WordPress Theme Gallery

Now that you’ve successfully installed Wordpress, its time to make some important changes. These will really make the difference in your search engine positions and also to make sure you get as many return visitors as possible.

If you stick with the default settings and themes, you’ll be missing out on a lot of traffic and potentially a lot of money too. So lets begin:

Logging In

To log into your Wordpress Admin section, just visit the installation of your blog and enter the following to the end of the URL:

/wp-admin so if you’ve installed Wordpress in the root of your domain, then enter http://www.YourDomain.com/wp-admin

You’ll see the following screen:

Enter your username and password, which you chose during setup and it should log you in to your Admin section.

Once logged in, you’ll see the following screen, which gives you the main options at the top:

Delete The Default Post And Page

The first step is to remove the default posts which have been made during the installation. So click on the “Manage” tab at the top of the screen. You’ll see there is a post called “Hello World!” and it has options next to it. Choose “Delete”, then click OK to the popup box. This deletes this post completely.

Next step is to remove the default page which has been created. Click on “Pages” at the top of the screen and delete in the same way.

Rename Uncategorized Category

You should change the name of the default category. To do this, click on the “Manage” tab and then click on the “Categories” tab. You’ll probably have two categories, the “Blogroll” and “Uncategorized”. Click on “Edit” next to “Uncategorized” and change the name of it.

The name depends on what your blog is going to be about. It can be “Car Tips”, “My Thoughts”, “Latest News”, basically whatever you choose.

Delete The Blogroll

The Blogroll contains links to the very talented people who add and edit changes to Wordpress. The default installation of Wordpress will automatically link to their sites from your blog. This is a big problem when it comes to SEO. You don’t want to have too many links leaving your blog to unrelated sites as it could affect your search engine positions. So we must remove them.

To do this click on “Blogroll” at the top of the screen. Now check all the boxes and click on “Delete Checked Links”. This will remove all these links from your blog.

Change The Permalink Structure

The permalink structure controls how the URL is formatted on your blog. There are various options to choose from but having the blog title in the URL will always improve your results in the search engines. So which one do you choose?

First, click on “Options”, then click on “Permalinks” to see your options.

The most important thing is NEVER leave the default option checked. This will do you no favors at all.

The best option is one which is not presented in your choices. Here it is, just type the following into the “Custom Structure” box at the bottom of the main options:

/%postname%/

This will add the blog title to the end off your URL, without including any unnecessary numbers or other useless characters.

If you are unsure about this, then the next best option is to choose the “Date and name based” option. This will add the blog title but also the date posted.

Once you have chosen the option you prefer, click on “Update Permalink Structure”. When you do this, one of two things will happen.

1. You will get a message, which says “Permalink Structure Has Been Updated”. If this happens, you don’t need to do anything else.

2. You get a message, which says “You Should Update Your .htaccess now”. If you get this message, it means you will have to make changes to a file on your host.

This is usually very easy to do but depends on your particular webhost. When you get this message, there will be a box at the bottom of the page which has some code in it. It looks like this:

You should copy all this code onto your clipboard. To do this just right click your mouse inside the box where the code is and choose “Select All” then right click again and choose “Copy”.

You should then create a text file on your desktop. This can be a standard notepad file. Create it and call it “htaccess” then paste the code into it and save it.

Next thing is to login to your webhost using an FTP program. WSFTP is recommended for this or any other FTP program will do the job.

Login to your Wordpress installation where you see the Wordpress files. You can then upload the htaccess file which will be shown as htaccess.txt in your FTP program. Upload it into the installation folder of Wordpress. If you installed Wordpress in the root of your domain, then it will be in your “public_html” folder.

So upload the “htaccess.txt” file and then rename it to “.htaccess” this will then setup your permalink structure.

If this is still confusing then check out the Wordpress Permalink Section Here.

Add Your Ping List

Your ping list is a list of services that will be sent a ping, each time you update your blog. You can update this list by clicking on “Options” then “Writing”. The list is at the bottom of that page, called “Update Services”.

Obviously the more services you add the better. But, a word of caution, the longer your list, the more server resources your blog will use. If you are using shared hosting, your hosting company may remove your blog. So just a small list of the main services is recommended. Here’s one you can use:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.moreover.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.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

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