A quick video on how to create new blog posts.

A quick overview on How to Create a New Blog Post:

1. Under Posts, click Add New
2. Add Title  - think about the title as a headline that will get peoples attention. Under WordPress, the blog title will also become the title tag. The titles tags are really important for SEO.
3. Check how the url looks in the Permalink section. It should include your keywords or keyword phrase.
4. Add your text being the main body.
5. Upload an image. Set the Alt Text to include your keywords.
6. Include the category under which your post should include.
7. Add tags that are relevant to your post and readers.
8. Save Draft.
9. Preview your post to check that it looks the way that you like.
10. If all looks good, then click Publish.

Easily done.

Dolman Bateman & Co, Chartered Accountants have just released a negative gearing calculator for calculating the after tax cost of owning an investment property.

The negative gearing calculator enables you to calculate the after tax cost of a rental property and to compare multiple properties. The effect of the depreciation allowance on buildings and its resulting tax effect can mean that a newer more expensive property can be cheaper than an older property because of the effect of tax and depreciation.

You can also determine the effect of interest rate rises, increases in rent or the effect of losing a tenant for a few weeks.

Watch this video and decide for yourself whether social media is here to stay and how it will affect your business.

This video from WordPressTV shows you how to set up the vital tool – Google Analytics – into your WordPress site. I prefer using one on the Google Analytics plugins rather than posting the code into the footer.php file because if you change your theme the Google code will be lost on the new theme and you will have to enter it again.

Anyway here is the excellent quick video:

Any questions leave a comment.

I just moved our servers across to a cloud hosting environment with VPS.net and the performance of our sites went through the roof. Granted our old shared hosting environment was pretty slow.

With cloud hosting, you buy nodes of computing capacity in the cloud. The cloud being a large mass of computing power and you just buy what you need. If you get a huge spike in your traffic, you can easily buy a bit more of the cloud and when the spike finishes, you return to your old capacity. VPS.net also gives you great statistics on how much of the cloud you are using so you can easily work out if you have too little capacity or too much.

I found the setup of the servers a bit daunting, so I bought a Managed Support service with VPS.net and they set up the server, transferred all the data and databases and optimised the server setup for WordPress. I only had a couple of simple jobs to do.

The cost is a negligible if you are running a business and the internet is a component of that business. My cloud hosting service is much cheaper than a dedicated server option.

If you are wondering about what is cloud computing, I found this video explains it pretty well.

Got any questions, I will try to answer them. Leave your comments and questions below.

Google has recently announced that site speed is now one of the components in their Search Engine algorithm. This has been on the cards for a while, when they flagged it by including Site Performance in the labs section of Google Webmaster Tools. Matt Cutts of Google discussing page speed on his blog.

Page Speed has been concerning me for a while as my sites on a shared server environment started getting slower and slower. I have just upgraded to a cloud hosting environment with VPS.NET and the difference in the speed of my WordPress sites has improved massively.

If you want to see how quickly your site loads try: http://www.webpagetest.org/

Finally, Matt Cutts himself interviewed by WebPro News.

Tim Ferriss, the author of the best selling “The Four Hour Workweek” explains how he uses WordPress. It is always great to see how others use WordPress, explaining what worked and what didn’t.

At one stage during this video, I paused the video and immediately changed Categories to Topics on my blogs. I thought that Topics was a much better description that Categories.

The video is 50 minutes long so you are going to allocate some time to watch it.

In the video he covers…

- Why he blogs
- How to blog and blogging best practices
- Frequency and tools — best times and days to post
- Blogging myths and how to harness data for better results
- Testing design and surprising findings that can be copied
- How to address comments and community building
- How to write and research for good social media response
- 20 minutes of audience Q&A on Twitter, branding, outsourcing, and much more.

What did you think of it? Leave your comments below:

A picture tells a thousands words, but in some instances it just adds some life and pizazz to your site. Luckily adding photos and videos is really easy using WordPress.

WordPress Adding Videos and Photo Video

In this video from WordPress.tv, you will see how to add photos and videos to your posts.

Although the video is actually made for WordPress.com sites rather than self hosted WordPress site, the principles are the same.

1. Select the relevant file using the “Upload/Insert” section.
2. Upload the file or enter the url for the file.
3. Insert into post. With images, you can define the size and position of the images.
4. Save Post via “Save Draft” or “Publish”

SEO Tips for Images

Name the image file as something relevant to to site and what you are trying to do with that page. Don’t be afraid of using of long file names.

When you insert images don’t forget the Alt Text associated with the Image should include the relevant keywords for that page. The SEO weight of the ALT Test is low but it does help.

Google has posted a SEO Report Card on how well it’s own sites are optimised for Search Engines.  The Report card examines the on-page optimisation of the various components such as Titles, Descriptions, URL’s, Headers etc and shows how various Google products are doing it well and others need improvement.

The best thing about the SEO Report Card is that gives examples of how it can the pages can be improved.

I found it pretty easy to read and because it is from Google itself very authorative.

The link is here – http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/googles-seo-report-card.html

Other SEO Resources from Google

Google has also has a SEO Starter Guide which is well worth reading.

If you are looking for information about SEO – one of your first stops should be the Google Webmaster Central including:

• Google Webmaster Central Blog
• Google Webmaster Central Help Forum
• Google Webmaster Guidelines

The information on these pages does not always show up in the top search queries, so it is a great place to look at first.

I was looking for information of the effect of server location on local SEO ( like www.google.com.au – from Australia results).

After much searching I found the answer in the Help Forum. If your site is a com.au and hosted in the US, then the com.au will take precedence.

Here is the official Answer: hosting server IP address importance to SEO

When you are using WordPress, writing and publishing blog posts will be your most common task. Using WordPress is pretty simple, if you can use a word processor and save the document, then you can use WordPress.

You don’t have to know html code (it helps at times) but it is not essential.

WordPress have produced an excellent video on how to write and publish a wordpress post.