Hi Ken,
If I can just give you a heads up Kenneth, with Wordpress you choose a template that you like.
The default template is, well; pretty bland and is only really used for basic display purposes. You don’t really optimize a ‘theme’ per se’ you download a theme you like from Wordpress.com upload it to your theme folder of your Wordpress installation and then activate the theme from within Wordpress’ admin control panel.
You can actually add content to your Wordpress Blog and then change the theme afterwards without any problems. Changing your theme after you’ve added content ‘posts’ to your blog is absolutely fine to do, in fact everyone who is familiar with wordpress has probably done it at some time.
What Lookkaa is saying is pretty much right, you should put up 2-3 posts straight away, although 12-15 posts would be much better!
Even if you have to edit your posts later it doesn’t really matter too much.
The main reason you want to have as many posts as you can as soon as possible is so Google sees that you have substantial content from the word go! In doing this your blog will have a bit of a running start. Of course it’s totally up to you how you do things, but here’s a quick rundown of what you should do in some sort of order.
- Research your niche, look at the best keywords relevant to your niche, the amount of traffic these keywords attract and the amount of competition there is in your niche and your niches best keywords.
- Once you have established that your niche is viable (acceptable traffic volume, low level of competition) select a number of keywords to base your niche Blog on and indeed your niches own speciality within your chosen niche market based on your keywords.
- Write some core content, (use Microsoft Word for draft) then optimize your content (10 or more posts) for your chosen keywords.
- Organize hosting and domain name then create your blog directory and install wordpress onto your hosting server and relocate your DNS (Domain Name Service) to your hosting server.
- Then install your Wordpress onto your directory on your hosting server, in my opinion this is better done manually.
- Then upload your content (posts) and refine content, further optimize content where necessary, keywords, linking on page SEO and then add rich media, images, video and audio where you like.
- Then you’re basically ready to start promoting your blog and chasing traffic through various sources.
Well that’s it in a nutshell! Of course there a hell of a lot more involved but this is ideally the order you are best to tackle things for a large number of reasons.
To go over again, many people find that when they first put up their blog they don’t get crawled by Google for months and therefore it takes a long time to get any such traffic to write home about.
What you really want is to have plenty of content available as soon as possible, even if you have to refine your content later, it doesn’t matter.
What matters is that you have a healthy amount of content for Google to crawl so Google takes your blog seriously which will shorten the time it takes for your blog to get indexed.
Ideally you want to have 12-15 posts from the word go, and then start back linking straight away.
It’s a big mistake if you don’t do this as it could take up to two whole months for your blog to be crawled and indexed if you only have a few posts and no back links as naturally Google's crawling and indexing system gives priority to blogs with the highest value which means blogs which appear on the web with 15 posts and 20 back links will get crawling and indexing priority over a blog with 2 posts and no back links.
Essentially you want 12-15 posts the moment your Blog goes live, and then verify your blog with Google, Yahoo and MSN Search, then go crazy back linking. Even better try and get a few high PR back links. If you do things this way you can have your blog crawled and indexed in three days after which your blog will start climbing the SERPS and before you know it you will be in the top five search results for your niche (competition dependant) which then results in traffic.
This is basically the reason why the guys here are saying to get a healthy amount of content on your blog straight away, take it from someone who has done it the wrong way and wondered why it was taking so long for things to happen.
Hope my post has cleared things up for you and I hope it helps you get things moving faster.
Kind Regards
John
P.S. Great resource missann, I also have a really kewl customizable theme for download.
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