I lot of people starting blogs for the first time are typically disappointed in the amount of traffic their sites receive. It’s not uncommon for a new blogger to find themselves unmotivated to the point of quitting as time moves on and the number of visitors they see never increases. One of the keys to getting traffic is to rank highly in search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, for specific search terms related to your blog’s topic. By using some basic search engine optimisation techniques you can see your site rise in search results and begin to see more visitors coming to read your blog.

So what’s the easiest way to work on the search engine optimisation of your blog? Well, if you’re using WordPress (and that’s most likely true if you’re reading this blog right now) than you have a good start right out of the gate. WordPress is built with an underlying framework that makes it easy for themes to be search engine efficient. The coding and order of the site’s elements are typically fashioned in such a manner to make it easy for search engines to crawl and index your site.

Aside from your blogging software, much of the onus is on you as a writer to help get your blog high in the search results. Write with your keywords in mind and use them throughout your posts. If you’re interested in ranking in Google for the term “paper airplanes” than make sure that phrase appears in your blog frequently. Another tip is to try and get links back to your blog from other sites related to paper airplanes. A combination of high quality back links and well written content will help raise your blog in the search engines.

I wanted to take a moment to spotlight one of the free themes available from the guys over at WooThemes. While the offer plenty of worthwhile “premium” themes I think their best WordPress theme they have is a free one called Typebased.

This theme comes in a variety of pre-selected color patterns that make it good to go right after installation. In addition, it’s one of the most flexible and easy to modify free WordPress themes I’ve ever come across. I’m using it for a World of Warcraft site I run called Alterac Volley and, as you can tell if you visit the site, I’ve heavily modified the original Typebased theme and I did it with ease and very little trouble.

If you’re looking for a clean and simple WordPress theme that gives you a lot of flexibility than I recommend you give Typebased a try.

WordPress.com offers a lot of features to their users at a small price each year. You can get extra storage, CSS options and ad removal each with their own fee. The question I have to ask is are these features, all added together, worth the price? Or would someone looking to expand their blog with more customization be better off finding their own web hosting package and using the open source WordPress.org software to run their blog?

Here’s a breakdown of the WordPress.com premium features:

Your Own Domain - You can have your WordPress.com blog run by their service but using your own domain for $10/year. That’s the same fee for that same price by yourself or you can use WordPress.com’s domain register for an extra $15/year.

Extra Storage - All WordPress.com accounts come with 3GB of storage but you can expand that storage in blocks of 5GB. So for an extra 5G you’d pay $20/year, 15GB for $50/year and 25GB for $90/year. Any web host worth their weight can offer you similar space options for equal or lower prices.

Custom CSS - You can gain the ability to customize your own CSS on your blog for $15/year. With WordPress.org this is obviously free.

Go Ad-Free - For $30/year, WordPress.com will stop running their ads on your blog. Let’s think about this for a second. A small blog probably doesn’t even generate $30/year in revenue for WordPress.com when the ads run normally. This is a huge win for WordPress.com in most cases.

Final Verdict

If you host a blog on WordPress.com and are considering upgrading to any of these premium features I strongly, strongly suggest you think twice. For much less money you can find quality web hosting that will give you even more benefits than what WordPress.com can offer you.

The newest release of WordPress, version 2.7.1, is available for download at WordPress.org. For those of you using version 2.7 currently the update to 2.7.1 is a breeze. Simply click on the link at the top of the admin and WordPress will upgrade itself automatically.

This is without a doubt the greatest new feature in the 2.7 version of the WordPress software. Previous versions has the ability to automatically upgrade plugins from within the admin but the ability to upgrade the core software was missing. This meant each time there was a new release people with multiple WordPress blogs had to FTP up the new files to each of their sites.

Automatic updating of the WordPress core has saved bloggers a ton of time in keeping their software current. This ease of upgrading also does great things for WordPress security because any means to make patching holes in the code easier helps prevent the spread of security leaks and problems.

Now that I’ve had a chance to use the 2.7 release of WordPress for a few weeks on all of my blogs I think I’m ready to render a verdict, so to speak, on the latest version.

Overall I really, really like 2.7. I was a huge fan of the previous update to the admin but the newer version in 2.7 even blows that one away. Things were stepping in the right direction before but now the admin for WordPress makes it all feel like real, professional software and not some user interface monstrosity that is so common in the Open Source scene.

The other big improvement, and one I haven’t even had a chance to try yet, is the ability to update the WordPress install without using FTP. This has been available for updating plugins for quite some time but updating the core software was never an option. This will be a huge feature for people like myself who have multiple blogs and found it to be a pain to update their WordPress install after each major release.