6 Ultimate Proven WordPress SEO Settings For New Bloggers

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As we all know the importance of SEO to get better page rankings, here am covering proven WordPress SEO settings for every blogger.

What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

I have covered this topic in detail already in my earlier blog powerful SEO tools.

As a blogger, you must have searched or got a query from other bloggers this question. 

What is the best way to implement SEO so that it gets more traffic? 

There are many different answers from different SEO experts or bloggers. In my initial days when I started with blogging, I was a bit confused about to whom I rely upon and which method to implement?

But when I jot down all those suggestions, I did find some interesting matter about it. 

Many websites/courses suggesting below SEO components which are common or basic things to do for better SEO ranking. 

Of course, there are other SEO methods you need to implement for better SEO rankings, but these are basic settings you need to take care of.

1.Update ping services

Whenever you publish/update any new post or page, WordPress will ping that to all ping services and directories. This way, your new/updated post or page will get indexed in search engines.

What is indexing in SEO?

when you added new information on your website, that won’t get available in search engines immediately.

Because that particular information should get identified by search engine bots to crawl and capture the information. Once crawling done, search engines update that in their DB so you can see in results when you search.

In other words, indexing is very similar to what we have on any book’s first page. In the book first page, you will mention what are all topics available with what information and also in the page number you can find that information.

By looking at that index page, you directly go that relevant page number to read instead of searching every page.

Until search engines added your post details and update the index, you can’t see your page in search results.

How quickly your new post can be indexed? You can do this by submitting the sitemap to search engines which can help you to crawl your site.

But indexing will take time as it somewhat linked with the popularity of your post or page.

This WordPress SEO setting will help you to get the quick popularity so that your page can be index bit quickly by search engines.

You can change these lists of ping\directory services URLs at any time.

You can also go to wordpress.org support page for more information on ping services by WordPress.

Go to the WordPress site and go to the Settings » Writing page section to change the list.

Wordpress SEO Settings Ping Services

2. WordPress Address & Site Address URL

WordPress Address is where your WordPress is installed whereas Site Address is what your home page URL would be.

Site Address is what your site visitor type in the address bar to see your site. This is something you put in your email signature or all your marketing ads.

WordPress Address URL is basically where your WordPress installation files stored and access your WordPress admin area.

Both URLs would be the same most of the scenarios except few rare scenarios like you are transferring to a subdomain, changing to https from HTTP etc.

From the SEO perspective, it is important to set the right URL in Site Address so that won’t be any crawling issues.

In case, you have installed an SSL certificate recently then it is mandatory to change this manually. Until that, your site still refers to HTTP instead of HTTPS.

Login to your WordPress site and go to the Settings » General page section. Here you can see WordPress site Site Address URL options for change.

6 Ultimate Proven WordPress SEO Settings For New Bloggers_URL

You can also change these settings from backend if you are familiar with it.

Updating wp-config file, functions.php file will also help you to change the WordPress Address & Site Address URLs.

3. Search Engine Visibility

Are you a blogger who doesn’t want to get your blog posts indexed in search engines?

I hope you are not. No blogger likes this idea of not getting indexed in search engines.

But there are few situations where you may go for this option. Like if you are new to blogging and still your site is not ready fully. Or you are doing some important settings and testing where you don’t want those pages indexed until final review.

In that particular situation, you can use this option in WordPress. By default, this option will come with enabled mode to get indexed.

But in case you did change this option mistakenly, make sure to unselect the same to get your site indexed.

You can stop search engine indexing by selecting the below option in the WordPress admin area.

Go to the WordPress site and Settings » Reading page section. Here you can see WordPress site Site Address URL options for change.

6 Ultimate Proven WordPress SEO Settings For New Bloggers_SEO

This is the must to verify WordPress SEO setting for every blogger as it impacts search engine indexing.

4. Related posts

This is a basic WordPress SEO setting you need to take care of. This helps you to manage the page bounce rate drastically.

When a new user comes to your site for one particular topic blog post, that user may leave immediately after that.

You need to market your other posts on your site so that that user will spend more time on your site. This can be done via internal linking to your other relevant posts.

Apart from displaying internal links on your blog post, you can also rely on this related post option.

By doing this basic WordPress SEO setting, WordPress will automatically display relevant posts to the current post at the end of it.

You will have few options in to like whether you want to display related posts based on category or tags?

If you have multiple categories, WordPress can display related posts only from that category in which the current post is written.

Go to your WordPress site and go to Settings » Reading page section to see this Related post option for changing.

6 Ultimate Proven WordPress SEO Settings For New Bloggers_Related Posts

5. Permalinks

Permalinks are nothing but the permanent URLs of your pages and blog posts. You can also set the permalink for your categories and tags.

When you open a blog post, the URL address showed in the browser address bar is what permalink of your blog post/page.

You must have defined this once permanently and continue as it impacts website ranking in google, hence the name is permalink.

Does this permalink structure impact SEO ranking?

Your blog post URL must be short and informative which helps search engine crawling simple.

And also helps users to see which post they are going to read when to search and navigate.

If you select the day and name structure, your URL would contain full date format and as well as your post title which forms a long URL.

Your reader doesn’t bother about the day you posted the blog in URL as you can also set the same in the blog post page as meta.

Hence better select simple option Post name which helps you to get the search ranking easy and user-friendly URL.

Because of date and numbers in your post URL irrelevant and URL contains only post name with keywords is what search engines seek.

Navigate to your WordPress site and go to Settings » Permalinks page section to see this Permalinks option for changing.

6 Ultimate Proven WordPress SEO Settings For New Bloggers_Permalinks

6. Sharing Buttons

You have written great content in your blog post and published it. It got indexed to major search engines with the help of ping services and blog directories.

Do you think that is enough to get the page rankings and more visitors to your blog post?

Of course, that’s not all.

Agree, “content is kink “.

But until you market your content, no one comes to your site and read that blog post.

Social media marketing plays a major role to share your content to a wider audience and get more page views.

Whenever you write a new blog post or update an existing post, you have to make sure to share the same on your social media accounts.

To make this automatic, WordPress given an option with the help of the Jetpack plugin.

  1. Navigate to WordPress site
  2. Go to Settings » Sharing page section to see this Sharing options for adding/changing.
6 Ultimate Proven WordPress SEO Settings For New Bloggers_Share

Conclusion

All of the above are basic WordPress SEO settings every blogger should do immediately after installing WordPress or before publishing the first blog post or page.

These WordPress SEO settings help you to get done with basic steps but ultimate is your great content.

Can you comment here if you know any other important WordPress SEO settings to get more search visibility?

If you are new to blogging, you can consider my earlier blog 11 Important Considerations You Need To Mind Before Write A Blog.

This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. Harsita

    I am new in blogging. I don’t understand the whole article completely but it really gives me a lot of information.

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