First Steps After WordPress Installation – Privacy & Permalinks

In this short video I’m going to show you two very important steps to make right after you’ve installed WordPress and are ready to start working on creating content for your website. These two steps involve checking/setting your privacy settings and defining your permalink (URL) structure for your site.

Video “Transcript”

Hi and welcome to WPExplorer.com. In this video I will go over the very first SEO steps you should take after installing WordPress.  I’ll review how to check your privacy settings and define your default permalink structure.

You’ve just installed WordPress. Now you want to make sure search engines will index your site in search results. So you’ll want to head over to Settings -> Privacy and make sure that the first option labeld “Allow search engines to index this site” has been selected. If you select the second option it will add a “no-index” meta tag to all the pages on your site, which tells search engines to not index them in search results.

Next you’ll want to head over to Settings->Permalinks. Here you will choose the default url structure for your site. This is very important to do at the very beginning because if you decide to change it later all your pages will now have a different structure so if anyone was linking to your old posts those links will now go to a 404 error page and you will lose valuable traffic and page rank.

Personally I like to use the option that says “Post name” this is the slimmest option and provides you with smaller and cleaner URL’s then the ones above.
Below you will see the options for category and tag base slugs. In WordPress, by default the category and tag archive urls will be preceded with the word category or tag. This makes it much clearer from a user stand point and also prevents slug conflicts. Here you can change those terms to whatever you like, such as using “Topics” for the category base as shown in the example.

To summarize, when you first install WordPress make sure to first check to make sure your privacy settings are correct if you wish to possibly show up in search results and next to setup your permalink structures for better SEO optimization and also to prevent issues in the future.
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