Choosing Wordpress To Host Your Blog
If you are looking to jump on the blogging bandwagon, choosing the right hosting service for your blog can be a bit of a nightmare. There are so many ways to get your own blog these days, but there are two options that seem to have the same appeal. Firstly, many website hosting services offer the opportunity to host a blog as part of the hosting package. Freewebs is a good example of this. You can host your blog as a sub domain, which basically means that the URL that you choose for your blog is tacked onto the end of the freewebs domain. Secondly, websites such as Wordpress or Blogger allow you to host your blog for free. Again, you do not get your own domain name unless you choose to buy it, but you do not have to pay for the privilege of hosting the blog with this option.
If you choose to host your blog on one of the main blogging websites, the three main players are Wordpress, Blogger and Typepad. Whereas Wordpress and Blogger are both free to use, Typepad requires a subscription to set up a blog, which many people then use to host a portfolio, as opposed to a regular blog. Wordpress is generally considered to be superior to Blogger in the hosting stakes. Wordpress offers built-in statistics, so you can easily track how many visitors your blog is getting, as well as how these people find your blog, the keywords that they type in to do so, and the links that people click on in your blogroll. Blogger does not offer this feature, and you will need to install a site meter to provide statistics on who is visiting your blog.
Most bloggers are concerned with directing traffic to their blog, and this is where it pays to make your blog search engine friendly. Wordpress is far more SEO-friendly than its competitors. There are plug-ins that you can add to do so. You can set up your blog to add meta-tags to your posts. This means that you can add keywords and descriptions to your posts that will be picked up by the search engines. The Add Meta-tags plug-in uses excerpts from your blog posts as the post’s description. You can also download the Head META description plug-in, which does a similar job. You can link other posts on your blog that are in the same category with this plug-in. It can also link posts that have related content, but are not necessarily in the same category as the post in question. If you have a tag cloud on your blog, the Keyword Tag plug-in will post links to other posts on your blog with the same tagged keywords.
Other top plug-ins for Wordpress include Akismet, which fights spam and checks trackbacks. The Google sitemap plug-in creates a sitemap of your blog that is search engine friendly, especially for Google. There are many more plug-ins available, and a good list is available here.
There are many obvious reasons why Wordpress is one of the most popular blog services, but it will ultimately come down to personal preference. There are very few other blog services that offer the same array of impressive plug-ins to make your blog more search engine friendly, and this is one of the major factors behind the popularity of Wordpress.
constant-content.com | March 20th, 2008
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Wordpress indeed is the best platform for blogging.
You can use wordpress.com or get a paid-self hosted wordpress blog if you want to monetize your blog.
Nothing can beat wordpress so far.
-Nhoel of nospamplease.com
Whilst Wordpress is indeed a fine platform Blogger can be used with Google Analytics and it is all free.
As is my website —- which is just as well as I have no desire to monetize any of my work!