A beginner’s Guide On How To Create A Blog- Essential Wordpress Settings

This 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.
&/%postname%/

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.

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.

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