The next step in setting up this site was to choose how I would manage the content. Naturally, since I love doing WordPress customizations, that was the simplest choice. Plus, I believe that blogging allows you to keep fresh content, which is an attractive quality to search engines and visitors alike.

WordPress Installation

GoDaddy makes the WordPress installation process quite simple in their GoDaddy Hosting Connection center. All I had to do was choose to install the application, answer a few questions relating to installation directories, usernames and passwords, and GoDaddy did the rest. The application installation process generally takes under half an hour, and they will email you once it is ready to go.

Theme Selection

Since the goal of this SEO contest is to get your site indexed and optimized as quickly as possible to move to the #1 ranking, the ideal choice of theme was Thesis – the best WordPress SEO theme. While the theme doesn’t come with as much graphical beauty as many other themes, it comes fully ready to be optimized without having to do many additional plugins or code modifications.

Blog Concept

I believe that traffic and popularity are key factors in site optimization. Why? Simply because if you have useful content on your site, and give people reason to visit it, those people will (hopefully) like it enough to share via bookmarking and linking. And as most optimization experts will agree, natural links into your site definitely help boost it in the rankings.

Hence, I have decided to share my optimization techniques. I am looking at this as a 96 day SEO experiment, to see the results of what can be accomplished in terms of Google SERP rankings using a particular set of optimization techniques. Hopefully, it will become a useful resource for anyone starting out their own website or blog.

Plug-ins

Because Thesis comes with SEO optimization fields built into the theme, I am not in need of many additional SEO plug-ins. With any other theme, I would choose to install Platinum SEO. But with theme, my first plug-in selection will be for the automatic creation of a sitemap. Google Sitemaps not only creates the sitemap, but continues to update it as new content is added the site, along with submit it to the major search engines: Google, Bing, Yahoo & Ask.

I also hope to encourage visitors and conversation by adding this site to the DoFollow blog circuit with the DoFollow, CommentLuv and KeywordLuv plug-ins.

Finally, I added Contact Form 7 to make contacting me about any of your optimization questions in relation to anything you see on this site.

Feedburner

Lastly, I took the standard feed and converted it to Feedburner so I could monitor my subscription stats. I hope that everyone who stops by subscribes via RSS to follow the progress of this SEO experiment and read about all the steps taken to get this site to the top.

Your Suggestions

If you are (or plan to) build a site quickly in hopes of getting it to the top of search engines results as quickly as possible, what content management systems, themes, plugins, etc. would you utilize? ifwnsre2z4

The first step with the creation of any new website website is the initial setup process.

Domain Name Selection

Upon learning that “oes tsetnoc” is the targeted phrase for this contest, the obvious goal was to get a domain name with that in the URL. Anytime you are creating a new website from scratch, it is best to figure out your primary keywords and try to get them incorporated into your domain, as this is a great way to optimize your site from the very start. In this case, the keyword phrase was already chosen, but in other circumstances, you may want to play around with keyword research tools to see what keyword phrases would be the strongest and most relevant to your site. If you cannot get your keyword phrase and choose something more unique, you will also want to check and make sure no one else is already using your name choise. One great way to do this is by simply Goolging your term of choice, or checking usernames across the many different social networks at Know Em Username Check.

Since I wasn’t the first to enter into the contest, I missed out on the .com, .net, and .info. With the remaining options, I figured .us would be a good way to go. After all, it still does have the keyword phrase in the URL, and I would like to believe that .com is not always the automatic winner in Google rankings compared to other extensions. So I purchased oestsetnoc.us for $4.99.

Hosting Selection

Since this contest will expire in three months, and at the time I wasn’t fully sure what direction I was going to go with it, I decided that instead of purchasing a separate hosting account, I would just add it to one of my pre-existing hosting accounts. I researched having multiple domains on one account / aliasing, and while there were mixed thoughts on the subject of the ranking effects of an aliased domain, the majority of opinions said that it had no effect on optimization at all. So thanks to my flexible GoDaddy hosting plan, I am not paying any extra to host this site.

WordPress Setup

Naturally, since I love to do WordPress customizations, I chose to install WordPress on this domain right away. GoDaddy makes that part simple – I just choose to install Wordpress from the GoDaddy Hosting Connection, answer a few questions about directories and passwords, and it creates the database and installs the application for me, even sending an email when everything is ready.

Setup Summary

The above steps were quite simple, and after I made the choices on hosting and initiated the WordPress setup, everything else was left to the speed of the hosting company to get it implemented. So my actual time involvement in this part of the process was relatively short, less than half an hour, to get the basic site going.