How to set up your wordpress blog

Set up your profile: First create your user profile and personal options. Wordpress requires you to only give your contact email address and a nickname. Your e-mail address helps you to administer your blog. Only registered users will have access to your email so you will be notified when anyone adds comments to your post. You can add and update other optional information like your name, contact information and password as and when required. When you are setting up your user profile, set yourself as an administrator. If you intend to allow authors to contribute to your blog, add them and assign role, giving suitable permissions.

Setting up Permalinks: The next is to set up permalinks which will give you good visibility in search results and visitors can get an idea about the link they are visiting. Goto Settings>Permalinks. From the options available under Common settings, select Custom structure. You can either use only the post title or include category and post title. Enter /%postname%(post title alone) or /%category%/%postname%(when url includes category and title of the post). People otherwise suggest to select the Day and name option to show up in search results and get more traffic.

Now you can add a few posts and get familiar with the how to manage your posts from the admin panel.

Configuring the security settings: A few security settings can make your wordpress secure against hackers and spamming activity. They are:

• Admin account removal: When you installed wordpress, a default admin account is created. Remove the default admin account created at the time of wordpress installation to avoid hackers target your admin account. It is easy to delete your default admin account. Go to Users, hover your mouse over admin account and click Delete. Your admin account will be removed.

• Hide directories: Use htaccess to avoid people accessing your directories and add a blank index.html file in every directory so that even if somebody browses your directory, they will find only a blank page with no content inside.

• Turn-off remote publishing: If you are not using an external blog editor to post from a remote website or desktop blogging client clear the options Atom and XML-RPC publishing protocol found under Writing Settings.

Configuring the discussion settings: Discussion settings are related to your blog, article content and the authors.

• Blog comments: There are about seven to eight settings that are relevant to blog comments and I recommend you to enable comments into your blog and maintain them as they enhance the value of the article. Make sure you get the email address and the name of the author who wants to add a comment on the article to avoid spam entries. You can also choose the close adding comments on your articles older than a particular number of days.

• Approving blog comments: Let an e-mail alert tell you whenever anyone adds a comment on your article so that you are informed and can respond to the comments. You can have the authority to approve every comment on your article before it goes live. This is a good practice which will avoid spam and inappropriate content in your comment space.

Installing wordpress theme: Good blog content as well as an attractive blog go together for a successful blog. Wordpress offers you free themes that you many install at any time easily or you can purchase a premium theme. Choose a theme that is compatible with the wordpress version you have installed. Theme installation is easy and you can find a host of themes in your Wordpress dashboard. Navigate to Appearance>Themes. Theme installation requires you to upload the theme via FTP and activate the same.

Installing wordpress plugins: Add suitable plugins that will help you keep your wordpress blog secured, generate traffic to your blog, upgrade your current installation version automatically and many others.

Hope your wordpress blog turns out successful.