Are categories and meta-tags the same thing? Absolutely not! Do not think about the search engines when you are setting up your categories. Think about your readers. Categories are a way for readers to find related posts.

I read one blog regularly because I like the content but it also drives me crazy. I counted more than 190 categories just beginning with the letters ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’! I couldn’t go on – but you get the idea. There were categories with the singular word and the plural word. One post I looked at had more than 60 categories listed. That was practically more words than were in the entire post.

Used like this, categories are useless and they just clutter your page. Most of my blogs have very few categories and rarely more than 1 category per post. If you want to do SEO (and you better want to), use meta-tags – not categories.

Do you have your categories squared away? Good – because now we are going to dive into WordPress options.

Log-in to your admin panel and look across the choices until you find ‘Options’. Click on Options and you will be preesnted with a new screen of choices. If your WordPress installation is new, you will have 6 options – General, Writing, Reading, Discussion, Permalinks and Miscellaneous. We will look at each one in depth so don’t be intimidated.

Let’s take a closer look at General Options. Many of the blanks will be filled in for you but look at them anyway because generally the e-mail field is wrong. The Title field should contain what you want your blog to be called. Mine is ‘WordPressGuru.com. Next is the Tagline. This is simply a short description of what your blog is all about. Think about this before you fill in this blank and make it keyword rich.  Of course, you can change any option at any time so nothing you choose at this point will be carved in stone.
The next two fields are URI’s. These will probably be the same unless you have WordPress installed in one directory and your blog installed in another.
Look closely at the e-mail address because it’s probably wrong. This address will not be displayed anywhere. It is for WordPress to communicate with you so just make it your primary address.

Now comes Membership. This is up to you but I like to leave these two fields unchecked because I moderate all comments (coming in another option). If your comments get out of hand (hopefully!) you can change this option later. I like for it to be easy for my readers to leave a comment so I have these unchecked on all of my blogs except 1. That blog gets so much traffic and so many comments that I want people to register and login. Generally people who want to leave stupid comments won’t bother to register. I am NOT talking about spam comments. That’s a whole other subject which we will talk about later.

New user default role should be Subscriber. Look at the choices you have here. You certainly don’t want your readers to have change access to your blog so you don’t want anyone else to be an administrator unless you co-author a blog. If you get to the point where you have people contributing to your blog you might want to give those people author status but that’s about it. Let new readers who might register keep their subscriber status.

Tomorrow we will talk about date and time and all the different formats you can choose.