Hosting Your Own Blog

Hosting your own blog gives search engines a reason to keep revisiting your website. It is important as I mentioned before that you update your blog several times per week. Below you'll find some recommended free software for hosting your own blog.


WordPress

All my blogging sites use WordPress as I believe it is the best blogging script available. It's very easy to install and you can go live within just a few minutes.
Download: http://wordpress.org/download/
By default WordPress gives you the ability to choose if you want Search Engine Friendly URLS for your blog, but I've taken that a step further. You will only be able to follow the instructions I'm giving below if you already have WordPress installed.
If you have WordPress installed add this line of code to your "Permalinks" section:
/%postname%.htm
Input the above code into the line that says "Custom Structure" and ensure that you have the check placed in the "Custom, specify below" under Common Options.
What this does is give your blog highly optimizable search engine friendly URLS. Every blog post you make will have a keyword rich URL based on the subject of your blog. For example if your blog post was "Caribbean Recipes" your URL would be http://yoursite.com/caribbean-recipes.html.
It's a nice handy trick to get more search engine friendly URLS out of WordPress to ensure that your keywords appear not only in the subject but also in the page URL.
Blogging Themes
Now that you've got your blog setup, I know that by default WordPress skin may not be too pleasing to you. Let's change that by installing a new theme. The sites below offer some free themes that you can use and customize.
WordPress Themes Viewer
http://themes.wordpress.net/
Alex Kings' Theme Viewer
http://www.alexking.org/index.php-content=software/wordpress/themes.php
Kaushal Sheth's Themes
http://www.kaushalsheth.com/themes/
Theme Porter
http://www.themeporter.com/tags/themes/
Browse through those four websites and select a theme that you like best. You simply download the theme and upload it to your wp-content themes directory, then activate the theme in the admin area of Wordpress under presentations.