WordPress is the simplest way to get a website up and running. Follow this quick-start guide to get going with the essential WP tools for your site
Wordpress is by far the simplest and quickest tool to use to set up a website. Once you’ve installed WordPress to your host account, follow this quick-start guide to get up and running with the minimal essential tools for your site.
Google XML Sitemaps
So you’ve built your site and put loads of great content in it. You want people to see your content, so you do a few searches on Google to see if your site is listed in the results. You don’t see your site, so you type in the full site URL. To your horror your site still does not appear. You try the same in Bing, then Yahoo… it’s the same again. So where have you gone wrong? Firstly, Google, Bing and the other site engine providers try to find and record every web page in every web site ever created on the Internet. According to http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/, as I’m writing this, there are 2,010,000,000 – that’s 2.01 billion! web pages on the web right now. That’s a lot of finding and recording. Of course they don’t try to do this manually, they use thousands of little programs call web crawlers or bots that automatically surf the web 24 / 7, reporting back home, details of any web pages they find. This is still a big job and it could be months before they even get a sniff of your site and include your pages in their search results. You can however assist these little bots by submitting a file called a sitemap which contains a list of all the pages in your website. The sitemap needs to be created in a format that is understood by Google, Bing and the others and should be maintained regularly as new content is added or removed from your site. To make this job easier for you, you can install a WordPress sitemap generator plugin. I’ve been using Google XML Sitemaps. It does the jobs of frequently adding entries for all of your webpages into a properly formatted sitemap file and sending it to Google and Bing as often as you want. Once you have the WordPress Google XML Sitemaps plugin active on your site you should at least see your web pages listed in Google and Bing search results after entering your sites full URL within a couple of days.
You can find more information and download details for the Google XML Sitemaps generator plugin here.
Akismet
So you’ve built your site and put loads of great content in it. You want people to see your content, so you wait. Then it starts to happen you get emails and notifications that you’re articles have got comments waiting for your approval. You think “YES!” my stuff is being noticed and you feel greeeat! Then you log in to look at these comments and find that there all nothing more than spam links to sites selling Ugg boots and Oakley shades. Who’s got time for that you think, well no-one really, comments like that are generated by spam bots, little programs that crawl the web trying to get into websites just like yours in any way they can to spam the hell out of it with unsolicited links. Some bots actually try to get into your site to try to give hackers control of your admin pages so they can be pretty dangerous.
Anyway, to stop of at least hinder this type of hacking install the WordPress Akismet plugin. It’ll add barriers to your WordPress site’s commenting system to try to make sure the commenters are real people and genuine commenters.
You can find more information and download details for the Akismet anti comment spam plugin here.