10 Essential WordPress Settings After Installation

• By Mohsin Ali Waheed
• 1 November, 2011
• 4 Comments

In order to generate income on internet its very necessary to have a blog or website. Your own blog can made a difference in your life and you can easily achieve results on internet. Without blog its very difficult to earn money on internet. So if you are newbie and want to host your own blog, you can always buy your own Alertpay WebHosting in Pakistan. After that you have to install WordPress on your webhost in order to blog. Now many new people have become over excited by all this and forget to do some basic WordPress tweaks and settings which are necessary for you to succeed.

1. Delete Default Post and Pages.

After installing WordPress delete default posts and pages immediately. Many people ignore this when they first install WordPress and take it easy. Now let me tell you what is wrong with this. It obvious that you are going to write your own articles with different titles. So sooner or later you have to either delete the posts or update the posts with your own stuff. But after some time what happens is that Search Engine Bots might crawl your blog in the mean time.

Its Search Engine Bots duty to index all your blog posts, tags, pages, archives etc. So when Bot visit your blog it will automatically index your blog posts and pages into search engine search directory. Problem comes when after some time you decided to delete or update these posts. When you delete these posts Search engines will mark these pages as Not Found with 404 error message. This is not good for your SEO and your blog too. This will gave negative impression of your blog in the eyes of search engines. So its better to delete default posts immediately.

2. www is important or not.

Second thing you have to decide is that whether you are going with WWW or not. First let me tell you that by default you can access any website with two URLs. For example www.example.com and example.com are two ways to access the main page of same blog or website. But you have to block this feature because it is not search engine friendly and creates duplicate content. So you have to decide that what URL you want to show when a visitor visits your blog or website.

If you have a small domain name with only one or two keywords in it then my suggestion is that you choose option without www(it makes you domain name much more shorter). But if you have a domain name with 3 or more keywords than my suggestion is that you go for www because your website domain name is already lengthy and www will not effect it but it looks beautiful and conventional(choice is yours).

Simply click on Settings Tab on the Right side of WordPress admin panel and click on General. Now put your blog domain name with www or without www in WordPress address (URL) and Site address (URL) fields and click Save Changes. Congratulations you have successfully prevented your blog from being penalized by search engines.

3. Delete Admin Account Immediately.

Don’t be surprise with that. Everyone knows that WordPress creates default user Admin when it is install on any webhost. Just like Windows which has also default Administrator account. The problem with this is that it risks your security and anyone can try and login with Admin as username. So create a new user by clicking on Users tab -> Add New with your name or any thing you like and give it full Administrator permissions via Role drop down menu. After creating new account log-out from Admin account and sign-in into your newly created account. Now simply go-to All users Tab and delete Admin account.

4. Set Custom WordPress Permalink.

This is perhaps the most important settings you are going to change and it will definitely boost your rankings in search engines. After starting your blog this is your first Search Engine Optimization step. Permalinks are URLs automatically created by WordPress in order to save your time but setting wrong permalinks for your blog will make life harder for search engines and eventually your life too. Default permalink for WordPress look like this.

http://www.yourblogname.com/?p=123

Now imagine your are a search engine bot and you have to index this URL. At the end of this URL we see P=123 which is post number which is easy to organize for WordPress but we for us it means nothing. You cannot tell much about the post content that this URL is pointing. So to make it user friendly and search engine friendly we add some keywords in it. For this we change default permalink to custom permalink mention below.

/%postname%.html

Just click on Permalinks link from Settings Tab and enter the above phrase into the Custom Structure box and click Save settings.

5. Set Time zone.

Not many people gave importance to this feature but i can assure you that setting WordPress time zone to your local time zone will really help you in future. For example if you schedule your posts this feature will make sure that posts are published just at right time selected by you. So that your blog stay updated and your readers will never miss the post publish by you. Simply click on General tab on the right side of your WordPress Admin panel and click on Settings link. After that simply select capital city of your country and click Save button.

6. Disable users registration.

Unless it is required by you that users register at your blog for comment posting or you give users the option to make Guest accounts, disable this feature as soon as possible. Go to General tab and Settings and un-check box that says Anyone can register and save the settings. Also put Site Title and Tagline for your blog at the top of this page.

7. WordPress Threaded comment.

At first this option means nothing to you but after some time when visitors leave comments or just wanted to discuss some thing this feature will help them to discuss things in a nested environment. Again go to General link, this time click Discussion link and check the option that says Enable threaded (nested) comments and choose 5 digit from the drop down menu.

8. WordPress Comment Gravatar.

Its very good practice that you enable Gravatar images in your blog because it encourages users to put there E-mail into the E-mail box so that when they leave a comment there picture may appear in comment picture box. But for those who have not signed up for Gravatar you can set a fix picture format from Discussion link of Setting tab. Choose option of Show Avatars and check any custom image from the pictures given at the end of the post.

9. Update WordPress ping list.

Not many newbie people know about ping and what does it do. Ping is a service in which you add ping websites so that when ever you update your blog ping service will notify these ping blogs so that ping websites update there directory. Go to Writing section of Settings tab and enter ping websites given in the text file given below.

Download: Ping Websites list

10. WordPress Blog Visibility.

I have heard many people saying that they are putting lots of effort in there blog by writing fresh, unique and quality articles, promoting there blog on forums, Writing articles for other websites, Exchanging links with link Directories or posting articles on article directories but there blog is not performing at all. There is an option in WordPress if it is checked there is no way that search engine will index your blog so please make sure that you have selected the option I would like my blog to be visible by going to Privacy link in Settings tab.

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