recommendation would be to first choose a theme. Click Appearance area and choose themes. There should only be two on your first install, but at the bottom of the page is a link to the theme directory. Go down, click it and start looking for a theme that will best exemplify your brand. You can also jump on Google or Bing and start searching for wordpless templates.

Depending on where you find your template, you can add it one of two ways. The first is through an automatic install if it is available. The second is to download the template to your website. Use an unzip utility to unzip it to a folder, then use an ftp client (I use filezilla) to upload the template to your website. If you need to upload a template using this approach, save your unzipped template folder to the Themes folder which is a sub-folder of one of the three main folders.

6) Once you have chosen and loaded your theme, go back to the Appearances/ Themes link and your new theme should show up. Click on it and in the top right corner there should be a link to make the theme active.

7) Now that you have chosen your theme, you can add some plugins which add video, social tools, links, pictures, news feeds, and any other resource that you would ever want. Go to the plugins tab. At the bottom of the page are links to get more plugins. Just like the theme, click on the link and go shopping. Install the plugins using the same methods as you used to install the theme. Either use the auto install if it is present, or if not, download the zipped file, unzip it and upload it to the subdirectory entitled Plugins. There is a way to automatically unzip the files in your directory, but it is beyond the scope of this article.

8) Once you have chosen and uploaded your plugins, activate them on the plugins page. Most of the admin functions for these various plugins will be found under the Settings link. Also, once you have activated your plugins, you can make them show up on your blog by clicking the Appearance link and clicking Widgets. Adding them to your blog is simply a matter of choosing and saving them.

That’s about it. Now all that you need to do is add pictures, update text and make your blog look pretty. It is a very straightforward process if you are looking to host a blog on your own URL instead of relying on your Blogger or Wordpress.com account.

TAGS: Wordpress, blogs, fantastico, resellerzoom, web host, web registrar, URL, plugins, wordpress themes

It's Reat Estate SEO Time Again with Agents Online

Okay, the fact of the matter is that sometimes your SEO plans work out and sometimes they don’t. For example, I published the real estate country website with intentions to get it on the first page of google for the search phrase “real estate country.” To date the page has not shown up in the top searches for Google, and is in fact very poorly ranked. I blame lack of planning on my part as United Country seems to have numerous high ranking pages that show up under the Real Estate Country Term.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. This afternoon I registered for another term that I feel will be better suited to demonstrate the SEO strategy that I have been sharing for the past while. This new term, Agents Online, gets between 11,000 and 18,000 searches on Google per month. Obviously the term targets real estate agents, I have been a member of the site for eight years, but there are very few competitive sites optimized for that term.

With this new term, here is the strategy: Use XSite Pro to create a website optimized to the term Agents Online. After that, establish backlinks to the site by posting comments on the many social networks and blogs that cater to the real estate segment. I also plan to the site on the few blogs that I manage myself. In fact, wherever there is the ability to place a dofollow link on a website, do so.

After that, it is a matter of reporting on the success. Hopefully I will have better luck demonstrating how to use this technique to search engine optimize your real estate lead generation pages than I did with Real Estate Country.

The Step by Step Domination of the First Page of Google, Continued

I have been a bit lax in my activities of getting links to realestatecountry.net to cover the most of the first page of google for the search term “real estate country” This is primarily due to a lot of other activities going on such as helping my wire promote her chewable prenatal vitamin website. Anyway, I am making some small progress and thought I would update some of my real time activities to continue to demonstrate how to get your site and sites managed by you to the top of the search engine for a given search term.

When I last posted, I was mentioning creating a number of squidoo and hub pages for Real Estate Country. While these are still a priority as my next step, I decided to create a blogger blog for the topic instead. I posted my first article today which was a very basic introduction to the blog. As time goes by, I will continue to post real estate country related articles on that blog as well as the other real estate blogs that I manage in an effort to get that and other blogs to show up under this keyword. The strategy is to have this blog and the other related blogs show up in the top ten under the search term so regardless of where the searcher clicks, they end up connecting with me.

I chose to create the blogger blog before the sqidoo page because I recently read that both Squidoo and Hub pages provide nofollow links which means that the search engines don’t really count them for backlinks. I have also read that Google may disregard this feature for these sites, so the jury is out. With that in mind, I thought getting at least one of my real estate country sites onto the first page of google should be the priority.

So the next steps in this step by step strategy are to:

1) Create one or two keyword-specific blogs and start populating them with good content. Use blogger as it has a very high PR as part of the google platform.

2) When you have time, start creating squidoo lenses and hub pages on your specific topic and search term.