There are a few little tips and tricks to go through here that you learn after building a couple hundred WordPress sites. This is a basic instruction on setting up the Settings tab of you WordPress blog.

Login to WordPress and find the Settings tab on the left hand side, in gray, at the bottom.

Hover over and let’s start at the bottom with Permalinks

Permalinks

Setting up permalinks properly is essential, and it’s part of what makes WordPress superior to other platforms out of the box. This setting is easy, but essential. Under Common Setting select “Post Name” and then click Save Settings.

Privacy

By default this should be set, but make sure it’s set to “Allow search Engines to Index this site.”

Media

You can see a cool little trick about how to change your default media library folder name in Media Settings by clicking the link.

This section I personally like to UNCHECK the box for “Organize files into year and month folders.” This shortens your url for these files, and it has the added benefit that if you need to update an image file somewhere on your site, and it’s a month later, you don’t need to locate the code where that file is embedded in the site. All you need to do is go to Media, delete the old file, and then upload the new one with the same file name. Now wherever that image appears on your site, it’ll be updated.

Save Changes.

Discussion

The default article settings apply to posts and pages. You can Leave these items checked if you want to allow people to comment on anything you publish, but doe to the spammy nature of the internet, it’s best to leave this off for you static pages. I uncheck all three boxes sometime or leave the first one checked if I;m making a site that will link out regularly to other blogs and leave it at that. You can still change the settings at the individual post or page level.

Now, you’ll also want to check the box for “An administrator must always approve the comment.” That way if someone does post a good comment at some point and you approve it, you aren’t leaving the door wide open to spam from that author in the future.

Save changes.

Reading

This is the area for deciding if you want to show blog posts on the home page or a static page. Up to you.

Save changes.

Writing

Just let this one chill.

General

Best practice is to set the URL to the www. version. You may have just the URL there without the www. Generally the initial installation with Fantastico works like that. If so, add www. to both the “WordPress Address” and “site address”. At this point WordPress will log you out. Simply enter your password and username and log back in.

That’s about it for setting up the basic WordPRess settings with search engine optimization in mind. As far as setting up website hosting and installing a theme, we’ll cover those in other posts.