People write a blog for a variety of reasons, as an ongoing diary or commentary by an individual, to promote a business, as a way to reflect on life or for a plenty of other reasons. Blogs are a great to express your opinions and attitudes, but when writing a blog you have millions of competitors. In order to build an audience, you have to avoid few things that can seriously hamper your progress toward your goal.

Uninteresting Posts

Before you start your blog, think about your goals you want to accomplish. Define your target readership and don’t forget that your future readers are common, real people and that you need to write posts that people enjoy reading and they will reward you by returning to your blog regularly. Getting the visitors is easy, making them your regular visitors is hard. Write in a conversational style and on one particular topic. Don’t worry about blog traffic but focus on quality contents.

Ignoring Search Engines Optimization Activities

You should follow a basic but important search engines optimization tips that will make your page perfectly optimized like:
-Your blog URL should contain the primary keyword you want to optimize for.
-You should use your primary keywords in the title of your post and your secondary keywords in the body of your post.
-You should use your keywords in the anchor text of links in the body of your posts.

Not writing often

Write often and write regularly so readers and search engines will visit your blog more often. Post on weekdays because there are more readers during weekdays than on the weekends. Even if you keep a low pace of posts, say 5 posts per week still are available for your readers most of the time.

Uninteresting Design

Your blog design should not be complicated and visually unappealing. If your blog design is complicated it will make readers distracted from reading your content. It also can slow down loading and will drive impatient visitors away. But if your blog design is simple and visually appealing it will be more attractive to your regular readers and also you can submit it to some CSS gallery site that feature great designs and get some extra traffic from there too.

Not Spreading the Word about Your Blog

Don’t just post on your blog and leave it like that. You must work a little bit harder and be active to generate traffic, read lots of other blogs, leave track backs, simply you should become part of the community. You can automate your blog with the social media platform to auto-publish your article and generate traffic from there.

It is Free

Its open source and thus the platform itself is free to use and develop on – starting on WordPress is like less than half the cost of custom developing from scratch or using any other robust CMS.

Additional Functionality via plugins

WordPress community is vast and growing every passing day. Community contribute in the form of plugins which gives you additional functionality at ease and most of them are free or really low cost. Try to only use plugins which are regularly updated as it means the developer is active and it was not just a onetime thing.

Easy Development

In comparison to any other robust Content Management Systems available, WordPress programming is really simple and very documented which makes it easy and simple to start developing on WordPress for even beginners.

Flexible Structure & Template

Because of the flexibility of its structure and code, the framework has no limitations in terms of design customization as other CMS available. You can do anything to it in terms of design.

Easy to Release

All the above factors make the site development really fast and save you a lot of valuable time. You can setup your WordPress on the root folder of your server and run your existing site on live domain and once you are ready with your WordPress website, you can make your site live in seconds by just changing few options in the admin panel.

Themes – multiple prebuilt websites/blogs:

There is a huge bunch of themes available for use – free or low cost. If you are starting with a new website, you can search for themes available on internet and match with your requirements. It is more cost effective in compare to doing a custom theme as you save development cost and as you grow and know your business better then you can start customizing – all depends on your business model. Just make sure that the theme you are selecting is not only just good to look at but has the simple management of the functionality in the backend so you can manage it.

SEO compatible framework:

WordPress system has been built to be search engine friendly. WordPress has the most SEO compatible pretty urls which are most liked by search engines and very easy to manage. Apart from that there are multiple free plugins available for you to extend the SEO functionality and manage it easily all by yourself.

Upgradable

WordPress release latest updates every now and then and you can simply implement that with click of a button. You will need to make sure that any customizations you do are only done in your theme folder. WordPress upgrades update the WordPress core files.

Easy Content Management:

Writing content in the backend is as simple as writing in MS Word. Also, you can play around with the placement of the features and add new features yourself mostly all by yourself – just make sure that the developer utilizes the power of WordPress when working on your site (making the sections widgetized to the extent possible).

WordPress as a Company itself is run by smart innovative people and though it is open source it has a huge funding behind it for them to push developments on the platform itself.

When it comes to blogging, we depend on lot of ways generating the traffic and one of the most popular and effective way is to ensure that we get good enough traffic from search engines. Search engines give preferences to web pages depending on lot of things and one of them is URL of the web page too. More related keywords you’ll have in the URL of the page, better chances will be that it will appear higher in the SERPs.

What is a permalink?

Permalink is short form of permanent link of a particular blog post. In blogs each and every post gets a specific URL, so that it can be accessed at any point of time even though it doesn’t get displayed on the blog’s home page any more.

So Don’t I get permalinks by default?

By default, wordpress creates the URL of the blog posts in this format : http://yourdomainname.com/?p=1 however, this is not search engine friendly URL as there are no keywords in the URL and doesn’t make any sense to any human reader as well. Now consider this URL: http://yourdomainname.com/youarticlename/, don’t you think that this URL is much better and true as well ? 😉

How do I customize permalink in WordPress for my blog ?

Now, you are making sense! It’s really not difficult to change permalink structure in WordPress you need to follow these steps to ensure that you get to choose the kind of permalink structure you long for –

Go to Settings -> Permalinks and you can choose Common settings and click on save settings.

If at all you get any error then it will most likely because of read/write permissions on .htaccess file. In order to ensure that it works properly, we will change the read/write permissions of .htaccess file. You will need to set 666 settings to your .htaccess file.

Another wonderful question! WordPress is so flexible that it gives you the power to include date, time, year, categories, tags and what not in the URL structure and depending on your website’s requirement you can choose any one kind of URL structure. I prefer to use the Custom structure and in that the value I’ve put is /%category%/%postname%/.

This ensures that the category name appears in the URL structure and we can keep category names in such a way that they include important keywords and that ensures that all important keywords appear in blog posts’ URL.