Permalinks are the format in which your blog posts are organized.  There are several different options you can choose from in your Settings > Permalinks section and you can also have a custom setting.  This is what your dashboard will look like:

As you can see you have a large list of options to choose from.  The default setting is very messy and for purposes of Search Engine Optimization we don’t want it to be that way, as Google likes things that are nice and organized.  The other choices wordpress gives you are not as bad but they leave things a little less organized than our custom structure.

With Category then Post Name this makes everything in your blog very logical and easy to find and follow.  This is the way Google likes to see your permalinks and we suggest that you do this.  Of course if you are not interested in Google you may put them as you wish, but unless you have a very specific reason to have them otherwise, it would be wise to keep them well organized.

There are many options under the Settings Menu in your WordPress Dashboard and I’d like to go over all of them.  We’ll start with General Settings.  Obviously these are the general settings for your blog.  When you click on general settings you will see this screen:

General Settings

Most of the options are pretty self explanatory but I will go over them anyway in case anyone gets confused.

• Blog Title – This will be the main header for your blog and should be a couple words that either brands your site or shortly describes it.
• Tagline – This is the line of text that will appear just under your blogs title.  You can use this in many ways.  It could be a description of your blog if you decided to use the title for branding.
• WordPress Address (URL) – This is your domain of your blog.  Setting this will make your “Home’ page go to your domain and as well as clicking on your blog title
• Blog Address (URL) – Set this to a different URL if you want your blog homepage to be different from where you installed your WordPress. That is if you want your homepage to be www.example.com instead of www.example.com/blog/
• E-Mail Address - This is used for admin purposes as stated.
• Membership – You can toggle this option if you would like to allow anyone to register on your blog.  Not recommended.
• New User Default Role – This is the default permission that will be granted for registered users.
• Timezone – What time zone are you in?
• Date Format – The format in which you want the dates to appear on your posts.
• Time Format – The format in which you want the time to appear on your posts.
• Week Starts On - The day in which you want the day of the week to start on for your blog.

There you have it!  Simple enough.