The Most Important Setting For Your WordPress Blog
February 2nd, 2010 |
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’ve decided to build a blog and you have taken the time to pick your WordPress template, set it up, 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. You make sure to Digg your posts, submit them to delicious and StumbleUpon, Tweet them on Twitter, and post them to LinkedIn groups. This helps but you are still not getting any traffic from search engines. 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 results page for Google, Bing, or Yahoo. 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 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.
