How To Configure a WordPress Blog

How to Configure a WordPress Blog

It’s time to begin configuring your WordPress blog once you have completed the following activities:

Registered your domain name

Got your website hosting

Ordered your professional theme

Configured your hosting and installed your WordPress blog

It’s time to begin configuring your blog. Watch these videos to learn how to configure your WordPress blog

WordPress Configuration Clean-Up Tasks

1. Remove Default Blogroll Links

Before you begin blogging there are some clean up tasks you need to perform. Because I want the attention of my website visitors focussed on the products and services I have to sell I want to remove the default Blogroll links that link out to various areas of the WordPress.org site.

2. Remove the Hello World Post

The “Hello World” blog post gets published with every WordPress installation and since it’s a useless post, I like to delete it.

To delete the Hello World post login to your WordPress admin panel by navigating to the Posts section then simply place your mouse under the “Hello World” post and you will see a “Delete” link, click the delete link and say good-bye to the hello world post.

WordPress Configuration Tasks

3. Upload Professional Theme

If you need help uploading your WordPress theme visit this tutorial

4. Activate WordPress Plugins

In most installations of WordPress the Akismet plugin is installed by default so all you have to do is navigate in your WordPress admin panel to the Plugins area and activate Akismet.

If your WordPress installation doesn’t already have this plugin then you can download it here

Before your Akismet plugin will work you will need to get a WordPress API. Get your WordPress API key here.

Next you will need to active your All-in-one-SEO plugin so you can write your meta title and meta description.

5. Add your RPC Ping Notification List

When you configure your blog you want to add a list of update services, it is these services that get your blog posts indexed quickly by Google because of the immense popularity of these sites, Google is sitting on top of these sites devouring the content that appears there.

By adding a list of update services, each and every time you post to your blog, all these services are notified and Google will find your article from these sites.

Here’s where you add these update services to your WordPress blog.

Inside your WordPress admin panel:
Go to Settings -> Writing

Here are some of the best update services to use, copy and paste these into the “Update Services” box in your WordPress Settings.

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://1470.net/api/ping

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://blogmatcher.com/u.php

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://ping.weblogs.se/

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.newsgator.com/

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

6. Configure Blog Permalinks

Permalinks are the URL’s of your blog posts and pages, to make sure you understand what a permalink is let’s use the example from The VEO Report blog where I wrote a blog post titled “Corporate Identity Brand Building”

On the VEO Report blog my Permalink settings are:

/%category%/%postname%/

In this case, I selected the “Business” category on my blog so the Permalink for this post is:

http://veoreport.com/business/corporate-identity-brand-building/

In the above example, there is a risk that because there is not a unique permalink identifier that I could over write a blog post.

For example if I wrote another article titled Corporate Identity Brand Building and filed it under the Business category then the new article would overwrite the old article or could potentially cause other problems with my blog.

Because I thoroughly planned the content for The VEO Report in advance there’s no risk that I will have that problem.

Here is a better permalink structure to use if you think you are going to write multiple articles that will have the same title:

/%post_id%/%postname%/

Or

/%category%/%post_id%/%postname%/

You can also create unique pages by using dates in your permalink structure.

Here is a list of WordPress Permalink attributes you can use:

%year%
The year of the post, four digits, for example 2009

%monthnum%
Month of the year, for example 05

%day%
Day of the month, for example 28

%hour%
Hour of the day, for example 15

%minute%
Minute of the hour, for example 43

%second%
Second of the minute, for example 33

%postname%
A sanitized version of the title of the post

%post_id%
The unique ID # of the post, for example 423

%category%
A sanitized version of the category name

%tag%
A sanitized version of the tag name

%author%
A sanitized version of the author name.