Designing websites with SEO in mind doesn’t have to be rocket science. Everything that you need to accomplish this can be learned online and with the assistance of a few books. I am going to write a series of articles showing you how to set up your WordPress blog site, and optimize it for SEO. This article is on FTP set-up, and installing an SEO optimized theme.

Assuming you already have your domain and hosting set up, we are going to jump straight into File Transfer Protocol. If you have not set up your hosting you will need to do that first and make sure that you get a web hosting company with Fantastico. It is a program offered with a select few web hosting companies that allows you to set up WordPress with just a few clicks.

Once you have WordPress set up you are going to need your FTP software. I use Filezilla, and it can be found with a quick search on Google. Just download it and go through the set-up steps as with any other program. Once installed, your initial set-up for transfers will be required. After the first time it will remember you passwords and you can connect to your website easily.

Go to your control panel in your web hosting account and look for create FTP account. If this is your first time doing this leave directory blank, and just put in your domain,user name and password. I set my quota to unlimited. Click enter and you have set up your FTP account. Once you click enter, it will give you the information you need to access your account. Copy and paste this into a document and save it on your desktop.

Open Filezilla, and on the top left, below File if you hove over the button it will say open site manager. Click on that. It will bring up the site manager window, with your options for setting up your new FTP account information. Open your document from earlier, and fill in the information.

Host is the FTP server. Set logon type to normal, and type in your user name and password. Name the account something that you can remember for your site. If my site was mysite.com I would name it mysite. Once you have filled in all the information with what you saved on your document, click connect.

Once you have clicked connect you will see four large quadrants on the interface. Computer Folders, computer files, server folders and server files. These are important because you can work everything from this location. You also have the option of drag and drop from your desktop.

The themes I recommend are listed with the resources on my website under free marketing training and website development for SEO.

To install your theme, refer to the large quadrant on the upper right called remote site. This is your server folders. Click to open the folder and then scroll down to public html. Click on WP content and then click on themes. The quadrant under the server folders is your server files. It will already have the default WordPress themes installed, classic and default. What you want to do is find your theme that you have downloaded through the process on the left, or open it on your desktop, and the drag and drop it into the server files quadrant. Once it is done setting up you are ready to go into WordPress and activate your theme.

This is your first step towards website development for SEO. You are now ready to customize your SEO options.

Most of you know as part of your web marketing strategies you should be taking advantage of properly using your keyword phrase in your headline. What a lot of people don’t know is that their subheadings should not only contain their keyword phrase but should also be defined by the ‘h2’ tag.

Understanding ‘Header’ tags for better web page optimization. The search engines pay special attention to any ‘header’ which is defined in the source code of a webpage by tags such as these: h1, h2, h3, etc.

The headline of your content would be defined by the ‘h1’ tag, after that you want to use the ‘h2’ tag for any subheadings rather than just making the font type bold. Adding this technique to your web marketing strategies will give you a little extra edge when it comes to ranking higher in the search engines.

If you have a WordPress blog as part of you web marketing strategies here is a quick explanation. Inside the administrative panel of a WordPress blog in the ‘Add New Post’ section the HTML editor will usually only show a single line of icons starting with ‘B’ which will make the highlighted text bold. In order to get the icon for the function that allows you to work with the header tags you’ll have to click on the last icon on the right to get a second row of icons to appear.

When you mouse over this icon you should see the words ‘Kitchen Sink’ pop up in a small grey box, click on that and presto! You can now see and use the other functions of the HTML editor. The icon you are looking for will show as a box with the word ‘Paragraph’ in the bottom row to the left. Clicking on this will give you a drop down menu which will normally show you; ‘Heading 1’ and ‘Heading 2’ etc.

A note of warning when using the ‘h2’ tag in your subheadings as part of your web marketing strategies! You might find it makes your subheadings too big or too small. To address this problem is beyond the scope of this article as it involves understanding source code.

Make good use of the header tags as part of your web marketing strategies. You’ll find it only takes 20 to 30 seconds to do this to further optimize your webpage. That is a very short amount of time when you consider your webpage could be up on the Internet for years.

Since the inception of the Internet, consumer and business owners alike have used the World Wide Web to connect with each other. Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo comprise most of the market share when it comes to finding what a user may want or need on the World Wide Web. It’s no surprise that many marketing online companies have gone to great lengths to develop methods that increase the likelihood of a potential customer in this highly competitive environment.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a commonly used term among Internet marketers. Enabling a search engine to easily find and properly place an e-commerce site above the completion is the sole purpose of SEO. There are many schools of thought when it comes to effective means of creating an optimized website.

Many Internet marketers agree that having good keywords throughout a website is the best way to achieve the desired result of SEO. Many people have tried and often failed at such practices as keyword stuffing or other “black hat” methods that are less than honest. Keyword research while writing evenly flowed content is the absolute best way to allow search engine bots to easily scan web pages and provide the potential customer with the best experience.

Many people are scrapping multimedia plug-ins such as flash or other similar navigation menus as it is impossible for search engines to crawl them. Although some attributes of these media rich additions can make a website standout, these methods are not search engine friendly. Using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can achieve many goals when it comes to providing an even balance of richness and SEO. Not only can a webmaster create unique looking websites with this technology, it also provides a lighter footprint when it comes to server storage and page load times.

Submitting a site-map to major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing will help speed up the time it takes for a website to be indexed. Using meta tag descriptions of pictures and postings can also give the website owner an advantage in some instances too.

See what a website marketing company has to offer before making an educated decision about their services. Competition is at an all time high as many brick and mortar business realize the marketing potential online. With a solid plan and a basic understanding of SEO, making it on the well sought-after first page rank on a major search engine can be achieved