If you missed "Wordpress On Steroids, Part 1", and "Wordpress On Steroids, Part 2", be sure and check those out to get valuable Wordpress information leading up to this final article.

Next Step.....

Once you've got Wordpress installed, you're ready to start setting up your site.

Once you've picked a theme and downloaded it, simply unzip it and upload the theme folder to your server at /public_html/wp-content/themes. Then login to your Dashboard, go to design>themes, and click on the theme to make it your active theme. You can click on any one of the themes that are showing to make them the active theme.

Plugins that you want on your site need to be downloaded, unzipped, and uploaded to /public_html/wp-content/plugins. Then go into your dashboard, go to plugins, and click on the activate link to activate any plugins you want to be active on your site. Remember, you can find free plugins at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

Go into settings and fill in the information on your site details. These items are pretty self-explanatory.

Go to Write>Page to start adding pages to your site. While editing a page you can choose the page parent to determine how it will show in your menu. Remember, the page title will become a menu link. You could write a page titled "My Family" and set it as "Main Page, No Parent" and then you could write a page titled "MY KIds" and a page titled "MY Wife" and set them to have the "MY Family" page as parent. That would give you a dropdown menu, assuming your template supports dropdown menus, with "MY Family" as the main menu item and "MY Kids" and "MY Wife" as dropdowns under it.

You also have the ability while writing the page to select if you want to allow comments or not, if you want it to be password protected, and a few other things.

Go to Write>Post to start writing posts to populate your site with content. As with pages, you can choose some options to determine how the post will display.

With posts, you need to first setup some categories under the settings>manage>categories tab so you can organize your posts into the order you want them in. For instance, you could have a category named "General Interest" and one named "Latest News" and one named "Cooking Tips", and then organize your posts under the appropriate one.

Under Design>Widgets and Design>Theme Editor, you can customize widgets and theme files if you know a little html, php, and want to give it a shot. The widgets tab usually gives you a list of widgets and a list of sidebars and other areas where the widgets can be placed, and you simply drag and drop the widgets you want into the areas you want them in. You can then edit each widget to make it display as you desire.

Search Engine Optimization.....

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to optimizing your website's position in search results. Many books have been written about SEO and websites are dedicated to it.

Showing up higher in search results usually means more traffic and more business. That is another reason why using WordPress is such a good idea, because WordPress is especially well suited for boosting your site's rank in search engines.

How to make your Wordpress site SEO friendly.....

You need to research the right keywords for your site and then put those keywords in the right places. Those right places include the title bar (the text that shows up at the top of your browser), any headers, headlines or bold text on a page, and the meta data (helpful information in a page's code that is not visible in a browser).

How WordPress Helps Your SEO Efforts.....

Right out of the box, WordPress is SEO-friendly. It puts important information in the right places by default, so as long as you fill in the appropriate information in your dashboard settings, you'll have a good start in the search engine rankings.

However,there are also a number of extra steps you can take to optimize your search engine rank, many of which are either built in to WordPress or easily managed with plugins that are available to download.

Permalinks are the direct urls to your content and optimizing how those links appear is good SEO. There is a place in your dashboard to change the way your permalinks are setup.

There is a plugin you can download and install that creates a sitemap, which is a widely adopted standard among search engines, and helps improve your search rank.

There are SEO plugins available that specifically deal with improving your sites SEO. They are worth the effort if you want to improve traffic to your site.

And Finally.....

Once you have your site up and running and optimized the way you want, you just have to keep it updated with new content. Updates are a breeze with WordPress, which means you can spend more time on your content and less time trying to figure out the tech stuff.

So, what are you waiting for? Wordpress can be the right answer for just about any need. It can be the answer to quickly and easily building a professional looking web site for:

• The smallest "mom and pop" business right on up to a giant corporation.

• Service-oriented companies like home builders, plumbers, HVAC contractors, real estate agents, car dealers, etc.

• Consultants, freelancers, and coaches.

• Schools, nonprofit agencies, and churches.

• Bands, artists and creative professionals.

So, that's it, you are now the proud owner of a great looking web site, a "Wordpress On Steroids" web site.

Hope you enjoyed this series on installing and configuring Wordpress.