Blogs are one of the quickest and easiest ways to set up your website.

Most hosting companies give you the option of a “one click” installation of WordPress and if you have this available, it’s worth using as it will take care of setting up the database that WordPress will use.

The only downside to using this method is that WordPress regularly introduces updates, which means you may have a version that isn’t quite the latest one. It’s up to you whether you’re worried about this, although I would advise that you do keep your version of WordPress as up to date as possible as the updates often cover security bugs.

The next thing to do once you’ve got the newest version of WordPress installed on your website is to make some small changes that will have a big influence on making it as attractive as possible to the search engines.

This involves modifying some of the default WordPress settings and also uploading what are known as “plugins” to improve the functionality of WordPress.

I recommend that you install the following plugins:

• Akismet, a useful plugin that helps cut down comment spam on your blog
• All in one SEO pack, which does exactly what it promises and helps you optimize your blog so that the search engines will love it
• Sociable, so that your blog readers can easily add your blog to a selection of social bookmarking sites
• WordPress stats, which offer a quick overview of your most popular pages and the links your readers have clicked on, all easily accessible from your main WordPress dashboard

The other thing to change is the “permalink” structure. You can select this from the Settings menu in WordPress. Once you’ve chosen Permalinks, go down to the box called custom structure and type in:

/%postname%/

then save your changes.

This will change the way your blog posts are stored and will make them friendlier for the search engines to index.

Check out my series of free videos that show you how to earn money with blogs. It’s easy to follow this information on earning money from your blog.