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Getting your general blog settings for your website right from the get-go is so important, not only for your sanity, but it can also improve your SEO. If you’re new to blogging, or just starting with improving your SEO, setting your site title and tagline is an important step which you cannot afford to miss.
For this post, we will be looking at the ‘General’ settings. General settings covers the following settings in WordPress:
- Site title,
- Tagline,
- WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL). Bear in mind, you need to own these URL’s and can’ just reassign to something different on a whim. To do this, you will most likely need to go through your host’s C-Panel or H-panel.
- Administration Email Address,
- Membership,
- New User Default Role,
- Site Language,
- Date Format,
- Time Format,
- Weeks Starts On.
For the purpose of this article, we are only focusing on site title, tagline, site language, date and time formats, since these are pretty basic features needed to get your site going. Depending on your blogging goals, you may want to delve into the realms of membership sites and new user roles, but we will leave that for another post.
Step 1: Locate Your General Settings
To locate your general settings, starting on your WordPress dashboard, click ‘Settings’ and then ‘General.’
Step 2: Set Your site title and tagline
Start at the top, with your site title and tagline. Make sure that you include your keywords within your tagline, but don’t keyword stuff. Google will know that you’re doing here and quickly call you out on it. Think about a few keywords which really identify your site and include them in your tagline and site title.
Tip: As an aside, some WordPress themes will use this information when populating your theme templates on your site. Entering your site title and tagline here, ensures consistency of this information across your site. Also, search engines use this information for creating your search engine results, so make sure the information truly reflects your site to draw your potential reader in.
Step 2: Set your site language
Using the drop down box next to the heading ‘Site Language,’ select the language which you are writing your website in.
Step 3: Set your date and time formats
Scroll down the page and you’ll be able to select your date and time formats. What you select is how your date and times will appear on your published blog posts. Consider where your audience is located, as this may impact on how you format your date. Consider that audiences in America will be used to a different date format to those from Britain, for example.
After you’ve selected your date and time formats, select which day of the week you would like your week to start on.
Step 4: Don’t forget to save!
As with any changes you ever make to your website, never forget to hit the ‘Save’ button at the bottom!
If you ever wants to change these settings, just go back into ‘Settings,’ ‘General’ and reselect the options/change the information to your desired output.
This post was proofread using Grammarly.
