Wordpress setup for selling

The first thing that you need to do if you want to create a wordpress site to bring more traffic to your online store is to get wordpress installed.

Instructions for doing so will vary with your host.

Resources:

• How to install Wordpress with cpanel

Once you have wordpress installed, it is a good idea to do the little bit of extra footwork necessary to protect yourself from the most common hacks, which tend to involve scripts.

This step involves altering the default database and adding a few extra files to your server to prevent people from using scripts to determine what plugins and themes you have installed on your site…which is commonly done to look for security holes.

While completely optional, it is a good idea to do this at some point. If you are unfamiliar as to how you can go about doing this, I highly recommend the step by step guide, Blog Lockdown. It covers some other basic aspects of security as well, but contains a full rundown of basic hardening for wordpress blogs. If the price is a bit steep for you currently, you can always come back and do this once you have begun getting more sales with your new site.

Recommended Product:

• Blog Lockdown
  A guide to making wordpress more secure

By default, the links generated in wordpress work great, but are very sub-optimal when it comes to search ranking.

Rather than links like http://yourdomain/?post_id=3, you should have links like http://yourdomain/store-categories/your-category-name.html.

With wordpress on Host Gator (or any other linux based host that allows url rewriting), this is a snap.

• Setting Up Search Engine Friendly Links In Wordpress

While you are in the process of creating your site, it is a good idea to prevent search engines from indexing it. Once you have finished all of the basics, you can then re-enable search engine robots.

Resources:

• Disabling Search Engine Robots In Wordpress

When you first setup your wordpress site, chances are good that both www.yoursitename.com and yoursitename.com will both take people to your site.

While this is a good thing, it is problematic as it creates duplicate listings in search engines and can cause your site to rank lower.

To remedy this, you should take the time to setup url re-writing so that all inbound links to http://yoursitename.com are rewritten to http://www.yoursitename.com before being processed.

Resources:

• Rewriting URLs to prevent getting penalized for dual search entries

Now that you have wordpress installed with search engine friendly links and have disabled search engine indexing temporarily, it is time to choose a theme for your site and get it setup.

There are thousands of free wordpress themes available, many of which you can find at the WordPress themes site.

These instructions assume use the Atahualpa Theme ( version 3.2 ).

Note:
Newer versions of the Atahualpa Theme have made major changes which will not work quite right with these instructions and go in a direction that I don’t really like form a code standpoint as they move core php from the wordpress loop into the theme options file.

I recommend this theme simply because it has everything we need, it needs minimal modifications for search engine optimization, and it is the most user friendly theme that I have found to date where making basic changes are concerned.

Of course, you can use any theme you want, but a few of the files I provide will need modification if you use a different theme.

The best themes for this process are ones that have one to two sidebars ( two with the option to disable one is best ) and are relatively clean.

Resources:

• WordPress Themes
  A large variety of functional themes for WordPress.
• The Atahualpa Theme ( ver 3.2 )
  The theme that this site uses.
  If you want these instructions to work without modification, get it!

Once you have chosen a theme, you will need to get it installed on your store traffic site.

You can either do this manually or from within wordpress itself.

To use older themes which are not on the Wordpress site, you will need to install them manually.

Resources:

• Downloading, Installing, and Activating Themes for Wordpress

Now that your theme is installed, you should make any necessary modifications to increase your sites ranking within search engines.

While the default for most themes works quite well, I recommend making alterations so that individual pages and posts have their own name in H1 tags and your site name in H2 tags.

To do this typically requires editing your theme files, so be sure to be careful if you do so.

Resources:

• Altering H1 and H2 display in Wordpress for search optimization

If you want to make changes to the way that your theme works, I would recommend making them now, before you start creating your content.

You can find some resources for modifying the Atahualpa theme both in the resources box below and in the Atahualpa Theme Options page under Appearance in the admin panel.

If you want changes made to different themes, you can make them yourself or hire someone else to make them for you.

Resources:

Atahualpa Modifications:

• Banner setup in Atahualpa
• Logo setup in Atahualpa
• Disabling automatic table striping in Atahualpa
• Disabling automatic table hover highlighting in Atahualpa
• Other modifications:
  Read the built in documentation for Atahualpa Theme Options
  Check for articles with the Atahualpa tag on this site.
  Check the the Atahualpa forums
  Contact me with questions

Other Theme Modifications:

• Place a work order on RentACoder
• Place a work order on eLance

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of extra pieces of code written for wordpress to add various functionality to it.

Since you are creating a site designed to increase your online store traffic, I recommend various plugins below, not all of which will be immediately used.

See the resource box below for help with plugin setup.

I recommend grabbing the following plugins. Those which you should setup initially have (activate) next to them for your reference. This is because some of the plugins really shouldn’t be setup until you are ready to let search engines index your site.

• Add to Any
  (activate) For letting readers share your information with others
• Akismet
  (activate) For automatically dealing with various types of spam comments
• Category Posts Widget
  (activate) For displaying posts from a particular category.
• Contact Form 7
  (activate) For quick, easy form creation.
• Enhanced Links
  (activate) A nice link widget.
• Dean’s FCKEditor For Wordpress(activate) Use the FCK Editor to create and edit posts and pages.
• Flexi Pages Widget
  (activate) Highly configurable page list widget
• Organize Series
  (activate) For creating posts in a series which reference each other
• Platinum SEO Pack
  (activate) For setting various search engine optimization preferences as well as adding meta keywords and meta descriptions to posts and pages.
• Post-Plugin Library
  (activate) Needed for various post related widgets.
• Post Template
  (activate) Used to create templates from posts and pages…to save you time if you want to create similar looking pages.
• Really Simple CAPTCHA
  (activate) Works with Contact Form 7 to add a CAPTCHA to your forms so you won’t get spammed by bots.
• Recent Posts
  (activate) Used to display recent posts in widgets or posts
• Similar Posts
  (activate) Used to display similar posts to the current post.
• Simple Google Sitemap Creates an xml sitemap and submits it to major search engines.
• WP-Ban
  (activate) Ban problem users.
• WP-DBManager
  (activate) Manager your database from within wordpress
• WP-PostRatings Allow users to rate your content.
• WP-Print Give users an on page print button for posts and pages
• WP-ServerInfo
  (activate) Quick information about your server from within your admin panel.
• WP-Security Scan
  (activate) Provides feedback on notable security flaws in your setup.
• WP Super Cache Caches pages so they can be served faster. Great for large sites.

There are plenty of other excellent plugins out there, but the above are those which I recommend having setup on most sites designed to drive traffic to stores.

Resources:

• How to set up new plugins in Wordpress

Many themes make use of dynamic sidebars that you can easily add widgets to. Widgets are small bits of code that do various things without your having to know how to create them yourself.

At minimum, I recommend including a Page List, a Category List, and a Links List in your sidebars. Depending upon the nature of your online store, you may want various other widgets in your sidebars as well.

Resources:

• Setting up sidebars and widgets in WordPress

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