The Most Important Setting for Your WordPress Blog

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: blog, blogging, Google search, privacy setting, search engines, SEO, social media, WordPress