This tutorial is part of Atomic Blogging ( a step-by-step guide to blogging).

What you see above are the number of spam messages that the author of  Atomic Blogging, Alvin Phang, has received so far on his blog at GatherSuccess.com! It’s a HUGE problem and it can be extremely distracting for any blogger. To avoid and prevent all of this spam you must use Akismet – A FREE plugin designed to avoid spam for your blog.

Before I start, Akismet is a free open source spam program available online to help fight spam for wordpress owners.

Just follow the following steps to get started to prevent spam on your blog.

To install & setup Akismet for your blog first you need to go to your plugin panel in your admin control panel in wordpress found at http://www.(yourdomain).com/wp-admin/

Follow the steps above to activate Akismet.

After you have activated all the plugins you should see the above message. Just click on the link and enter your Wordpress.com API Key.

To get your API Key, all you need to do is go to www.wordpress.com and sign up for a free account. The API Key will be emailed to you when you sign up for your free account.

After you have signed up for your free wordpress.com account you will find the API key under ‘My Profile’. An example of what an API Key looks like is: fbd655933fa6. Please use your own API Key and don’t ever share your API. It’s like a password for you =)

So, once you have received the API Key from Wordpress.com, just enter the Key in the box and click on ‘Update Options’ in your own blog!

You will know you have successfully installed Akismet when the green word appears as above. And you are done! NO MORE SPAM for your blog!

To get more step by step tutorials, I highly recommend you take a look at Atomic Blogging to grab more tutorials =)

If you have benefited from this tutorial, please feel free to share it and post it on your own blog or leave a comment below.