If you are new to blogging and have just set up your WordPress blog you may not have had a chance to look at all the other options available inside your dashboard. Some new bloggers avoid having to change anything but changing the settings on your WordPress blog is actually fairly easy. WordPress is pretty much good to go out of the box, but there are a couple settings you should think about tweaking.
Writing Settings - In here I like to set my own Default Categories and Link Categories. You can easily run your blog or website without doing this, but I feel it saves me time and effort. I hate having “Ungategorized” show up in my list of categories. If I change my default category to something else, it means I will probably never have to see uncategorized again. Sometimes I forget to categorize my posts and when that happens I won’t have to worry about Uncategorized showing up all of a sudden.
Permalink Settings – You will find this under the SETTINGS option. The default means that the title url of your blog post looks like this
www.yourblog.com/?p=483 – the number is the number of your blog post but that doesn’t help you in the search engines. You want your blog to include the title of your blog post like www.yourblog.com/chocolate-cupcake-recipe – which tells the search engines what the blog post is about.
You can create your blog so it is just your blog domain name and the post by using the custom settings permalinks structure and only including the following characters /%postname/ – as you can see below:
Privacy – You definitely want to check out this setting. I have heard rumours of people installing a fresh WordPress and their privacy settings are set to block search engines. It is worth a shot just to go into this setting really quickly and making sure that search engines can crawl your site. This is the only option to tweak in this particular settings menu so it is easy stuff. Most people will want to allow search engines because that is where most of your traffic will be coming from.
Discussion Settings – You can leave these settings alone if you want but there are a couple things I like to tweak. FIrst off I make sure the top option “Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article. ” is clicked. This means when you have a link to another blog you will send a trackback to that blog. If the person allows trackbacks that could count as a back link for you. Back links are good things!
I also like to change my gravatar picture. This is a small step but it can add a lot to the aesthetics of your site. A lot of people who comment on your site will not have a gravatar, so the default will show up. The “mystery man” might be good enough for most, but if it looks bad on my blog I will want to change it. Sometimes I will go with blank and sometimes I will just pick the one that matches my site colors and theme.
Those are just settings on your WordPress blog that you might want to change and it really is the tip of the iceberg. Some things you will learn as you go along and become a more advanced blogger but the things I outlined above are things you want to look at as quickly as possible.
