The Ultimate Beginners Blogging Guide

Here is an in-depth beginner’s blogging guide for anyone just starting with a new website. I made this so that you can have a checklist of sorts to know what to look out for and what to expect. There is a lot of noise about this topic, and many people want to make you empty your pockets for the information. I want you to have it free, and I hope that it helps you with your blogging and website building journey.

Choose A Domain Name

Think very broadly when selecting your first domain name but do not break your head over it. Just sit down and do it in one sitting.

First, ask yourself, what are you knowledgable about? Maybe you have a new hobby like bow hunting or fly fishing choose a name that relates to your topic but not be too specific.

Remember you will write over the course of a year around a hundred articles on the topic so it should be something that you:

• are interested in, and you are actively learning the topic whatever it may be
• you already know the topic and can talk non-stop about it for hours (then writing about it will be super easy)

Buy A Domain And Choose A Hosting Company

I recommend Bluehost because it is cheap and beginner-friendly.

With Bluehost, you will have:

• free domain for your first year of hosting
• free SSL certificate
• only 2.95 per month
• 1-Click WordPress Install
• 24/7 chat and call support

There are all sorts of hosting companies; some have better support, and others have faster-hosting services. Remember that when you start you really will not need the speed.

With Bluehost, the support will talk to you like you are a human. They usually fix the problem for you, and they are incredibly polite.

Some people complain that Bluehost is terrible for many different reasons, but it is a great hosting company. Also, the people who denounce Bluehost have more technical knowledge than most people or promote other hosting companies with more significant affiliate commissions.

If you do not want to sign up with Bluehost try Siteground, Dreamhost, A2 Hosting, InMotion Hosting or HostGator. All these companies are great in their own way, but they can work out more expensive. For example, HostGator charges an extra $60 for an SSL certificate, and with Bluehost, it is free.

WordPress Install

With Bluehost installing WordPress will take a few minutes. The installation problem is not troublesome at all. You will have to learn WordPress to be confident using your site.

It is easier than you may think, and the best way to learn WordPress is to build your own site. You can use a starter template as a guide.

WordPress 5 Minute Checklist

In your WordPress backend (dashboard) go to settings and then general. Here you will be able to write the title and tagline of your site. A tagline and title for your site is a necessary tactic to inform crawlers what your website is about.

Here are a few screenshots on how to get there:

First go to “Settings”

Now click “General”

Here you can adjust your title and tagline.

If you scroll down on the same page you will be able to adjust your timezone, date format and things like which day the week starts for your site. You should adjust this according to your location. At some point, you may want to un-check the “Anyone can register” box.

Changes will not be automatically saved so make sure to click “Save Changes” whenever you make an adjustment.

Now edit your post category if you have made different categories for your posts. This is nothing earth-shattering, but after you have written 50-100 posts, you will want to organise them in some way. Here is where you can adjust the default post category.

Go to “Settings” click on “writing”

Now you can adjust what will be your default post category

Beginner Permalink Adjustment

You really want to make this quick fix before you write the content of your site.

Firstly what is a permalink? It is the code that appears in the URL of your posts and pages. For example, my site’s URL will show up like this https://moneywithi.com/how-do-i-get-a-free-review-of-my-site/ as you can see right after my site domain name the title of my blog post is the rest of the permalink (aka URL, aka link code for a post or page).

From an SEO standpoint it is better to have your post name as a default for your permalinks.

Go to settings in your dashboard and click on “permalinks”. Tick the “post name” box and don’t forget to click on “Save Changes”.

WordPress Theme

I now recommend Kadence WP because it is a fast and reliable theme. Of course you can choose from a number of fast and reliable themes.

Check out:

• Kadence WP
• Astra
• Hestia
• Ocean WP

Make sure to choose a mobile first theme

If your theme is not mobile-first then do not even consider it as an option, here is an entire post I wrote about how and why you should make your site mobile-first.

Plugins

What are plugins? Well in simple terms plugins are like mobile apps, they add more functionality to your website and just like mobile applications the fewer you have, the better.

Unless you are a developer, you are going to need plugins, so make sure to have as few as possible. To avoid using too many at one time, it helps to have a flexible, strong and reliable theme.

I recommend Kadence WP because it is a free theme with premium features. My theme recommendations do change from time to time because I look for the best possible theme. You should too, but the people who built Kadence have built numerous plugins and themes that have over 40,000 installations individually.

I have already written about the ten best plugins to use, and you can check it out later. The rule of thumb is before installing any plugin, make sure to check if it has a full 5-star rating and how recently it was updated.

Faulty plugins can and will cause security issues on your site so it is important to proceed with caution.

SEO

What is SEO? SEO is short for search engine optimisation, and this term stands for the actions a website owner takes to improve their site for search engines.

Why do you need to optimise your site for search engines? So that they can find you easily, and they will see your awesome content to put up in search results.

With WordPress, most of the technical SEO is already taken care of, and when you are starting new, all you need to worry about is creating great content.

There is no magical SEO plugin that will improve the SEO of your site. Some plugins that claim to be great for SEO are not what they say they are. For example, the much loved Yoast plugin is supposed to be an SEO plugin that is awesome and will do some magical mumbo jumbo for your site, wrong!

Although there may be some features that make Yoast a handy plugin you do not need it! It is only good for telling you that you are starting too many paragraphs with the same word and other minor things that anyone can accomplish without it.

So why are Yoast and other SEO plugins bad for search engine optimisation? Firstly they make your site slow; secondly, plugins are a possible security threat to your site, and lastly the fewer plugins you have, the better.

I do use an SEO plugin (gasp) and before you start hating on me, let me tell you why. Rank Math generates a sitemap of my entire site that I copy-paste into Google Search Console. Someone on YouTube once asked what the major difference between Yoast and Rank Math was. The answer they got was as follows “Rank Math is the premium version of Yoast, for free”, after testing both plugins I cannot agree more.

Here is a small list you can use for on-page SEO and off-page SEO:

1. use short URLs (this is automatically done when your setting are set at “post name” in your WordPress permalink settings)
2. use the H1 title tag for each post and page of your site (this is already done in WordPress because all the titles are by default H1 headers)
3. link to internal resources on your site (as a beginner this will take time because you do have to create content that you can link to)
4. optimise your images with descriptive Alt text and scale them down
5. write the first 300 hundred words of each post already optimised for snippets
6. write your H1 tags in the form of a question whenever possible
7. make your content easily readable
8. add media to your posts (youtube videos, images and screenshots when needed)

1.From an SEO standpoint, you have to make high-quality titles for your blogs. Be descriptive and try to be brief. When your permalinks are set to “post name” the URL of each post will look like this thenameofyoursite.com/the/name/of/your/post. So keeping your title short will make your URL short automatically.

2.Use keywords in each H1 title. Remember to only use the H1 tag for the main heading in your blog(which is already set, and this is why I say that WordPress takes care of many SEO related features).

For breaking up your content, use the H2 tag. Take this post as an example. I have broken up my content with H2 headers only. The reason for this is that web crawlers come to your page and look at your title as a description of the content you have written. They then look at the H2 tags for further information on your content. So when you write your title heading look at it like this:

H1 Header	H2 Header	H2 Header	H2 Header
How to care for premature kittens	How to feed premature kittens	Why you should keep premature kittens warm	How to know if your kitten is unwell

3.If you are writing a post about caring for a premature kitten, and you have already written a post about how to make your kitten drink milk from a feeder then you can easily incorporate a link to it in your blog post.

Make sure to be descriptive when you add a link to any web page on your site or any other site.

It is now an SEO sacrilege to make the word “here” a link to anywhere. Highlight half or part of a sentence when you are adding links.

Here is an example of why it looks better.

“You can go here to read all about blogging tips”,

or

“I have written an in-depth article on how to blog the right way and make some serious money.

Imagine the bold text is anchor text (highlighted text which is a link), which one do you prefer? This has become an SEO optimisation because the Google guidelines dictate that a user should know where you are sending them. So whenever you send someone somewhere, tell them in one sentence where it is and what the post is about.

4.Optimise your images with alt text it is super easy. The reason you have to do this is that you need to tell crawlers what your image is. When you insert a picture in your post, you get a set of options with which you can scale your image and add alt text. Go to your WordPress dashboard-media-images, here you will see all the images on your site, and you can make adjustments individually.

Alternatively you could use a free plugin called Smush to make your images smaller for you.

Go to media in your WordPress dashboard and then click on “media”, your image library will show up (these are pictures that you have added to your site so if your site is empty your library will be empty too.

Click on any image you want to edit.

Now click on “Edit” to scale your images.

Normally the ideal size for an image on websites is 1200-900. All you have to do is set a number in the box above the button “Scale”.

5.What are meta tags or featured snippets? When you make any kind of Google search you will see this

The few lines of text that are below the link are supposed to be an inside view as to what the post is about. With SEO plugins, you can customise your very own snippet, but I usually don’t waste my time on this one.

Why? Because Google will crawl your site and choose the part of the text from the post that it deems descriptive, and put that up, irrelevant what you choose.

Blogging is all about simple writing, but the first 200-300 words of your post should be a short intro and a complete answer to the question in your title H1 tag. Crawlers better understand the encyclopedia-style text than simple written text. At least that is what seems to be the case. Google is not transparent on how they rate our sites, so we do have to try with trial and error.

Another thing you can do to get the attention of crawlers (or try to) is make your snippet bold.

6.Most people spend hours online, but with so many interesting things to do online, few people will read a huge amount of text till the end.

Make reading your content easy as best as you can. Use small, simple sentences, write small paragraphs and facilitate skimming your content by adding numbers to your headings.

You can also use a table block at the beginning of your post so that a user can go directly to the part of the content they are interested in.

8.Adding media to your website makes your content look good. YouTube videos are an awesome way to explain things that are better explained in a video. You do not need to embed a YouTube video that you have made; you can add any video that is relevant to your content. Look at this post I have embedded YouTube videos of four awesome YouTubers.

Keyword Research

Use Google search for all your keyword research. Please do not waste your money on keyword research tools. Do not worry; you are not at a disadvantage if you use free alternatives.

Paid keyword tools are overrated and fraudulent in many ways. You see keyword tools of smaller companies than Google have less real-world data for accurate measurements. On the flip side, you can use tools like Google Trends, Google’ search engine and Google ads for a more accurate idea on keywords and long-tail keywords.

Here is an in depth post you can read on doing keyword research as a beginner blogger and beyond.

Content creation as a beginner blogger

As a blogger, you will have to create content regularly. This is because your website needs content for different reasons. The first reason is that your site should have useful quality content when anyone comes to your site; they have something to read and keep them on your site.

The second reason is as per the Google quality guidelines and E-A-T your site needs content to prove that you know what you are talking about. It would help if you made yourself familiar with the Google quality guidelines document. This PDF is 200 pages long, make sure to download it and read it entirely at least once.

The content you create should be consistent and cohesive. It is easy to wander away from the original theme of your site’s topic.

Write and publish a blog at least twice a week for the first six months of your new site. Write more not less to build an amount of content on your blog.

There was a time when people would build a niche website with only 30 blog posts on a specific niche. After a year or so, the site would gain traffic and rank according to the content on the site.

Nowadays, it is not as easy to rank your pages due to the updates Google has made for sites. There is so much to consider when you build your site from the ground up and getting authority is not easy.

Social Media Promotion

When you write your very first blog and publish it, no one will be there to read it! Yep, all the successful bloggers have felt this pain of self-doubt and loneliness. To curb such depressions build just one social account around the topic of your blog so that you can promote your blog there and get some eyes on it.

Still, only to do social media promotion on one account. Everybody starts with just one social account before going on four different socials. This is because it takes time and energy to run and keep up with any social account.

Choose a social account wisely because some are better than others for promoting your blog; you can read this post I wrote all about which social platforms are the best and why.

In short, Pinterest is my all-time favourite for getting eyes on my blog, but you can choose one according to your preferences. It really depends on what you write about because Pinterest has mostly women users; they make up more than 80% of the people surfing site.

Make Sure To Index Your Site

You must index your website with Google so that the search engine knows that your domain exists and the web crawlers will make regular visits to see your content.

It is specifically for this reason that people keep talking about consistency when publishing content. It does take time for any site to rank in the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages), but you must tell search engines where to find you.

Here is a video by WP Beginner that has everything covered on how to index your site with Google.

Make Sure To Register Your Site With Google Analytics

You should do this primarily for yourself! You see in the early days of your website, your stats will be incredibly discouraging, but as time goes on, Google Analytics is an awesome tool for your site going forward.

You will be able to determine everything from interaction to stay time on your site. Once you have had it on your site for some months of content creation, it will be easy peezy to find which blogs are doing well and much, much more.

Again you can use the Headers and Footers plugin to add the analytics code. All you have to do is copy-paste the code given to you by Google Analytics into the header section of the Headers and Footers section of the plugin. Click the “Save Changes” button, and you will be all set.

Learn basic Html

You do not need to become a coder and you can easily skip this step!

However, if you learn basic Html skills, it will be easier to resolve small issues in the WordPress blocks. If you can learn how to read Html then if an issue occurs, it will be infinitely simple to identify the problem.

Here is a link to a video by Mike Dane explaining Html is the simplest terms, and even my grandmother could understand it.

Link Building And Site Authority

What is link building? In simple terms, link building is just another way of getting authority for your site. This can be done in several ways and is the hardest part of SEO. For example, throughout this post, I have linked to all number of websites so, in essence, I am voting for those sites.

Each link is a vote towards the credibility of a site. This is why when adding links to your site, you will always have a “nofollow” option to choose from telling search engines that you do not trust a site or the site is just for advertisement.

Here is small video by Income School that will fully explain link building and how you can do it too.

Final Thoughts

That is all folks. There are a plethora of things to do, but this guide should put you on the path to success. I hope that someone somewhere benefits from it.

SEO is a huge topic online, but think big and start small, and you will get there. The only thing you should concentrate on is creating content. Writing two posts a week should be your minimum target.

Come on people lets do this!