Wordpress Tips!

[theonlything]

Hi,

I've seen a few people struggling with Wordpress so thought I would post a little set of tips for those setting up Wordpress on their own hosting. I'll assume you have your own domain and hosting ready..

So, you've installed Wordpress and want to have it optimized for SEO, here are my 2 cents (1.62 pence):

1. Go to Settings, Permalinks, and change the structure to custom. Then type in the custom box %postname%
This will allow Google to index and rank your pages more easily as they will come out as example.com/page1 instead of example.com/asd2342sdjkhs3

2. Go to plugins and search for and install "Google XML Sitemaps" -to help Google index all your pages well and quickly "All in one SEO pack" - to get the meta tags on all your pages "Akismet" - to stop those damn spammers! Another useful one, though not so important is "Redirection" which allows you to very easily set up 301 redirects and to check for bad links (404s) on your own site. You can configure them fairly easily once they are installed.

3. If you're getting frustrated because when you visit the site it only shows the latest post, go to "Settings", "Reading" and at the top you can change the default homepage to any page on your site.

4. In "Settings" again, make sure that within "Privacy" you have the blog visible to all otherwise Google will not look at it. (Unless you actually want it to be private of course..)

5. As far as themes go, you can go to "Appearance" and browse through some themes and select one of the free ones.

6. If you want to put Google Analytics on the site it's very easy, go to "Widgets" within "Appearance" and drag a new text widget into your sidebar. Then copy the Analytics code you get from Google into that text box and save it. Done.

So there are some tips for Wordpress users. I hope that you find them useful, and if you already knew them or they are very obvious I apologise!

Ana

[Boswell]

Some good tips, thanks.

Regarding themes (5) there's usually not much there in the default installation, but if you try this site there are 1,000 or so free themes, and use the search engines for WordPress Premium themes to get hundreds more, some specialised, at reasonable cost.

I didn't know you can add the tracking code to a widget. Shouldn't the code be added to either the footer or page templates, just before the </body> tag?

[theonlything]

No probs.

Sure, the tracking code can go in the footer or headers too, but it involves knowing how to handle a php file usually, which some people may not know about.

Having it in the sidebar will still track every page (assuming you have your sidebar on every page which is the default)...

Agreed on the themes by the way, and thanks for the link.