One of my fellow bloggers, Marko Saric, has such a blog in place taking you through step-by-step manual installation of WordPress on your own hosting account. To read the article about WP installation please visit his website How to make my blog for complete details.

Once WordPress was installed, there are a few tweaks required to optimize it for your content, for visitors and for search engines. When I say tweaks, I refer to web templates for WordPress that can better put your content in value, or plugins that can enhance the functionality of your blog.

For templates you can visit ThemesBase where you will find many free WP templates for download. Alternatively you can do a quick search on Google / Bing and you will see that the Internet is full of such free & paid WordPress templates.

For WP plugins, there are few that should be installed on any WP blog: All In One SEO and Google XML Sitemaps. Installation of plugins can be done directly from your WordPress admin panel, in the Plugins section. Simply type in the name of the plugin to search and hit Install. Once installed, activate it and make the settings that suits you best.

Again, it makes no sense talking too much about this as long as these things are available and explained in detail by Marko at 20 most popular plugins or Plugins used by How to make my blog.

But if these domains are so institutionalized, does it mean you need to know someone in that institution in order to get a backlink? The answer is No. There are employees or departments of these institutions that run their own blog for updates and news under the .edu or .gov domain, with possibility to post a comment on articles where you can include your link. Below I explain the 2 steps in getting such backlinks work for you: finding .edu / .gov blogs and posting comments that GET APPROVED (this is where most webmasters fail in their desire to get things fast).

1. Finding potential sources of .edu / .gov backlinks. First step is finding web-pages hosted on .edu / .gov domains where you can submit a comment with a backlink to your website. To search for such potential sources of backlinks, open Google search or Yahoo search and paste the below search expression (you need to change in the expression with your actual keywords, for example if you are looking for posts related to hotels or accommodation):

2. Getting your comments with backlinks approved. If finding potential sources of backlinks from .edu / .gov domains will prove easy with above searches, getting your actual links on these domains is the trick that most so called "gurus" avoid bringing the light on. First of all you should understand that most comments on this blogs are manually moderated. Also, keep in mind you are not the only webmaster trying to get a backlink from that blog. That being said, to get comments with backlinks approved you should go through some ethical submissions:

• Read the article or part of it to know what it is about and make a comment related to the content. Don't post comments like "Thanks, nice post" or such things as all blog moderators have seen such comments way too often. DO NOT post your backlink now or your website name anywhere in the comment.
• Copy the link of the article you commented on and save it in a file. Return to the article one-two weeks later and check if your comment was approved.
• If your comment was not approved you can check again at a later time. If your first comment was approved, now you should be able to post a comment on any post of that blog and most times will go live immediately as will be automatically approved. The comment should still be related to the article's content. Feel free to include the link of your website with desired keywords at this stage

That would be all. If you speed the process from step 2 and go with backlinks inclusion from first comments, you will see that the approval rate is not so great, and once you have been flagged as spam on a blog, any future comments from you will go directly to spam folder making your approval rate near to zero.

What does it mean to NOT over-abuse pop-up campaigns? Well it means to try to limit / cap the number of times someone sees your pop-up, for example once a day. We all know how annoying it can become to visit a website that launches pop-ups one after another, on any page load and reload. This can drive users away from your websites, however if the pop-up is caped at one / day, this will not interfere that much with visitors.

If you will start setting up pop-up marketing campaigns on your website, does that mean you should stop banner advertising or any other marketing messages? No, the other campaigns should continue running as before, and results might be better if all campaigns are converging to the same message (promoting same & similar services / products).

One pop-up script code to use in your website is below. This script is set to show a pop-up each time the page with the code loads (no limitations available). The code should be included in your web-page <body>…</body> tags. I personally put the code just before the closing </body> tag, as this way it allows the page content to load first before launching the pop-up window. Make sure you edit the PopUpURL.com with your pop-up link location.

Alternatively, the pop-up window javascript code that can be capped for once a day can be found below. You should copy and paste the following code in a new file named onlyPopupOnce.js . Again, make sure you edit the PopUpURL.com with your pop-up link location.

Once you have saved the file with above code, copy it to your hosting account where your website is located. The next step is to include the Script code in your website that will launch the pop-up window. For this you need to include the following code between the <head>…</head> tags of your web-page.

Once implemented, you can test it and you will see that once the pop-up was launched, it will not show again until next day. To test it more time, make sure to delete your web browser cookies before each test.

Increased interaction means optimized lead-generation and sales, that can have a good impact on a webmaster’s financial success. The ability to increase for example the CTR (Click Through Rate) 5x on an ad-banner by implementing a Geo-targeting system could result in making $5000 from a campaign rather than $1000. This is an opportunity webmasters with international traffic should not miss.

On the other hand, the ability to restrict traffic that bring loses through fraud or other means, is again a cash win. This was my specific case that pushed me in getting a Geo-targeting system in place. Over one of my campaigns I found that users from a certain country (I will not mention it here) were bringing me loses due to fraudulent activities, and being able to filter that traffic became a priority for me.

For this I have used the Analyse Spider script (you can buy it with $50 one time fee) that helped me filtering fraud traffic from a certain country and increase therefore profitability by 30%. I can recommend this script as it has many uses, and I have been implementing it on different projects for over a year now.

The Geo-targeting script has many implementations, and it is a must have capability for those serious about online business. Among such implementations are:

• Real Time Geo-Locating (Country)
• Redirect web pages based on geographical region
• Automatically target advertising by country
• Geo targeting for increased sales and click-through
• Provide Location Aware Content ( language, currency, etc.)
• Fraud Detection ( Credit Card Fraud, etc. )
• On-line Campaign ( targeted Banner Ads )
• Web log statistics and analysis (Analyze your web logs )
• Filter non-valuable traffic on basis of originating country and low your host bandwidth cost
• Digital Rights Management
• Spam Filtering

The good part for webmasters is that RSS feeds may be used to have fresh updated content on their websites / web-pages. A quick search on Google will get you all sort of available software that you have to pay for. The good news is that there are such tools available for free, and really easy to implement. All you need is the RSS feed or feeds you want to implement on your page and you can create in some easy non-techie steps great looking widgets/boxes that will push fresh content on your website.

These great free tools are:

• RSS-to-Javascript
• RSSinclude

Once you have your RSS feed, use any of the above free tools, fill in the fields with your desired information and generate the code. The code generated can be implemented in your web-page HTML code, where you want the RSS content to be shown.

1. Web Domains. Get a web domain that includes the relevant keywords for traffic you want to get. For example, if you want to start selling online extra large clothes, your domain should be like www.extralargeclothes.com . Feel free to play around with the keywords, if the domain you want is already registered, try adding some variables to the name, like “store”, “online”, “sale” etc or numbers. Avoid having a domain name with “-” sign in it, should you fail to find an appropriate domain name with a variable than try adding “-”. The domain level is also important: for international purposes use a .com domain (I have run tests of same and similar keyword domains with .com, .net, .info, .org, .biz and the .com domain gets by far the best search engine results). For localized results, try using a local top level domain (.co.uk for British results, .de for German results, .fr for French results and so on).

2. Page name. Just as with the domain name, using relevant keywords in the page name is of high importance in getting good results. For example, a page about shorts on the above domain could look like shorts.html or extra-large-shorts.html. In the case of page names, when using more than one keyword feel free to use the “-” to separate words.

3. Content. You will hear everywhere that content is king. True and not so true. If you don’t have content on your page you’ll find it hard to rank. If you have content, but irrelevant to the traffic you want to target or simply written in poor manner that makes it hard for users to find what they were looking for, this again won’t help much in SEO. As content is something that helps in identifying the relevance for a page to get high search engine rankings for certain keywords, you need to make sure the text is well written, with paragraphs / structure that makes it easy for user to read it or find a specific thing. For this you should try to structure your content with in-content titles, to bold or underline expressions in the text that would make it easy to follow the factors of interest. Bottom line, I found that fewer content and well targeted and readable makes a huge difference in getting good SEO results.

4. Meta content. You will hear many people from the SEO world that meta-content became irrelevant. Let me make it clear what meta-content is: meta-content is the content that shows up in search results in the most cases (Meta Title and Meta Description). Simply go to Google and search for anything you want. In the results you get, you will see that each result has a bolded & blue line (Meta Title of that page result) and a short description underneath it (Meta Description of that page result). So what drives you to click on a search result? The relevance no doubt, having the correct title and description that fits your search. The meta-description should be short (150 characters), and should sound like a call-to-action to users reading it (Click here to check best prices for Extra Large Clothes; Check for latest outfits on XXL clothes; etc). So having this in place helps in driving traffic from a search result to your page. If you fail to drive traffic from search results even if your page offers the content users are interested in, search engines will soon push other results in front of you that better capture users to click.

5. Links. Once you went through all the above steps, you need to get links to your website. Search engines rank better websites that have in-bound links from other web sources. The way search algorithms are developed are that the more links you have, the better as it figures out people talk about your website because you offer relevant content. The strategy for link building should be simple and you should avoid buying and link building packages that deliver 1000s of links to your website within days. If this is done, search engines will tend to mark all those links as spam, and you will surely not benefit for it. The link building should look natural, and you can take care of that on your own with a few minutes a day (post your links in comments on blogs, post your links in forums or other sort of online communities, post your links to web link directories, exchange some links with other relevant websites). When making link building make sure that you also use proper keywords to your links (where possible). For example, when building links to www.extralargeclothes.com, use the text Extra Large Clothes (usually page title and variations of the title). The text to your link will tell search engines what is the page linked to about, something that will have some weight in ranking.

What you should also understand is that SEO is a process that takes time. People that say they can get high positioning in search engines in a matter of hours or days are not to be trusted. In order to get good positions in search results, search engines require time to crawl your website and index its content, to find other relevant websites and compare it to yours, to push some results for your work and compare user reaction. All these processes may easily take one month, so do not expect immediate results in SERP. Simply follow the above steps and in time you will see some interesting results.

Among the recommended tools I suggest using:

• Microsoft FrontPage - an Office tool, available in Microsoft Office 2003 or 2007 editions
• Webawy - a similar tool to FrontPage, free to download and use
• KompoZer - a simple to use website template editor tool, supporting many of the new features available now (works well for Artisteer created templates); free to download and use

WordPress: it comes as an archived file that you can upload on your hosting account where it needs installed. Well this may sound difficult, but it’s not. In fact, most web hosting providers (free and paid) offer now a script installer environment – simply click on a button within your hosting account and your WordPress blog is installed and ready to use. You can test it out for beginning on a free hosting account for WordPress (offered courtesy of ANAwebs.com). Simply create a free account, login and visit the Easy Script Installer section. Here search for WordPress and click install. You may freely play with it, learn to post articles, create categories and so on. If you enjoy it and need more blogging power, you can upgrade any time to a paid hosting account (few $ per month, one of the cheapest on the web).

Below we have a screenshot of WordPress dashboard (the back-end where you can customize your blog, write / edit articles). The left menu has all the sections you need to make changes to your blog: write articles and edit them, approve comments, create categories, set blog settings, change templates, offer access to other users to create articles and many more.

There would be a number of handy changes we recommend for your newly WordPress blog, but I will cover this in another post.

Blogger: it is a platform powered by Google. It requires no web hosting as it comes as part of the package. Simply create you account on Blogger.com and set up your blog. The blog will be visible at a web address under this form: yourblogname.blogspot.com. All customization is available from Blogger dashboard: write / edit articles, create categories, change templates and much more.

Best way to learn to use these blogging platforms are to test them by yourself. No worries if you anything wrong: it's just like editing a document.

The output of websites developed with the WYSIWYG editors are HTML files. Coding knowledge is not required. As WYSIWYG stands for “What You See Is What You Get”, these editors are simple to use. Basically you will be working in a user friendly environment similar to Word (MS) (very similar to Word actually, and we are sure you know how to use Word). It’s as simple as writing the text on a page and adding some graphic elements for beauty or in support of your content.

Personally I use the FrontPage (built under Microsoft Office 2003 suite). You can still grab it online, but you can also use Webawy that is similar with the old FrontPage, but free to use.

Once you have downloaded any of the above applications and installed on your computer you will see you have built-in templates to use, but they are simplistic and sometimes that might not be exactly what you expected. What I do is do a search on Google for "free web templates", "free HTML templates" or "free HTM CSS templates". Some great websites to visit and check for free templates are below:

• Free Web Templates
• Free Website templates
• Open Source Web Design
• Free Templates Online
• Metamorphozis (quite a lot of my sites are built on themes from these guys)
• Master Free Templates

Virtually you can find anything on the web: if you want to make a site about dogs you will find a template with this theme, or anything else you want. Download any of the web templates you wish to use from above web resources (or any other sites you will find on your search), and modify as you wish in your WYSIWYG editor.

Below are some screen shots with the process, make sure when you start modifying to make use of the ideas and website structure detailed in the How to start making a website.

The home page of any website must be named index (and the file format you use: .htm, .html, .php etc). The name of index is commonly used and tells the server that is the first page to show to users typing in your web domain address. If you do not have a file called index, users typing in www.YourWebsite.com will not see your website. All the other pages you can call them as you like.

- FrontPage layout (similar with Word as you can see, with all the same options on top to text and link editing, saving, drawing tools and more)

Once you have opened the web template in Frontpage, you may start editing the text, links, menu and page properties. We will not say anything about text editing, as this is a simple task (just add your content), so I will jump to editing links and the page properties.

- Adding a hyperlink (to text or image, simply select the object to hyperlink, click on the Hyperlink button and insert the link to direct when clicked)

As you can see in above image, you need to insert the web address where the text / image will direct when clicked (you can also click on any of the files like index.html and any other pages you have there if the link is inside your website).

- Page properties (edit page properties like title, description, keywords, page language). To do that right click on the page and hit Page Properties in the menu that popped-up.

From the above window you will see the minimalistic settings you need to do in Page Properties. Why is that important? Well the changes you make here will have a huge impact on your search engine optimization. The Title must be short, about the website or web page itself, the Description should be no more than 200 characters long (a short description of what the user will find on this page), while the Keywords are the main words that would cover the subject approached on the page, delimited by commas.

When you made all the changes you wanted to the page, Save it. You can built another page now using the similar template (just copy-paste the page you just worked on, and start making the new page on the copy, rename it and save it.. and so on).

So how do we set an online presence? Does making a website require any special knowledge, do you need to hire someone or can you do this alone?

Well I am the adept of doing it myself. For most of my needs, and I am sure for most of your needs, the below resources and tutorials for how to make a website will be more than enough. You can do a simple standalone website or a dynamic website (constantly updated - like a blog, forum, ecommerce site) with advanced knowledge in web development required. In fact, with no knowledge required in the field. My tutorials will take you through the beginning steps and based on your online needs, I will show you how to discover the best solutions.

But first of all, let's start with the beginning. Take a block note and a pen and put your idea of a website on the page. Answer yourself the following questions first: what do I want to do? do I want to simply share a hobby with other people or do I want to make sales? do I want to make a standalone website that once developed just stays there or do I want a website I can update constantly and also interact with other people? what name should my website have? what structure should I use?

These are just a few of the questions I recommend going through, and though for most questions the answers must be looked by you, I can give you a few suggestions for some others.

1: once you have put your ideas on the paper is good to think of a name for your website. The name of the website must be short, easy to remember by other users, connected to the website's approached subject. Take for example the name of this blog, Webmaster Wiki, is an eloquent name that tells you what you should find here: webmaster (related to website development / traffic / monetization) and wiki (a knowledge base, tutorials and resources).

2: you need to put down the structure of the website on paper. Really, you need to do that! Mostly because making any changes afterward, to categories, menus etc is a really big pain and is also not-recommended from a SEO perspective. Simply make it simple through the structure to understand what pages will you be having, how will you be grouping them and inter-connect them. It's an easy task that doesn't take a lot of time, and can save you a lot of work later on.

3: choosing the development platform. Again, not to worry, you don't need any special knowledge in the field. If you look at making a static website where you will put some info with not so many later updates, maybe HTML / CSS website development are the best option. This can easily be done using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor like FrontPage. If you have ever used Word from the MicroSoft Office suite, that using FrontPage is no different. If however you look at having a website that would have constant updates, than a CMS (Content Management System) platform would be best option to use. In this category I cover just a few platforms like the most powerful blogging platform - WordPress, best content management system - Joomla, strongest forum software - phpBB, or the e-commerce platform - osCommerce. Many more CMS options can be found and tested in live demos Open Source CMS.