This was originally posted on HeadwayHQ.com. David Wang has been doing a great job with his site and walkthroughs! Check out his site and make certain to subscribe to his RSS feed to keep up with Headway happenings. Hit him up on Twitter @blogjunkie too.

We’ve got a great thing going with the Headway theme, but there is a little bit of external setup that needs to be done in order to get things working as smoothly as possible and have the ability to track your progress.

After you have installed Headway and activated it, you’ll notice that you have a few new options in the Appearance tab.

Headway Configuration – SEO, Twitter Integration, Backend Options

Headway Design – Colors, Typography, Size, etc. IE: Look & Feel

Headway Layout Editor – Llay out pages and elements. Headway’s bread and butter.

Headway Easy Hooks – Great explanation at HeadwayHQ.com.

These tabs let you control virtually every aspect of Headway and its functioning. I want to focus on the Headway Configuration tab to get you started with the backend options that will make your site very useful. Many of you who have a site already have this information at hand, but to those newbies out there, this is your guide.

When you first click on the Headway Configuration tab, you are greeted with a page full of empty boxes under General Options.

For the Feed URL, go to feedburner.google.com log in with your current Google account or get a new one, and follow the steps to set up a new RSS feed. When you are done, copy the feed URL and paste it in this box.

If you have anything special that needs to run in Header Scripts, paste that in here.

The Footer Scripts area is where you want to past your Google Analytics tracking code or any other statistics software code. If you don’t have a Google Analytics account go to google.com/analytics/ and, again, sign in or sign up with your Google account. Follow the directions to set up tracking for your account. When you get to the end, copy the tracking code, then paste it here.

GZIP Compression is usually fine to leave on unless you know your host does not like it.

Favicons are the little avatars or logos that show up next to your site’s URL in web browers. If you have one, link to its URL location here. If not, follow the Headway instructions and get one at favicon.cc.

The Affiliate Link section is if you want to make money by people clicking on your Headway footer link and purchasing the theme at the Headway site. Make sure to put your correct link here. If you don’t have one, you can always use mine.

We’ll move on to the SEO tab.

As the note says, you can pretty much leave everything alone unless you really know what you are doing. The only sections that you must be aware of are near the bottom. Under META Content make certain to fill in the Home Description and Home Keywords boxes.

Search engines and social media sharing sites (like Digg and del.icio.us) use this information to help disseminate your site. It’s important that you choose a concise description for your home page. Think about what humans will search for when looking for your content. Enter that hear and keep it around 150 characters.

In the Keywords section, utilize the same principles as above. Short, concise and relevant. Enter 10-15 keywords that people will search for. The description and keywords box should have some overlap in their content, but don’t just copy and paste your description into your keywords box.

That’s it. That should help you be able to attract and track visitors to your site. Now the rest is up to you with content and networking.

Jason Wietholter is an entrepreneur and social media/multimedia specialist. You can find his personal website at http://jasonwietholter.com and lurking about the internets on Twitter @jasonwietholter.