The Most Important Setting for Your WordPress Blog

Bryan Howland posted on September 22nd, 2009

So you’ve taken the social media plunge, and like we suggest here at Maples, you are keeping it simple and setting up your home base. You have taken the time to pick your template and set up your WordPress blog and incorporated it into your site and you may have also posted one or more entries.  Now you’re sitting back and waiting for Google and Technorati to index your page. And waiting. And waiting. So what’s the problem? Is it your keywords? (btw - Google disregards keyword metatags completely) Do you not have enough posts? Or is it something much simpler?

When you set up a WordPress blog, the default privacy setting is “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors”. If you do not change this setting to “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers” then all the best posts in the world won’t make a bit of difference to search engines. Readers will still be able to see your posts if they follow a direct link, but your posts will not appear anywhere on a search engine. While this might sound simple, we’ve had clients with a year’s worth of blog posts come to us asking why they aren’t gaining any audience or being indexed on the search engines only to find out the problem was their privacy setting.

So before you launch your blog, or before you start worrying about not getting listed on Google or other search engines, take a second and first make sure your blog is letting the engines in.

(Photo Credit - tomwardill)

Tags: , , , , , , ,

8 People have left comments on this post



» Gail Mullard said: { Sep 23, 2009 - 05:09:23 }

It is amazing how such small details can have such huge implications - and like you say it is not uncommon amongst new clients to find this situation. What’s that old joke again about the machine that doesn’t work and to fix it the consultant bangs the right place with the right hammer and then invoices £10K to the owner, £9.990 for the knowledge and £10 for the labour!

» Dahlism said: { Sep 23, 2009 - 03:09:23 }

Good tip, although I believe some of the better WP themes have the correct box checked and are SEO compliant. It’s an important consideration when choosing a theme.

» Wordpress Blog Hosting said: { Sep 24, 2009 - 07:09:11 }

If you want a wordpress blog on a hosted site a little more complicated, although they boast that it only takes 5 minutes to install. Wordpress Blog Hosting

» David Gordon Schmidt said: { Sep 25, 2009 - 08:09:37 }

I already had a Wordpress account, but just launched a new wordpress blog within it called BtoB Issues & Opps. The template I used already had the “make visible to search engines” etc box checked, so no problem there.

By the way, the blog, http://www.btobopportunities.wordpress.com is a forum for examples of how to start productive social media conversation with non-promotional content, and how this can ultimately work to build awareness for a B-to-B company.

-David Gordon Schmidt

» Cas said: { Sep 29, 2009 - 08:09:31 }

This definitely is one of those little Settings details that will get you if you’ve only used Wordpress.com before and aren’t familiar with the .org or MU versions. However, the “block all search engines” comes in VERY handy for when you’re first building a site, still want your client to be able to SEE progress, but aren’t quite ready to open it to the rest of the world yet. This (along with a checklist of other things to change) is just one of those things you have to change at flight-check before launch.

» Bryan Howland said: { Sep 30, 2009 - 04:09:37 }

Thank you all for your comments.

» JosephCar said: { Oct 14, 2009 - 02:10:56 }

Good article, thank you
You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive.

http://top-get.com

best regards

» Steave said: { Oct 25, 2009 - 11:10:08 }

Interesting article you got here. It would be great to read something more about this topic.

Post a Comment