Great. You’ve installed WordPress and you’re ready to get blogging. Or are you?
Before you start posting away, there are a few crucial adjustments you should make to your WordPress settings before you get cracking. The first two are of particular importance with regards to making your blog search engine friendly.
This article will guide you through these 3 important steps. Do them as soon as you have installed WordPress and logged into you WordPress dashboard for the first time.
Step 1: Set your permalink structure
The default permalink structure in WordPress is not very SEO friendly. So, before you go any further, look for the Settings menu in your WP dashboard, expand it and click on the Permalinks option.
The WP default will look like this: yourdomain.com/?p=123
This is no good. Click on custom structure and type in /%category%/%postname%. If you prefer not to use categories, you can just set it to /%postname% or /%postname%.html if you want to use a traditional HTML page structure.
Save changes, and move on to step 2.
Step 2: Make sure the search engines can see you
Just above Permalinks in the settings menu is a Privacy option. Click it now. Set your blog visibility setting so that your blog is visible to search engines.
If you don’t, your content won’t be indexed by the search engines.
Step 3: Setting up your widgets
Expand the Appearance menu and click on Widgets. This is the sidebar stuff you see on your blog, like the Blogroll and Categories and so on. Many WordPress themes will leave you stuck with an ugly blogroll featuring a bunch of links you don’t want.
On the Widgets page, you can now easily set up your own custom sidebar. Simply drag the widgets you want to use from the selection on the left to the sidebar on the right. You can start with at least Categories and Recent Posts. You can always add more widgets as your blog expands and becomes more popular, for example Archives, Search and your own custom Links section.
All right! Good going. You’ve just made sure of the following:
1. Your blog posts will have a keyword rich naming structure thanks to your permalink setup
2. Search engines can access your blog and index your content
3. You have no irrelevant default widgets stinking up the place
NOW you can move on to changing your themes and installing your plugins. Happy blogging!
