Selecting The Right Blog Platform

Got your niche? Great! The next thing then is to think about actually setting up your new site and getting started with your content. To do this, you will need to choose a ‘blogging platform’ which effectively dictates how your site’s code will be structured and what you’ll see when you’re logging in and adding content.

Now of course, you don’t actually need a ‘blogging platform’ as such. You can go about building your own website from scratch which will involve creating pages in HTML and CSS, possibly using a builder like ‘Dreamweaver’ but if you do this it will take a lot longer and be much harder to create something that looks and performs like a professional website.

Instead then, you want to use a blogging platform/CMS. CMS stands for ‘Content Management System’ and is essentially a tool that simplifies the process of designing and building your website, as well as adding and editing content as needed.

Use a CMS and you won’t need to know a line of code in order to build the site, to add new posts and to edit your existing content. This of course saves a lot of time, it streamlines the process and it ensures that your site is at least functional.

Choosing Your CMS

Choosing a Name and URL

As you’re going with a self-hosted option for your blog, you’ll now need to choose a URL. This is the address that people will type in their search bar in order to find your website and as such it will probably also act as the title of your website and the brand you’re going with.

Choosing your name is another very important step here and there are two big factors to consider when making this decision:

• SEO

• Branding

SEO is search engine optimization – in other words, tweaking your website to ensure that it will likely to rank highly on Google and to show up in searches. Your URL affects your SEO because some URLs are much more ‘searchable’ than others and this will give you an edge over the competition.

In other words, if you wanted to rank highly for our earlier example – bodybuilding news articles – then having an address like bodybuildingnewsarticles.com or bodybuilding-news-articles.com would be a great advantage. This won’t guarantee you’ll rank highly mind and those who have done more work at their SEO could still beat you in other ways – it’s just a good head-start and advantage.

In terms of branding, you want to choose a URL that is the same as, or similar to, the name of your website. So a business called ‘Spination’ would do very well to get ‘Spination.com’. Again, this isn’t a requirement but it will make several things easier – not to mention promoting your site and making it more memorable.

If you don’t have a site name yet, then this is a good time to think about it. Aim for something that’s unique and interesting, catchy and at the same time descriptive. In a perfect scenario your URL will tell people what your site is about without just being a boring description. So in reality, ‘bodybuildingnewsarticles.com’ is a dull URL that’s not great for branding. Much better would be something like BroNews, BBNews or MuscleTalk. This is easier for creating logos, for making an impression and more but it still will give you some SEO benefit and won’t be too obtuse.

As for your ‘TLD’ or ‘Top Level Domain’ (the ‘com’ or ‘co.uk’ part), it’s still always preferable to aim for the ‘.com’ if you can. An exception to this is if you’re running a local blog in which case a regional TLD is better. In most cases though, ‘.com’ is the easiest to remember and thus the simplest to promote.