Everyday I am learning new stuff about wordpress, such as new plugins new functions and my adoration to it grows by so. This one took a lot of my time to finally find a decent solution.

I was looking for a way to remove the “category” base from the permalinks on one of my other wordpress blogs. The link structure that wordpress inserts automatically is as follows:

http://www.yoursite.com/categories/category1

Although you can change the word “categories” to anything you like from the dashboard>permalinks by changing the category base in the optional section, I needed to completely remove it and have permalinks such as the following:

http://www.yoursite.com/category1

I searched how to do this a lot on the forums including the wordpress support forum, and tried all the things they suggested. Nothing worked. Finally, I found a plugin called WP No Category Base that did the job exactly as I needed. The good thing is that it is free and installable from inside the dashboard. Just do a search with the name of the plugin and you will find it. You simply install it and it is done, no modification needed.

You can also go to the official page of the plugin here to download it manually and read more about how it works.

As you can see, it works flawless on this blog too, however I can’t guarantee that it will work with any theme or any other plugins. You have to see it yourself.

Related posts:

1. WordPress Blog Setup Checklist

In this post, I want to talk about the steps that I follow while creating a new website, specifically a wordpress blog for a niche or non-niche topic. I will not go into details here, since each step is a massive topic and can not be covered throughly in a single post. I’ll be talking on the steps seperately in the following days.

O.K., let me start with step number one.

STEP 1: Find A Niche

When I search for a niche idea, I try to find either a problem that people want to solve, or a product that people buys already. There are many web pages and tools I go through in my niche selection step. ClickBank Marketplace, Amazon Bestsellers, PayPal Shops and many other resources to brainstorm some profitable niche ideas. You can find literally thousands of niches in different areas and new ones are popping up every day. So, there will always be some niches that you could monetize.

STEP 2: Keyword Research

After I found a niche that I believe to be profitable, I do some keyword research. Although this step is as important as all the internet marketing gurus mention, I don’t spend days or weeks on keyword research. Since I can’t be sure if I will rank high and get some traffic without trying and just looking at the numbers. Here, I mainly use Google Keyword Tool and SEOQuake add on for FireFox to find profitable keywords and analyze them.

STEP 3: Decide on the Concept of the Site

Once the keyword research is done, I think about how to monetize it. Will I go for Google Adsense, affiliate sales or some CPA offers? Will it be an affiliate review site, an info-blog or some other type? I look for related affiliate products, CPCs for related keywords and related CPA offers.

STEP 4: Find a Suitable Domain Name and Register It

When the keyword research is complete, I look up for a suitable domain name. The more a domain name is keyword based, the better it is. However, I may go for a generic domain name – not one or two word generic names, like freesoftware or makemoney of course – if I can’t find the domain with exact keywords and if the one I selected makes me happy with it.

STEP 5: Set up WordPress

The next step is setting up WordPress to your blog. This is as straight as it is. You can download WordPress here, if your hosting provider doesn’t support WordPress.

STEP 6: Choose a Nice/Niche Theme

After the blog is setup, I browse through free wordpress theme resources to find a sutiable one for my niche. Since there are thousands of free nice-looking themes and everyday more are coming, I’ve never paid for a WP theme, though there are some wonderful themes that I would like to purchase in the future. You may check FreeWPThemes.net.

STEP 7: Configuration of Settings and Plugins

Once I am happy with the theme of my new site, I go through adjusting the settings and installing the necessary plugins I will make use of. Some of the plugins I use:

• All In One SEO Pack
• Contact Form 7
• Advanced Permalinks
• No Ping Wait

There are lots of useful plugins you can find inside the WordPress plugins archive.

I make sure to make the blog available to the public by changing the privacy settings and adding some pinging services.

STEP 8: Tracking Traffic with Google Analytics

I love to track things and I’m sure all the internet marketers are same since they are doing this business. I use Google Analytics for the time and it is really sufficient for my purposes. I add the code to the footer.php file just before the closing “body” tag.

Now it comes to populating the blog and posting something on it. When my blog has about 10 articles and the theme is settled more or less I go with the last two steps.

STEP 9: Submit to Directories

There are many many directories that you could submit your website, I have a list of them and submit to 3-5 directories each day. This will help my website indexed faster and will bring some link popularity.

STEP 10: Get Traffic

I’ve tried nearly all the traffic getting techniques like forum posting, blog commenting, video marketing, social networks though what I really like to see is the visitors coming from the search engines. The organic SEO is my favorite, since you work on it only once and if you do it right, you can expect visitors for your life as long as there is people searching for the terms you built your SEO efforts on.

I know more steps can be added to the list, and more details could be given. Though I just wanted to share my strategy with you. See you on another post.

Related posts:

1. Remove “Category” Base from Permalinks in Your Wordpress Blog
2. Effective Use of Google Reader in Blog Commenting
3. How to Write an Article About a Topic That You Know Absolutely Nothing About