The following video is a snippet taken out from our Long Tail University Course. Here we share with you how to set up wordpress site using the exact settings we use at Long Tail Pro to optimize our site for SEO and general best practices tips to generate easy traffic while keeping a secure and easy to maintaining backend for our content.
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For your convenience, below we summarized all the discussed points in the video of how to set up a wordpress site. We highly suggest you do watch the video as it detail out the exact location where we make changes to WordPress and the reasons behind them.
How To Set Up WordPress – Basic Settings:
General settings:
- Fill in site name and tag line?
- Set your preferred URL (i.e. www or non-www; don’t forget to set this in Google Webmaster Tools, too!)
- Permalinks: “Post Name”
Posts or pages?
- Posts for all articles
- Pages for stuff that will go in menus
Blog view or static page on the homepage? Well, there are pros and cons to each.
Blog view:
- Much more natural?
- User friendly
- Generally better user experience
- BUT… you can’t target keywords with your homepage
Static page:
- Allows you to target a keyword with the most powerful page of your site?
- But isn’t very natural, and could hurt you in a manual review, especially if you have affiliate links
Nowadays, all of my sites use a blog view on the homepage. It’s just more natural and provides a better user experience, which is important because we’re building real businesses.
Plugins we use:
- WordPress SEO by Yoast OR All-in-One SEO (basic SEO settings)
- Cookies for Comments (free alternative to Akismet/comment spam) Google Analytics by Yoast (GA integration) W3 Total Cache (image compression/site speed)
- Revision Control (deletes extraneous revision files/site speed)
- Quick AdSense (easy, site-wide AdSense or other ad placement)
- All 404 redirect to homepage (404 control)
- Backup by BlogVault (paid, optional) Thrive Content Builder (paid, optional)
- Thrive Leads WordPress Theme (paid, optional)
Remember, you get more than an advanced keyword research software when you become part of of the Long Tail Platinum community.
Our team spends countless hours on testing cutting edge SEO strategies, keyword research, niche selection, and site optimizations so you don’t have too.
Get your free 7 day FREE trial with Long Tail Pro today.
Cool! This is really simple & valuable post. Just 3 things
1. I love All in One SEO Pack instead of WordPress SEO by Yoast.
2. I install Google XML Sitemap & Jetpack by WordPress also &
3. I block all search engine after installation WordPress & continue it until my site setup perfectly.
Thanks.
Thank you share tip to setup wordpress. I have a question, Do you setup Webmaster on niche site?
Best,
Katie Lyons
We do. But we create a separate account for each.
Thank you for verify me!
Can’t believe you are recommending Cookies for Comments above, it hasn’t been updated for two years – https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/cookies-for-comments/
Quick adsense last updated 3 years ago – https://wordpress.org/plugins/quick-adsense/
Hi Dave,
Would love to know what you are using. Some plugins work flawlessly in our niche sitse but we are always open to testing new ones.
I am agree with Team LTP for recommend Quick Adsense. It is easy blugin for make your adsense in your site. Otherwise, it has never updated more than 3 years ago but it is still work for latest of WordPress and all my sites also use Quick Adsese.
These are some other tools which allow to enhance internal links and there are few free plugins for that as well.
Would love to hear what you use Bizztor! The more we share as a community the better 🙂
Site now being re-built.
Good list and comments.
What are your thoughts re: Silo Structures?
Any opinions/comments on Abba’s SERP Fuel Techniques?
Silos are a great way to expand an existing site into related niches, saving you time on starting a new site while leveraging your current sites domain strength.
I am not familiar with Abba’s SERP technique.
Reading this through, i feel like i have to rebuild my site now.
I would say, Yoast plugin will be the winner to mange the stuff. Install that and use it.
I have ditched Yoast SEO in favor of Rank Math SEO on my blog and the results are great