WordPress SEO – Day 2: 2 Easy Settings That Make It 2 Hard
Today is a a real quick one. You’ve got a WordPress site, and you want it to rank high? Don’t miss these 2 (seemingly) simple things that can have MASSIVE effects on your SEO.
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The first is usually a problem only if you’ve been building your site on a staging server or subdomain, and you’ve told Google to lay off while you’re under construction. We’ve seen this happen a lot with other WordPress developers – they build a site in a separate area, and they simply forget to turn this one little doohickey off (or ON, in a way…)
It’s the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” setting in Settings>Reading. This box MUST be checked off, or Google WILL ignore your site. It says “It’s up to search engines to honor this request.” They honor that request. Always. And, to make it worse, if Google sees this enough times, they might just ignore you forever. So – good people – please make sure that you do NOT see that box with a tick or an x or a check in it. If it’s already empty, you’re in good shape – but make sure it’s empty.
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The second is another problem that can drastically harm your search engine rankings: Permalinks being set up incorrectly. By default, WordPress has your permalinks set to be the number of the page – and this creates a big problem. Google sees your URLS as http://YOURSITE.com/?p=123, but for optimal search engine optimization, you want them to read as http://YOURSITE.com/about-our-wonderful-product. Google actually picks up cues as to what your site is about from the TITLE of the pages in your site. If Google shows up and all your pages are just numbers and question marks, all the good SEO in the world ain’t gonna amount to a hill of beans. Get your permalinks sorted!
To change your WordPress Permalinks, go to Settings>Reading, and click on the “Post Name” option. This will instantly re-write the page names with the title of the page, instead of that ugly number and question mark. Pretty sweet!
While those are pretty simple, here’s a little video to help you out:
Tomorrow: It’s Saturday. I’m not doing this tomorrow. But, on Monday – Check Them Backlinks!
