Setting up a blog on your website is a good way to keep in contact with customers, keep your website fresh and add plenty of content to it. But, if you already have a website, how are you going to add a blog as well?
By Keith Lunt, © HowToStartMyBlog.com

Where to put your blog?
I am often asked, what is best? Should you create a new domain name, use a sub-domain or use a directory within your blog. Some people go for the first option, even going as far as creating the blog on a different website host to try to fool the search engines into thinking they are not owned by the same person. But if you are trying to link a lot from your blog to your main website and hoping that will produce quality links, such a quantity of inbound links will not fool the search engines.

However, placing the blog in a sub-domain or a folder means that visitors crossing from website to blog see the domain name staying the same and know they are on the same website; it increases your traffic to your main URL; links to a folder are also to the main website and content in a blog in a folder will also help to keep your content fresh.

For these reasons I, as well as others, recommend that you put your blog into a folder within your main website, else create a sub domain to host it.

The blogging software
There is, in my opinion, only one piece of blogging software to use and that is WordPress. To install it is very easy.

First, if you have not already done so you need to activate an MySQL database on your website (which must also be PHP enabled). Also, get hold of your database access details – the database user name and password.

Next, go to WordPress.org and download the latest software, saving it to your computer. Unzip it by navigating to the folder you saved it to in Windows Explorer, then right clicking on the folder and choosing Extract All.

Finally, use the example config file to create your own, entering your user name and password (there are instructions within the file itself), then use some suitable FTP software to upload the contents of the directory to your website.

Now, when you go to the blog’s URL you can enter an administrator’s user name (do NOT use ‘admin’), a password and a contact email address.

Getting going
Now that your blog is set up, you just need to customise it by adding some plugins, selecting a theme and then linking to the blog from within your main website. All of these are quite simple steps, but full articles in their own right to cover in sufficient detail!

If you want to keep up with our latest posts, just follow us on our RSS feed, join our weekly newsletter or follow us over at Twitter. Please do join in - it is totally free and only the best posts are passed to you!

Also, leave a comment below. We are a 'DoFollow' blog, so it is well worth your time. Thanks for calling in.