This time we are going to work with the plugins for our blog.
When you first visit the plugin section of your dashboard you will notice that there are two plugins already installed: ‘Hello Dolly’ and ‘Akismet’. There is also a short description next to them.
For now we are going to activate only Akismet.

Extract from Akismet.com: Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.

To enable Akismet, click on “Activate” located on the right, next to its description.
We now need to get an API key from wordpress.com for our blog.

1. Go to wordpress.com and create an account.
2. Login to your wordpress.com account and click on “My Account => Edit Profile” (located on the top left corner). There you will see the wordpress.com API key you need for your blog.
3. Copy the key and come back to your blog dashboard.
4. Make sure you are at the “Akismet Configuration page” of your dashboard.
5. Paste the API key in the field provided.
6. Select “Automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month.”
7. Click on “Update options”
8. Done! We are now protected against spam.

 

The next thing we are going to do is make our blog search engine friendly; some webmasters call this work, search engine optimization or seo.
Let’s do some seo work!
To make our blog search engine friendly, we want to change the way the urls of our blog are displayed in the browser.

We don’t want to have http://www.bevyhost.com/?p=1152 when we can have http://www.bevyhost.com/creating-your-first-online-business/
Also, for personal taste, we prefer to include the www at the beginning of our urls.

To have the urls of your blog like this:

1. Go to your blog “Dashboard=>Settings=>General”
2. Fill in your WordPress address (URL) including the www. So it looks like http://www.bevyhost.com but with your own domain.
3. Fill in your Blog address (URL) including the www. So it looks like http://www.bevyhost.com but with your own domain. Now that you are at this window, it would be a good time to update your blog by filling all the fields in this window accordingly. Every field has its own description next to it.
4. Click on “Save Changes”.
5. Go to “Dashboard=>Settings=>Permalinks”
6. Select “Custom Structure” and write “/%postname%/” without the “”
7. Click on “Save Changes”.

Now let’s install some basic plugins on our blog:
There are two options to install a plugin in from WordPress 2.7 onwards directly from your dashboard.

First option

1. Go to “Dashboard=>Settings=>Plugins=>Add New”.
2. Fill in the search term you want to use and click “Search”.
3. Look for the plugin you want to install and click on “Install”.
4. Go to “Dashboard=>Settings=>Plugins” and click on “Activate”

Second Option

1. Go to “Dashboard=>Settings=>Plugins=>Add New”.
2. Click on “Browse” and look for the plugin as a zip file on your computer.
3. Click on “Install Now”.
4. Go to “Dashboard=>Settings=>Plugins” and click on “Activate”

You can also install a plugin for your blog via FTP (file transfer protocol).

1. Using a FTP program, upload the plugin folder (including its content) that you want to install to the plugin directory of your blog. Usually found on /public_html/wp-content/plugins/
2. Go to “Dashboard=>Settings=>Plugins” and click on “Activate”

There are some other options to install a plugin in your wordpress blog, but we won’t cover them for now.
We also want to make a good use of the title, description and keywords on our blog. For that we are going to install a plugin. This plugin is called “All in One SEO Pack”

Extract from the All in One SEO Pack website: This plugin is streamlined for some best practices for Wordpress SEO. While it gives you many options the defaults reflect the settings I recommend using.

Installing the “All in One SEO Pack” plugin

1. To install this plugin just follow one of the installation steps described above. If you are going to use the first option (installation from the dashboard) write the search term “All in One SEO Pack” and the plugin will appear as one of the first results for your query.
2. Click on “Install”.
3. Go to “Dashboard=>Settings=>Plugins” and next to the “All in One SEO Pack” click on “Activate”

Now we need to customize the All in One SEO Pack plugin

1. Go to “Dashboard=>Settings=>All in One SEO” and fill in the information about your blog accordingly. Note that some information is already filled by default. Change that filled information only if you know what you are doing.
2. Click on Update Options
3. Done

In the next post we are going to install a few more plugins.
Stay tuned for the next steps to create your first online business and make money with it.

This is a post from the " Creating your first online business " series of articles.

Other posts from this series:

• Creating your first online business #1
• Creating your first online business #2
• Creating your first online business #4

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