A beginner’s Guide On How To Create A Blog- Essential Wordpress Settings
Posted in: Blogging, create a blog, money making ideasThis is the part 02 of our ” Beginner’s guide to create a blog and make money blogging” series. Last week I showed you how much money you can make from blogging and gave you step by step guidance to create your own blog. If you missed that lesson please get it from here.
After installing wordpress on your server there are some essential settings which needed to be done. All the settings I am explaining here is very important in blog SEO and I am not going to explain the reasons one by one. If you have any doubts about a certain feature, feel free to ask me.
Essential Wordpress Settings
General Settings.
First of all, add the www attribute to your blog. You can do it by going to settings -> general settings.
Permalink Settings
The default permalink structure in wordpress is terrible in SEO point of view. But you can very easily change it to get the best permalink settings. Click the custom structure radio button and copy paste the following term in the given space.
Settings -> Permalinks
Writing Settings
Once you publish a post, Wordpress automatically notifies update services. This is known as pinging. This is very important in letting the world know that you have something new in your blog. Copy paste the following list and replace your default list in wordpress writing settings.
Settings -> Writing Settings
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://ping.blo.gs/ http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast
http://rpc.britblog.com/
http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
http://www.holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping.php
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc/
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
http://ping.blogg.de/
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.britblog.com/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.wpkeys.com/
http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
http://signup.alerts.msn.com/alerts-PREP/submitPingExtended.doz
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.imblogs.net/ping/
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
There are some tweaks you need to do with the use of some plugins. I will explain them in the “essential wordpress plugins article” .
Adding a sitemap to your wordpress blog.
This is also very important in blog seo and the sooner you add it to your blog the better. You can add a sitemap using many different ways, but the easiest way to do so is by using a plugin called XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress.
I am supposed to talk about wordpress plugins later in this series but I consider this is a major requirement so please download and install this plugin from here.
I made the mistake of including tag pages in my site map resulting hundreds of duplicate posts which is a big NO NO in search engine optimization. Please avoid doing the same mistake and set the sitemap content as follows.
Adding a robots.txt file
The importance of the robots.Txt file is up for debate. Some experts say that you need it and some says it is absolutely unnecessary. This instructs the search engines what pages in your web site should be crawled and consequently indexed. To be in the safer side we will add it to your site and let the experts argue on it’s necessity.
Open a note pad from your computer and copy paste the following text and save it as robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Then upload it to your root directory. ( public html) I use “Filezila client” to manage all my ftp uploads.
Get your wordpress API key.
You need the API key when using certain features / plugins in your blog. But when you host your blog on a paid host you have to create a free wordpress.com account to get an API key. Your API key will be in your profile page which you can access by clicking the ” My Account” link in the top right corner of your admin page.
Save this in a notepad and keep it for your future references. You will be needing it when we are moving to the wordpress plugins lesson.
These are the essential settings and things you have to do when you first install wordpress on your server. Your work is not over yet. It just started. Let me remind you what I am planning to cover in this ” Beginner’s guide to create a blog” series. Follow the links if you have missed any previous lessons.
00. Can you make money from blogging?
01. Getting a dot com name for the cheapest price.
02. Setting up the host and installing the blog.
03. Giving your blog the perfect foundation.
04. Let’s give your blog a great look with a beautiful and professional theme.
05. Make your blog work the way you want with world’s best plugins
06. Where to find content, how to write blog posts and how to keep doing it?.
07. Get Google to send thousands of visitors to you.
08. There are over 100 ways to make money when you have a blog. Let me tell you the best methods.
09. How to get more and more visitors to make you more money?
10. Become a king of social media.
I will be posting the article on ” How to add a beautiful theme to your blog” in few days. You can write a test post and publish it till we move on with the future lessons. And do not forget to create an account with ” Google web master tools” also. You will be needing it very soon.
Wish you a very prosperous week and I hope you are putting these lessons into action.
Do not forget to read,
How To Create A Blog- Installing wordpress.
Part 1 of Make Money Blogging Series.
I love how you are always to the point and make it sound so simple to do!
Thanks for sharing this guide. I really enjoying reading your blog.
By the way, I learned many things about this guide. Keep up the good work. And a big thanks for a ping list, I copied and pasted all the listed ping to my blog.
Thanks a lot
When we are making permalink settings we need to check the permission settings on .htaccess file.
If the writing permission is restricted on .htaccess file it wont’ work instead you need to update .htacess file manually, which is a pain.
Using FTP client (FileZilla) right click .htacess file in your root and change the permission.
Thanks for a nice and informative site. Somehow I was drawn to reading the post and I enjoyed a lot. Have a nice day!
I use to ping my blog on Pingoat, and when I do this, he notifies a lot of services.
But you have a huge list above, what´s the advantage of pinging on all these services?
@ Mayooresan,
When you on hostgator, you do not have to give write permissions on htaccess since they have the correct settings by default.
@ Iphone Barato,
Your post will be picked up by lot of services :D
I would say you have been great for newbies like myself. Great post.
I have a question. If i paste the whole list of pinging sites, will it cause a lot of load on my shared server?
Thanks a lot for the post. I checked the tags, categories and archives also in the sitemap and didn’t no follow them using the seo plugin. My site got some content issues due to that.
Is pingmatic not enough for blog post notification?
Great help for people like me who wish to start my own blog.
[...] 03. Essential wordpress settings. [...]
Your this posts have stated that you certainly have huge knowledge about wordpress. I think we should keep following you and I am sure you will keep passing us such important and useful information.
Well, I do not have a huge knowledge about WP, But I keep my self updated and experiment with my settings until I get the best combination. This series is a result of what I have learned so far.
you are doing some awesome work. no crap and no hype. i have been using blogspot for many reasons. i think i will be using wp for my future blog. thanks
Yes, Do that and you will not regret making the switch to WP. I guarantee that :-)
I use XML Sitemap Generator plugin at my blog and I really happy and feel safe. I tuned it up to send me backups weekly at my Gmail account where I made a filter for such emails to skip Inbox, be archieved automatically and get a ‘backup’ label – very useful!
Thank you for robots.txt contents – I have set it up too now!
“I never believed that I can create a web site which gets 100,000 page views a day. But I did, my most recently launched web site yesterday had 100,000 page views.”
I am so curious about your projects and I guess that I am not alone, please tell us some more.
Is this ppc or organic traffic you are talking about, either way it is an impressive amount of pageviews.
@ Alex,
Getting back ups to your email via xml site map is a cool feature. Could you tell us how exactly you do that.
I visited your blog and enjoyed your post about Year 3000.
@ Rick,
I will add a screen shot of my GA account ad get back to your question :-)
It is the best and very informative blog creation guide fro beginners i ever came to know.Good work Man.I just froward that to my friend who is little new to this. i am sure he will find it useful just the same way i did.
BTW Very Nice and Cool Theme you have here:)
Thanks for the tips, you were right Wordpress does have some serious flaws in its default state.
Thanks for the tip on the writing settings. I didn’t have all those sites installed to be pinged. Now I do! Thank you!
Thanks for the Ping list. I had several of those, but not all of them.
I often use Windows Live Writer, and you can set the ping list there too. :)
I was just thinking about A beginner’s Guide On How To Create A Blog- Essential Wordpress Settings and you’ve really helped out. Thanks!
this needs to be stumbled.
[...] 03. Giving your blog the perfect foundation. [...]
[...] 03. Giving your blog the perfect foundation. [...]
Thanks for a nice and informative site. Somehow I was drawn to reading the post and I enjoyed a lot. I didn’t have all those sites installed to be pinged.
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