Setting-Up Your Blog Properly – Part 2

As stated in Part 1, after installing your WordPress blog on your own domain, there are 3 steps you need to take to get your blog set-up properly so it will not only be indexed by the search engines but also be easy to run and a good place for your visitors to go. I’m going to cover each step in a separate post, this is Part 2.

These steps are specific to a WordPress blog hosted on your own domain. The free or hosted services like Blogger and WordPress.com will not allow you to accomplish what is described in these articles. These are the three steps:

1. Part 1 – Add the proper plug-ins
2. Part 2 – Change the permalinks
3. Part 3 – Find a quality theme and activate the widgets

Changing Permalinks

The default setting in WordPress sets the URL of each blog post as Yourdomain.com/?p=123. If you allow your URLs to look like this, you are missing a chance to add your keywords into the URL. Having your keywords in your URL can help your post get ranked in the search engines much quicker. This can easily be corrected.

After you log-in to your blog, click on Settings – and then Permalinks. You will see the following:

Click Custom Structure and enter /%category%/%postname%

This will make the URLS for your blog posts appear in the following format:

“Yourdomain.com/category(your keyword)/postname

If you’re reading this post from its own page (not the home page or the blog page), you can look at the URL in your browser’s address field and see it’s formatted as described – http://www.internetmarketingboomer.com/hot-topics/setting-up-your-blog-properly–part-2/

This is an important step to take in making sure your blog is set-up to be indexed by the search engines and listed with the proper keywords.

My next post will cover finding a quality theme and activating widgets on your blog.

Cheers!

Reba

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