Now that you have a functional blog, there are certain WordPress settings that you must adjust for the optimum performance of your blog.
The four major SEO settings you should perform are:
- Getting your blog indexed by search engines
- Changing the permalink structure to post name
- Installing an SSL certificate
- Generating XML sitemaps and sending them to search engines for indexing
Make sure that you mandatorily complete these four steps after hosting your site as they have a significant impact on SEO and search engine rankings.
Ensuring That Your Blog is Indexed by Search Engines
It is crucial to make sure that your blog is getting indexed by search engines like Google. Make sure that the following option is disabled in your blog:
- Open “Settings” present in the left panel of the WordPress navigation.
- Click on “Reading”
- Under “Reading”, make sure that the “Search engine visibility” checkbox that mentions “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is unchecked.
Using “Post Name” as the Permalink Structure
Permalinks are highly important from an SEO standpoint. Thus, it is very important to make sure that you have a permalink structure that is appreciated by search engines. Let us see how to change the permalink structure.
- Open the “Settings” option on the left side of the WordPress navigation panel.
- Click on “Permalinks“
- Under the option “Common Settings“, choose “Post name“
Why should you choose “Post name”?
Because now your post links will look like this: domainname.com/post-name
Since the post name is there, the search engines can quickly understand what your blog post is about while searching for relevant posts. If your post link was just a number or a date, it will be hard for the search engines to identify what your posts are about.
Adding dates in the permalink structure makes it look more cluttered. Moreover, it shows the date of creation of the blog post to your readers. Some readers might mistake your older posts as outdated and irrelevant. Let’s say you created a masterpiece content in Jan 2014. Someone looking at the post URL today might mistake it to be outdated (even search algorithms can get confused, not just readers). Why take unnecessary risks when you can just use post name as the URL!
Pro Tip: Never change the permalink structure on a live or authoritative site. Make sure that you change the structure to “Post name” at the time of the creation of the blog itself. Changing the permalink structure in between affects your SEO and search rankings in a negative manner.
WordPress themselves warn bloggers about the negative impacts of changing the permalink structure in between. Read the warning shown in the image below.
Use “SSL Certificate” to Show That Your Site is Secure
Note: If you have built your blog using Cloudways, your site should automatically have SSL enabled and must be showing a secure lock button in the browser. In case the SSL certificate is not present, you can follow the steps below to set up the SSL certificate and make your site secure.
Search engines like Google prefer secure websites with an HTTPS protocol over those with HTTP.
What are HTTP and HTTPS?
HTTP is a transfer protocol that helps users interact with web resources. HTTPS is an extension of HTTP, where the S stands for Secure. In HTTPS, the communication is encrypted and makes it far more secure than HTTP.
Search engines value secure websites. Thus, whether you are planning to start a blog or any other website for that matter, it is highly important that you should have a secure website.
An SSL certificate is a digital certificate that enables an encrypted connection and provides security to your digital communication.
Now that you understand what an SSL certificate is and the importance of having them in boosting your SERP (Search Engine Result Page) rankings, let’s see how to install an SSL certificate.
Ideally, you should pay for an SSL certificate. But while getting started on your blogging journey, you might not want to incur expenses other than hosting charges. In that case, there is a free plugin which you could install that will encrypt your blog and provides a secure connection.
The plugin is Really Simple SSL.
We have already seen how to install a plugin, you can follow those steps to install and activate the Really Simple SSL plugin.
Once your site is secure, you will find that your domain name now shows HTTPS at the beginning.
Generate XML Sitemaps & Get Them Indexed
An XML sitemap is a file that lists out a website’s important pages, making it easy for the search engines like Google and Bing to crawl them.
If you are wondering why your posts aren’t showing up on Google, check if you have created an XML sitemap for your blog. If not, you should generate a sitemap and send it to search engines.
How to generate an XML sitemap and send it to search engines?
There are many ways how you could do this. You can separately create an XML file with all the links and upload it to the Google Search Console. The plugin “Yoast SEO” has settings to generate XML sitemaps which you can upload to Google search console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
In case you are not familiar with Search Console, another easy method is to use the Jetpack plugin. It is a multipurpose plugin with one of the important features being generating XML sitemaps. With Jetpack, you do not have to separately upload the sitemap to search console or webmaster tools. The plugin will automatically generate XML sitemaps as well as send them to the search engines.
Let us see how to generate sitemaps using the Jetpack plugin.
- On the left side WordPress navigation panel, click on the “Jetpack” option.
- Click on “Settings“
- Under the section “Sitemaps“, enable the “Generate XML sitemaps“.
As highlighted in the above image, Jetpack will send your sitemap automatically to all major search engines for indexing. It is one of the easiest methods for generating XML sitemaps.
With that, you now have made the most important SEO settings changes. Your blog is now well designed, fully functional, and SEO optimized.