Getting your WordPress setup and setup correctly is not all that time consuming But there are things that you need to get done right so that search engines can crawl your site and you show up in results.
It might all seem confusing but really it isn’t all that hard. If you check out some of the previous blogs I have on setting up the general settings you will find that it is just common things. But a lot of people go straight to posting and don’t set up their settings. They install a theme and go.
But, this is a important step in being successful with your site and your blog. In this article we are going over the last three settings in the general settings menu. Which are Media, Permalinks, and Privacy.
General Settings – Media
This is the media setup for WordPress. These are the pixel sizes for the photos that you upload. When you upload a photo to a blog post from your blog post screen. You will see that it on the sidebar you have choices of how your image will appear.
This is what your sidebar will look like when you add an image to a post. You can choose the image size there are three settings Full Size, Thumbnail and medium. When you set up the settings in your media settings these will give your max sizes for any images you upload. I keep them as default, because I edit my photos via an online app so that they are not large files and we will go over than in another post. I do recommend staying with the defaults
Perma Link Settings in General Settings
Now, this is a very important setting. This I would say is one of the most important settings nowadays. Why? Well I will go into some detail on this but also I want to direct you over to a person that I follow and I recommend that you follow also. He has been someone that has directed me on the correct SEO path and helped me when I was completely lost in the SEO world. Here is a blog post I recommend reading and I seriously recommend following and subscribing to his YouTube Channel. Especially, if you are completely new to SEO. I am not an affiliate of Neil’s I just have learned so much from this man and I wouldn’t be where I am at today without his guidance.
You see all the options for settings.
Now, this is important… Pick Post Name. This way the search engines can find the post and it is evergreen.
- Plain: That just assigns a number to your post. Reasons that is not good in my opinion and also anyone that talks about good SEO. (Think about when you search for a topic. You type in words that have to do with the topic you are looking up. So you want those keywords to be in your address. I will go into a lot more detail on this in another post.)
- Day and Name: That one is better than Plain, but still not a real good one. You will have some of your keywords in there but you won’t really be able to add another snippet to that when you post a blog. Which is another subject for another article. But it is all about Keywords.
- Month and Name & Numeric: Pretty much the same reasons for these as for above.
- Now Post Name is the one I use for the reason of Keywords. I always research my keywords and they become the title for my blog. There is a more to it than that. But if you name your post with a good catchy title that incorporates your keywords you will more than likely show up in searches quicker on major search engines like Google. Which means your article will get in front of more eyes and if you are running a blog as a business that is what you want.
Privacy in General Settings
This is a section that is very important. It is for legal reasons and ethical reasons. If you collect information from the people that read your articles you need a privacy statement. This is a statement stating what you do with their information. Here is a great article from Neil Patel about this. You will need to create a new page for your privacy policy.
You can research about privacy policy. But make sure you do one. WordPress also has a basic one that you can use. You just fill in the blanks and edit them to fit your needs. But if you far are collecting any information on your viewers such as emails whether it be from sales or just email collection opt-ins.
As you grow, have an attorney look over one for you. But always have one. Along with adding terms of service. When you become bigger and there are more eyes on your words and your site you want to be as transparent as possible as you can be with what you will do with someone’s information that they have given you. And Terms of service and even a page to state your refund policy’s. You want people to know what they can expect from you.
This now completes the general settings. That is not all there is to having a blog. But this gets you started with your site the right way. Take a look at some of the other posts about setting up