My Website Journey

After setting up a WordPress blog and getting it indexed by search engines, it is important to keep track of the traffic that you receive.  This will give you a good idea of where most of your traffic comes from and which areas need to be improved.

I’ve been using StatCounter for years because it completely free and it also has invisible counters.  Invisible counters are great because your visitors wont need to know that you are monitoring them.  StatCounter has tons of great tools like viewing highest ranked Search Engine searches, where visitors came from, the countries visitors came from, the amount of time spent on your site, returning visitors and much much more. Read more…

Now that the WordPress blog is setup, the most important thing is to fill the the WordPress blog with relevant and unique content.  Google is able to determine if content has been spun or reused from other websites so the best way to really get your blog out there to start with is having great unique content.  The best way to get hits to a website is to have great content that users will actually refer to and read.   Of course just writing content isn’t always enough but it is a great start to getting your blog up and running.

Once the blog has unique content, you can begin different SEO Techniques that will help your site get found by various search engines. Read more…

Now that I was able to get Apache, PHP and MySql running on my CentOS 5 64-bit VPS, I have to actually build a website.  I decided to go with WordPress because it is one of the best Blogging/CMS systems out there.  After all this site is powered off of WordPress as well.  So I purchased a domain, http://www.popcornblogs.com/ set up the DNS servers to point to my VPS from Burst.NET.  Now that everything is setup, I just need to go to the WordPress website to download the latest version.

WordPress can be obtained by visiting http://wordpress.org/.  Download the latest version and extract the contents into your webserver’s directory.  After you have extract the contents to your webserver’s folder.  Navigate to the home directory and a page should come up stating that a configure file is required.  Click to configure your WordPress blog and input your database information (Database, server, login, password).  If you click next and you come up with the same prompt again, that means that your file permissions aren’t set correctly. Read more…