After you finished installing WordPress as we showed you in the previous lesson, you should now see the default WordPress theme when you type your website’s url in your internet browser, and can log into the admin area of your new website at http://www.mysite.com/wp-admin (replace mywebsite.com with your website’s name).

You should now see the login panel to the admin area of your website.

Log into your admin area

Log in using the information you entered while setting up WordPress:

After logging in, you will see the dashboard of you new website’s administrative area:

Actually you could now already start adding content to your website, but first we want to optimize the settings, install some useful plugins and change the default template to make your website more professional looking and search engine friendly.

Update your WordPress version

As of the date of this post, (July2010) the latest version of WordPress is 3.0. It has some huge improvements over the version 2, and in our tutorial we will be using version 3. You can see which version you have on top of your Dashboard.

The web is a constantly changing medium, and the WordPress script and its plugins are constantly developed. There will be updates every now and then, and we recommend you to update your version from time to time. However, it’s a good idea to wait a few weeks until all plugin authors had a chance to update their plugins too, otherwise you might risk that some of your plugins are not working yet with the latest WordPress version. Usually, after about 2-3 weeks, it’s safe to update your WordPress script to the latest version. Whether you keep your WordPress script update or not is up to you, but usually there are some major improvements and security updates over time. To be on the safe site, always back up your database before you update in the future (we will show you how).

For now, our database is pretty much empty as we haven’t added any content yet, so we can just click the link on top of the dashboard:

In the second step, select ‘update automatically’, and if you see plugins listed for which there are also updates available, update them too.

Optimize your website’s settings

In this lesson we want to customize and optimize the settings for your website, so it will be ready to be picked up by the search engines.

You find the settings menu in the left dashboard menu bar. Here are some tips on how to optimize your WordPress settings:

General: Your ‘Site Title’ and ‘Tagline’ are the heading and description how your website will show in Google’s search results. Your title should be up to 70 letters including spaces and include your keyword(s), the description can be up to 200 letters including spaces and should be written to convince the Google searcher to click on your website. It could look like:

You should also set your time zone.

Writing: No changes necessary

Reading: You can select here how you want your front page to look. If you have a regular website you probably want to select a ‘static page’ (you have to come back here after you have written that page, but if you are creating a blog you may want to select to always show your latest post on the front page.

Discussion: You can select here whether your want to enable comments for your website. If you are setting up a blog and want to enable comments, we recommend to activate the ‘Akismet’ spam filter plugin. Also you may want to check ‘An administrator must always approve the comment’.

Media: Nothing to change here

Privacy: If you want your website to be found by the search engines, make sure that ‘I would like my site to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati) and archivers’ is enabled (it is by default).

Permalinks: For search engine optimization reasons you should change these settings.

A permalink is the url or the name of a page you create on your website. Usually, WordPress would number your pages and call them e.g. ‘http://www.yourwebsite.com/?p=3′. Search engines however how no clue what your page is about. It will help them when you set the permalink to ‘/%postname%/’, because your page will then be named according to the ‘title’ you enter, and e.g. be named ‘http://www.coolhamstercage.com/big-hamster-cages/’.

So change the permalink structure of your website or blog to ‘custom settings‘ and enter /%postname%/:

After you have optimized your website’s settings, let’s in the next lesson learn how to install plugins and install Google XML Sitemaps, a plugin that will help submit your website to the search engines.

Tutorial 'How To Make Your Own Website':

1. Lesson 1 – Overview: What Will You Learn In This Web Design Tutorial?
2. Lesson 2 – What Will I Need To Build My Website?
3. Lesson 3 – Naming Your Website: Find And Buy The Best Domain Name
4. Lesson 4 – Your Website Needs A Home: Getting Your Web Hosting Account
5. Lesson 5 – Connecting Your Domain Name And Hosting Account: Set Your Nameservers
6. Lesson 6 – Installing WordPress: The Famous 3 Minutes Set Up Of Your Website
7. This article: Lesson 7 – Optimizing Your Settings: Update And Get Ready For Google
8. Lesson 8 – Installing Plugins: Add More Functions
9. Lesson 9 – Make It Yours: Selecting Your Website’s Template
10. Lesson 10 – Adding Content: Posts, Pages, Menu, Sidebar

Related posts:

• Lesson 6 – Installing WordPress: The Famous 3 Minutes Set Up Of Your Website
• Lesson 1 – Overview: What Will You Learn In This Web Design Tutorial?
• Will My Website Show Up On Google, Yahoo And Bing?