best seo tips for blogger

Top 10 Tips to improving your SEO

Seo tips

1. Keyword Research

It is essential when optimising your site, that the content is keyword rich. However, there is little point in writing keyword dense copy if the keywords are not commonly used in search terms.

It is advisable to keep keywords ambiguous when using any SEO tool, e.g. KeywordDiscovery or Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This will allow the SEO tool to return more suggestions, some of which may be surprising, and ones you had not thought of.

SEO tools will also allow you to see the levels of competition for the most popular keywords. This will allow you to optimise your campaign for the most effective keyword use.

2. Link Building

A high Google PageRank is something most sites aim for, and while the algorithm for determining page rank is constantly changing the number and quality of links into your site always features.

We suggest using reputable sites and niche directories to link back to your site. With genuine, relevant content, links back to your site can really boost your site’s PageRank.

Some SEO tools will also allow you to view the number of links your competitor sites contain, this will enable you to make sure you have more valid links therefore it is likely your page rank will increase.

3. Deep Linking

While it is important to have as many good quality relevant links as possible coming into your site, it is equality important that these go to different pages across your site. This will allow you to target more relevant links to each specific page. This will not only improve users experience more but will allow search engines to see that your site has lots of valid content, boosting PageRank. Sites that only have links going to the homepage are often viewed as shallow by search engines, or that the links are not genuine and generated by automation, reducing the sites value.

4. Sitemaps

The site map is an important tool for increasing the ease of navigation across your site. It allows web crawlers from search engines (and users) to quickly and efficiently search every page of your website. Every page of content is therefore easier to find, reducing the number of clicks, both web crawlers and users have to make before reaching the required content.

There is another version of the sitemap that is also used by search engines. XML sitemaps consist of a list of all pages and include the dates the pages were last modified. XML sitemaps are submitted to search engines to help them find and link to all of the content on your site.

5. Relevant Content

The most important part of SEO is perhaps having content relevant to your main page or site topic. The readable text on the page needs to be relevant to the targeted keywords and information in the meta tags and alt tags.

The content needs to read well, in addition to being keyword dense, in order to be useful to a reader. All information needs to be explained fully so it makes sense to the reader. The site content needs to be relevant in order for the search engine to link it to the search term. However some keyword stuffed copy can appear to be spam and put potential users off.

6. Optimise Meta Tags

The Meta tags are in the code of the site. The two most important meta tags are the description and keywords. Meta tags summarize what the site is about and are still have a role in the search rankings.

The description tag is what users will read when your page comes up in search listings and can make the difference between them clicking on your site or not. The recommended length for the description meta tag is 150 – 200 characters. The description tag should have a few keywords within it but should not be stuffed with keywords, this should read like a sentence, not a list.

Many search engines hold little importance to the keyword meta tags due to “keyword overstuffing”. However all search engines still recommend adding them. When putting your list together, you need to think of the terms people are likely to be searching for (see Keyword Research), so they are led to your site with relevant content. It is not useful to add too many duplicates to your site (e.g. SEO agency, SEO agencies, London SEO agency, etc) as these are essentially the same, it is better to pick one or two variations of each keyword.

 7. Use Alt Tags for Images

The alt tags will help SEO as a brief, descriptive alt tag can add relevant text to your source code, which search engines can see when indexing your site. A higher search ranking can be obtained with more relevant content, making these tags valuable.

The use of alt tags also helps the visually impaired who asses the site using screen reader. Whilst they cannot see the image, the alt tag describes what the image was off, so they do not miss any content from the site.

8. Social media

Not technically SEO, Social Media is a fast growing factor in getting your website noticed, and is an important element to include in plans.

Social Media is a term used to describe a variety of Web-based platforms, applications and technologies that enable people to socially interact with one another online. Some examples of social media sites and applications include Facebook, YouTube, Del.icio.us, Twitter, Digg, blogs and other sites that have content based on user participation and user-generated content (UGC).

To achieve the most form social media it is important to have a give and take relationship. Helping members out with retreats, or digs or giving helpful advice will increase the effectiveness of this media.

9. Ensure Domain Name Contains keywords

You do not need to pack lots of keywords into your domain name, but a few carefully chosen keywords to highlight the topic of the website are useful. Too many keywords in the domain name can make a site look like it is spam based. Avoiding the overuse of hyphens is also a key element in getting the domain name right.

10. Use Headings

The page title will be the first thing a search engine will look at when determining what the page is about. It is also the first thing visitors to your site will see when they get to your page. Therefore it is important that heading contain one or two keywords, they are relevant to the content on the page and provide appropriate targeting.

Headings have an important role in the organisation of information on a website, they are also able to provide aesthetically pleasing aspects to a site. It is recommended to use the appropriate page heading tags through out the site as these enable webcrawlers to access the site easily.

- See more at: http://www.alchemyinteractive.co.uk/resources/top-10-tips-to-improving-your-seo

7 best seo tips for new blogger

Seo tips and tricks to promote website

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the most important thing to learn for best blogging experience. Without proper blog optimization, we can’t even dream to get impressive traffic from search engines. From past few days, I am getting too much request of newbie bloggers to share some On-Page SEO Tips. That’s why today I plan to mention all those On Page SEO tips which I already shared on my blog in my earlier posts. I’m sorry if you have read those posts before, but I need to grab attention of newbie bloggers who just start learning SEO for their blog. All those tips are must to know by every blogger.

So, let’s take a look on best On-page SEO Tips for Blogspot Blogs and if you have read them before then don’t ignore this post. May be you learn something new which you missed before because of any reason.

On Page Search Engine Optimization Tips For Blogspot

Below are the tips and tricks that will be beneficial for you to optimize your blog for Google and other search engines. Read them carefully and apply all of them on your blog to make your blog lovable and trust worthy for search engines.

#1 Custom Robots Header Tags

There are some settings for bloggers that they can personally do for their blogs to make their blogs for SEO friendly. Custom Robots Header Tags setting in one of them. It’ll be beneficial for you to use custom robots headers tags correctly. It’s easy to manage these settings.

#2 Custom Robots.txt

Search engine bots like Googlebot (Web Crawling Robot of Google) needs some guidelines on how they have to crawl and index our blog. We can prevent some non-important pages labels pages from indexing in Google to protect our blog from duplicate content issues.

#3 Optimize Blog Post Titles

If you just started your blog on blogger’s default template, then definitely you’ll not be aware with this fact that your post titles are not properly optimized for search engines. You need to do some editing in your blog template to make your post titles properly optimized. You will see a noticeable change in organic traffic of your blog after making this change.

#4 Image Optimization

You may definitely notice relevant images between the posts on many blogs. Images not only enhance the look of our content, but it also plays an important role to optimize our blog posts. If we make effective use of images in our blog posts, then we can attain extra traffic from search engines.

#5 Internal Linking SEO

Many bloggers fail to optimize their internal links or even they don’t link their posts to each other internally. This is really a big mistake that we must avoid. Internal linking not only increases our blog page views but also help our posts to rank well in search engines. If you are also doing the same mistake, then you must need some tips to optimize your internal links.

#6 Search Engine Submission

When we are ready with our blog optimization, then we need to submit our blog in Google’s webmaster tool. Verifying and submitting our blog in Google webmaster tool helps it to get indexed in Google super fast. It also tells about our blog issues like broken links, HTML improvements etc that we must try to resolve. We just need to verify our blog ownership and submit a sitemap. That’s it. If you have not added your blog GWT, then I recommend you to read below tutorial.

#7 Improve Your Blog Load Time

If your blog takes lot of time, then visitors will go back and never come back again. It will increase bounce rate of your blog and you’ll lose your valuable traffic. Search engines give more value to fast loading blogs because they want to build best user experience. That’s why it’s very important to optimize blog loading time. I have shared some best tips that can help you to enhance your blog’s loading speed.

http://www.bloggertipstricks.com/on-page-seo-tips-blogspot.html

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the activity of optimizing web pages or whole sites in order to make them search engine friendly, thus getting higher positions in search results.

This tutorial explains simple SEO techniques to improve the visibility of your web pages for different search engines, especially for Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Audience

This tutorial has been prepared for beginners to help them understand the simple but effective SEO characteristics.

Prerequisites

We assume you are aware of simple web technologies such as HTML, XHTML, Style Sheet, etc. If you already have developed any website, then it is an added advantage and it will help you understand the concepts of SEO explained in this tutorial.

SEO - What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is all about optimizing a website for search engines. SEO is a technique for:

designing and developing a website to rank well in search engine results.

improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines.

marketing by understanding how search algorithms work, and what human visitors might search.

SEO is a subset of search engine marketing. SEO is also referred as SEO copyrighting, because most of the techniques that are used to promote sites in search engines, deal with text.

If you plan to do some basic SEO, it is essential that you understand how search engines work.

How Search Engine Works?

Search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results.

Crawling - Process of fetching all the web pages linked to a website. This task is performed by a software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, in case of Google).

Indexing - Process of creating index for all the fetched web pages and keeping them into a giant database from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords.

Processing - When a search request comes, the search engine processes it, i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database.

Calculating Relevancy - It is likely that more than one page contains the search string, so the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index to the search string.

Retrieving Results - The last step in search engine activities is retrieving the best matched results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser.

Search engines such as Google and Yahoo! often update their relevancy algorithm dozens of times per month. When you see changes in your rankings it is due to an algorithmic shift or something else outside of your control.

Although the basic principle of operation of all search engines is the same, the minor differences between their relevancy algorithms lead to major changes in results relevancy.

What is SEO Copywriting?

SEO Copywriting is the technique of writing viewable text on a web page in such a way that it reads well for the surfer, and also targets specific search terms. Its purpose is to rank highly in the search engines for the targeted search terms.

Along with viewable text, SEO copywriting usually optimizes other on-page elements for the targeted search terms. These include the Title, Description, Keywords tags, headings, and alternative text.

The idea behind SEO copywriting is that search engines want genuine content pages and not additional pages often called "doorway pages" that are created for the sole purpose of achieving high rankings.

What is Search Engine Rank?

When you search any keyword using a search engine, it displays thousands of results found in its database. A page ranking is measured by the position of web pages displayed in the search engine results. If a search engine is putting your web page on the first position, then your web page rank will be number 1 and it will be assumed as the page with the highest rank.

SEO is the process of designing and developing a website to attain a high rank in search engine results.

What is On-Page and Off-page SEO?

Conceptually, there are two ways of optimization:

On-Page SEO - It includes providing good content, good keywords selection, putting keywords on correct places, giving appropriate title to every page, etc.

Off-Page SEO - It includes link building, increasing link popularity by submitting open directories, search engines, link exchange, etc.

SEO techniques are classified into two broad categories:

White Hat SEO - Techniques that search engines recommend as part of a good design.

Black Hat SEO - Techniques that search engines do not approve and attempt to minimize the effect of. These techniques are also known as spamdexing.

White Hat SEO

An SEO tactic is considered as White Hat if it has the following features:

It conforms to the search engine's guidelines.

It does not involve in any deception.

It ensures that the content a search engine indexes, and subsequently ranks, is the same content a user will see.

It ensures that a web page content should have been created for the users and not just for the search engines.

It ensures good quality of the web pages.

It ensures availability of useful content on the web pages.

Always follow a White Hat SEO tactic and do not try to fool your site visitors. Be honest and you will definitely get something more.

Black Hat or Spamdexing

An SEO tactic, is considered as Black Hat or Spamdexing if it has the following features:

Attempting ranking improvements that are disapproved by the search engines and/or involve deception.

Redirecting users from a page that is built for search engines to one that is more human friendly.

Redirecting users to a page that was different from the page the search engine ranked.

Serving one version of a page to search engine spiders/bots and another version to human visitors. This is called Cloaking SEO tactic.

Using hidden or invisible text or with the page background color, using a tiny font size or hiding them within the HTML code such as "no frame" sections.

Repeating keywords in the metatags, and using keywords that are unrelated to the website content. This is called metatag stuffing.

Calculated placement of keywords within a page to raise the keyword count, variety, and density of the page. This is called keyword stuffing.

Creating low-quality web pages that contain very little content but are instead stuffed with very similar keywords and phrases. These pages are called Doorway or Gateway Pages.

Mirror websites by hosting multiple websites - all with conceptually similar content but using different URLs.

Creating a rogue copy of a popular website which shows contents similar to the original to a web crawler, but redirects web surfers to unrelated or malicious websites. This is called page hijacking.

Always stay away from any of the above Black Hat tactics to improve the rank of your site. Search engines are smart enough to identify all the above properties of your site and ultimately you are not going to get anything.

When you start thinking of doing a business through internet, the first thing that you think about is your website domain name. Before you choose a domain name, you should consider the following:

Who would be your target audience?

What you intend to sell to them. Is it a tangible item or just text content?

What will make your business idea unique or different from everything else that is already avilable in the market?

Many people think it is important to have keywords in a domain. Keywords in the domain name are usually important, but it usually can be done while keeping the domain name short, memorable, and free of hyphens.

Using keywords in your domain name gives you a strong competitive advantage over your competitors. Having your keywords in your domain name can increase click-through-rates on search engine listings and paid ads as well as make it easier to use your keywords in get keyword rich descriptive inbound links.

Avoid buying long and confusing domain names. Many people separate the words in their domain names using either dashes or hyphens. In the past, the domain name itself was a significant ranking factor but now search engines have advanced features and it is not a very significant factor anymore.

Keep two to three words in your domain name that will be easy to memorize. Some of the most notable websites do a great job of branding by creating their own word. Few examples are eBay, Yahoo!, Expedia, Slashdot, Fark, Wikipedia, Google, etc.

You should be able to say it over the telephone once, and the other person should know how to spell it, and they should be able to guess what you sell.

Guru Mantra

Finally, you should be able to answer the following questions:

Why do you want to build your website?

Why should people buy off your site and not from other site?

What makes you different from others?

Who are your target audience and what do you intend to sell?

List 5 to 10 websites that you think are amazing. Now think why they are amazing.

Create 5 different domain names. Make at least 1 of them funny. Tell them to half a dozen people and see which ones are the most memorable. You will get more honest feedback if the people do not know you well.

Buy your domain name that is catchy, memorable, and relevant to your business.

trick seo keywords for free

As a blogger, one of the biggest hurdles you will face in your blogging journey is: “What should I write about?“ Writing articles take time, and there are opportunity costs involved.

If you write an article that no one wants to read about, your investment of time and energy does not give any returns.

Blogging is a business.

Your readers are your customers. Your content is your product that you sell. As with any business, you can sell only what your customers want.

So how do you find out what your customers (readers) want to read about? There are several methods, but today in this article I will reveal a method that I have been exploiting for quite some time.

The method is so powerful that every time I mine a keyword and write an article on that topic, it always ranks well in the search and attracts a good volume of organic traffic. Once you read this entire article, you will understand how it works.

The only requirement here is, your blog needs to be submitted at Google search console ( Previously Google Webmaster tool). I assume you have already done it & if not, here is a guide to do that.

I have explained the articles in 3 section that will make it easier for a complete newbie to get started with it.

Search Analytics: Unexplored Feature of Search console

If you are a blogger or a webmaster, I am sure you have a Google search console account. But have you checked the Search Analytics (beta) feature inside your search console dashboard?

Search analytics dashboard

Search analytics dashboard

Search analytics will show you details about keywords, clicks, impressions and average position of your site for a particular keyword in the Google search results.

It will show you the keywords that triggered an impression of your site’s result, even if no one clicked on it. Click on ‘Search Analytics’ under the ‘Search Traffic’ tab.

Google Search analytics

You will get options for selecting clicks, impressions and CTR. Just select Impressions and CTR. You can leave the others unchecked.

Impression & CTR

Select Impression & CTR

Click on Download at the bottom of the page. Save it to Google Docs.

We are exporting this data to do some analysis that will result in new keyword discovery. It is not possible to do the keyword analysis within the webmaster tools dashboard, and you need to export the data to Google sheets.

Export Keywords

Now, open the sheet & sort the entire data by impressions and remove around 50%-70% of the keywords that have very low impression count.

We do this because we do not want to deal with low sampling size. There will be a lot of keywords with one impression and one click, and it will have 100% CTR. We don’t want to look at those keywords because such keywords are rare, and it will never be searched again. In my case, I removed all the rows which have keywords with less than 50 impressions.

Now sort the sheet again by highest-to-lowest CTR. Now we are getting a list of keywords which has a decent amount of impressions and a good CTR.

Sort keyword based in Impression

If you look at the keywords which have more than 50 impressions and a good CTR, it means that people are searching for that keyword and are also finding your result relevant and clicking on your website’s link.

Discovering New Keywords

Start looking at the top 100-200 keywords. You will find out that many keywords are highly related to the pages that you have already published, BUT you will also discover keywords in this report that is not directly related to the article topics on your website.

You will see keyword variations and some keywords that are not relevant to your pages, but people search for it and end up clicking on your website!

This happens because when someone searches for something Google will never show partial results (like 2-3 links alone). Google search will always try to fill up the entire page with relevant results, even if the relevancy goes down drastically after the 1st or 2nd result.

So if someone searches for a certain keyword and if there is no relevant result for it, Google would have shown your page even if the relevancy is very, very low.

If you have mentioned about a certain keyword inside your article (even if that whole article is not about that keyword), that link may end up getting clicked. This means that if you can write a separate article targeted for that keyword, there is a LOT of chances that it will rank very well, people will be searching for it and they will click on it. You can follow this guide to learn to write a keyword optimized blog post.

An Example – Adding More Perspective

When I was looking over my report, I saw this keyword showing up on my report: “importance of digital India”. I have never written an article about that. But one of my website’s link has got 162 impressions and 11 clicks in the past one month alone. It also has got a pretty good CTR of 6.8%!

That’s surprising because I never wrote an article about ‘Importance of Digital India’ or ‘Impact of Digital India in Digital Marketing.’

digital-india

This report will not show you which link on your website was shown or clicked on. But you can find it out manually in most of the cases.

I searched for this keyword in Google, and I noticed that this article is showing up for that keyword. The article is getting triggered on Google search because the keywords digital and India are included in my article.

Why random traffic?

Now I know that this keyword is searched for well, and also there are not enough relevant pages in Google’s Index. That’s why my page is showing up even if there is a very low relevancy. This means a great opportunity for me.

I can write a detailed article about “importance of digital India” and there is an excellent chance that I will rank very well in the search results for this keyword without much effort.

Conclusion

Keyword discovery is an integral part of digital marketing strategy for businesses. Keywords give us an idea about what our customers want and the words they use to find out solutions to their problems. Keyword discovery does not stop with this method.

You will discover new keywords even when doing activities like talking to your customers. Keywords are important not just in SEO and SEM but also in copywriting.

You have to use the words that your customers use; else you will not be able to make the connection with them. I will be writing more articles on how to reach customers online, so stay tuned!

more:http://www.shoutmeloud.com/google-search-console-search-analytics.html

make sure that your content is not boring?

Let me be honest with you.

If your content is boring, it doesn’t really exist – seriously!

Your readers are bombarded with dozens of emails, hundreds of blog posts, and thousands of Tweets every day. By creating boring content, you’re only helping them ignore you faster.

According to Hubspot, more than 50% of your website visitors spend less than 15 seconds actively reading content.

So you don’t have much time to make an impression on your readers.

Even if your content is insanely useful, you need to deliver it in a simplified manner that helps your readers consume it easily.


Not sure how to do that? Here are a few tips to help you.

1. Start Your Blog with a Clear Purpose

Even before you start writing a blog post, you need to ask yourself if your blog has a clear objective and purpose.

Without a clear objective, your content will always lack authority and engagement. In simple words, your blog needs to focus on a single niche or several closely related niches.

You can’t write about car accessories, weight loss techniques and retirement planning packages on the same blog.

When you’re starting a new blog, identify a niche, go deep, select a sub-niche and create focused content that solves problems.

Do this every time you’re writing a new blog post. Ask yourself if it’s addressing a specific problem and offering any specific solutions.

Creating focused content will help you establish yourself as a niche expert. And readers always take experts seriously.

They’re hard to ignore.

2. Find Proven Content Ideas for Guaranteed Success

You can’t create engaging content without coming up with blog post ideas that your audience really wants to read.

But why struggle to come up with new and interesting blogging ideas when you can simply copy tried and tested topics?

I’m not asking you to steal content from other websites.

But you can study successful content to get a clear idea of what your audience needs.


There are a few ways you can do that.

• BuzzSumo: Search for your main topic keywords on BuzzSumo to find out other blog posts on the same topic that have performed well on social media. You can give a different twist to these already proven ideas and add more value to the topic.                                                                                                                                                                                       
• Quora: You can find thousands of discussion threads on Quora that can help you identify some great blogging ideas.                                                                                                                                                         
• Twitter: Search for your topic and see the content that people are already sharing. Look for conversations on Twitter and see if there are any questions that people are asking.

By creating content on proven topics, and adding more value to them, you can completely eradicate the risk of being ignored by your readers.

3. Understand Your Audience With Web Analytics and Social Insights

There’s no better place to understand the interests and preferences of your audience than social media. Not only should you engage actively with your audience on different social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, but also closely study their interactions with you.

Monitor the kind of content they’re sharing, the status updates they like and the content they engage with.

This will give you a clear understanding of the kind of content you need to create to keep them engaged and interested.

To approach this in a simplified, yet extremely advanced, way, you can use web analytics and social insights tools like Cyfe.

While it’s a lot more than just a social media management tool, Cyfe can give you extremely valuable data on your audience preferences from different marketing channels like SEO, SEM, social media, email marketing and direct web traffic.

It will give you a clear picture of your best performing content, the people engaging with it and will help you optimize it across multiple platforms so that you can take maximum advantage.

4. Structure Your Content for Maximum Engagement

The structure of your content is one of the most crucial aspects of reader engagement. Using a simplified and user friendly content structure can significantly boost the readership and conversion rates of your content.

If you want to create content that your readers just cannot resist, you need to keep the following points in mind.

• Write in a conversational tone: You can’t write in a third person voice and expect people to engage with your content. Blogging is different from conventional article writing. You need to write like you talk. Frequently use words like “You”, “Me” and “I”.                                                                                                                                                                             
• Use short paragraphs: Your paragraphs shouldn’t be longer than 2-3 lines. Make it easy for your readers to skim through your content.                                                                                                                           
• Use short sentences: You don’t need to say everything in one breath. Break down longer sentences into 2-3 shorter statements and make it easier for your readers to consume your content.                                                                                                                                                   
• Use sub-headings frequently: Use relevant and action oriented sub-headings throughout your content. This makes it easier for your readers to skim.                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
• Cut the jargon: Don’t use complex vocabulary and unnecessary jargon in your posts. Write clearly in a conversational tone using everyday words.

I strongly recommend developing your own formatting guidelines when you start a new blog, and following them religiously in every blog post you write.

5. Use Authentic Data References to Back Your Arguments

There are millions of people writing articles and blog posts on different topics. Because of this, author credibility has become a major issue for readers.

You can really stand out from the crowd by adding solid research and data references throughout your blog posts. Instead of making claims and writing opinion based blog posts, back your arguments with researched facts.

Your credibility as an author has a direct impact on your content. The more credible you are, the more seriously people will take your advice.

6. Use Visual Content to Make Your Content Digestible

Text is obviously the most popular form of content. But things are changing pretty quickly. With smartphones and social media, visual content has become much more important.

In fact, according to Hubspot, people remember only 20% of what they read. In comparison, they can recall almost 80% of what they see. 

You can use this to your advantage by including more visual content in your blog posts. This will not only help readers consume your content more effectively, but also make it more colorful.

You can also convert the numbers and dry data in your posts to colorful and interactive infographics. You can either hire a professional designer to create infographics, or use a free infographic tool like Visme. It has ready to use templates and drag & drop options that can be used to create eye catching infographics very quickly.

Wrapping Up

Creating enjoyable and engaging content doesn’t require you to do anything out of the ordinary. To avoid being boring, you just need to structure your content in a reader friendly manner. Write with the benefit of your readers in mind, and try making your content as simple and attractive to read as possible.

How do you make sure that your content is not boring? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

how can by web hosting domain name

Here at Lifegoals4u I thought I had covered everything when it came to creating a successful blog and generating money. One topic important to new bloggers that I may have missed covering is how to buy your web hosting and domain name.

Many new bloggers make the mistake of buying hosting from unreliable companies, and they regret this misstep later. In this step-by-step guide, I will share everything you need to know to buy reliable web hosting and domain names, and I will demonstrate the process by actually buying them for this tutorial.

For the purpose of this tutorial I will be using Bluehost, which is a top recommended hosting service for WordPress blogs. An excellent bonus with Bluehost is the fact that you will get one free domain name that will save you money right from the start, and this will allow you to manage everything from one place.  This is a detailed guide, so I suggest that you grab a cup of coffee and get ready to buy your first web hosting and domain name.

Before we begin, here are a couple of things you need to have in preparation:

Domain name:

A domain name is like your network address.  This is the address of your blog or website.  You will get one free domain name with Bluehost, or you can use any of your existing domain names if you already have purchased some. (Even if you don’t need the free domain name now, you can use it later.) If you have not yet decided on your domain name, this guide will be helpful to you, or you can also use a free service called BustAName to find cool domain names for your blog.

Payment mode:

When purchasing your web hosting and your domain, you can make the payment via credit card, debit card or PayPal.

Step-by-step guide to buying a web hosting service:

To begin, head over to www.Bluehost.com and click on “get started now”.

This will take you to a page where you will see three different packages from which to choose. I will quickly explain the various packages, but you should also read this guide to get a deeper understanding of what these packages offer.

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• Running only one site: buy Starter package
• Running more than one site: buy Plus package
• Need SSL and dedicated I.P: buy Business Pro package

Unless you are someone who needs the Business Pro package, I recommend that you buy the Plus package, as you can host additional blogs on the same hosting service in the future. Remember, the link that I have provided at the end of this post will get you a significant discount, but this discount is only for the first bill. So remember that you will see far greater savings by purchasing hosting for a two or three-year term.


Click on “select” in front of the plan you have chosen. Since I’m buying hosting for this tutorial only, I have selected the starter plan for 12 months.

Choose free domain, or use your existing domain name:

On the next page, you can either choose to get a free domain name from Bluehost, or you can use any of your existing domain names.

Remember that you can use your free domain name later, if you don’t need it now.

If you are using an existing domain name, you need to change the Name-server to:

NS1.Bluehost.com

NS2.Bluehost.com

If you want to keep things simple,  enter the domain name you wish to buy in the “new domain” field, and your free domain will be activated with the web hosting. Click on “next”, and from here the remaining steps will be very simple.

Account Details:

In this section, you need to enter your details (name, email address, address), all of which is straight forward.  Make sure you verify every detail (especially your email address), as your login and hosting information will be sent to your email address.

Package information:

This part is crucial, and you should pay extra attention here to make sure that you are not overcharged for add-ons that you do not need.

Choose the hosting package for the 24 or 36-month term.  You will notice that the price decreases as tenure increases.

Be sure to deselect the options “Site Backup Pro” and “Sitelock Domain security”, as you don’t really need them. I would prefer to give you a free alternative to these in upcoming articles.

Complete hosting purchase:

Before you make your payment, I suggest that you scroll up and verify all of the information. By default you will see the option to make payment via credit card only, but if you want to make payment via PayPal, click on “More payment options” and it will reveal the Pay by PayPal option as well. Use the payment option you are comfortable with, and after making the payment you will see another after sale page like the one below, which you can ignore.  Click on “complete” at the end.

On the next page, you will see the confirmation for your hosting purchase, and you will see a screen like the one below. Click on “create your password”:

Selecting the password:

This is the final stage of your web hosting purchase, as you simple need to set the password for your hosting login. You can choose your password, or you can use a password generator to create a complex password, which I recommend.  Copy and paste the password at any safe place, and click on “paste”. Click on “create”, and that’s it!  The process of buying the web hosting service for your blog is 98% complete.

Logging into web hosting cPanel:

Check your email inbox, and you will find a confirmation email with all the login information for your web hosting. The only thing that will not be included in the email is the password you created in the last step — this is for your security.

Go to Bluehost, and click on “Login” at the top. In the login field type your domain name or username, and in the password field type the password which you have chosen or generated.

On the next page click on “Home”, and you will be at the Bluehost cPanel. That’s it! Congratulations! You have just purchased your first web hosting and domain name.  Here is a video which will give you a demo of Bluehost’s cPanel and dashboard:

www.shoutmeloud.com/buy-web-hosting-domain-name.html