In this article in the Free Blog Consulting series we will begin the process of actually setting up our Cool New Inventions blog. As we finished Part 4 in the series we had our new blog hosted and the standard Wordpress theme saying Hello World. For the purpose of these articles I will assume that you can log into your Wordpress blog and find your way to the dashboard. These next steps are important for getting your Wordpress blog started on the right track. One of the first things I do on any new Wordpress blog is to change the permalink structure. The permalink is the way your blog saves the information that you put on it. One simple change in the very beginning will make your blog much easier for the search engines to find. You will need to go to the the Settings tab and click on Permalinks. You should see a screen like this:

You want to add the custom permalink structure that is shown on the screen and then click save changes. With that done, I add some plugins. The free plugins that are available for Wordpress are one of its finest options. You can find a plugin to make your blog do almost anything. Installing Wordpress plugins is also very easy now. Just go to the Plugins tab on the dashboard and click on Add New. You can search for the plugins you want and then just click to have them installed and activated. There are two plugins that come with the initial install. You want to activate the Akismet plugin which is a great spam blocker. You will need to go and get a Worpress API key, which is not difficult if you follow the directions that are provided by the plugin to do that. I also add a plugin for keeping track of my blog statistics, a plugin for my contact page, a plugin that automatically upgrades Wordpress when they put out a new version, a plugin that automatically backups my blog and sends the information to my email account, and a plugin that will help with the SEO of the site.

I also add a few pages right away. I put up a Privacy Policy page, a Terms and Conditions page, and a Contact page. On each of these pages I put a link back to the homepage. These initial links will help your site get indexed by Google. The Cool New Inventions site was indexed in less than 24 hours because of these links and the link I sent to it from one of the articles in this Free Blog Consulting Series. When I entered Cool New Inventions into the Google search engine I saw the new site listed:

It is showing up on page 1 in position 9. It won’t stay there, but I know from my statistics that I did get two visitors to the site from people searching for Cool New Inventions on Google. With my new Pages in place I am going to install a WordPress theme to change the look of the site. I am going to use a theme from Solopress because they are easy to work with and I don’t want to spend a lot of time having to tweak the theme.

With the plugins and theme installed I need to write some articles for the site. Fortunately, the topic of the site lends itself to writing some interesting articles. I will start the blog by writing and posting five articles. The I need to build some links. We will talk about link building in the next article in the series.