Chapter 8
4 Must-Do SEO WordPress Settings
(to Make Google Happy)
Welcome to Chapter 8 of The Blog Strategist’s Master Blogging Course. In this module, we will explore the SEO settings you should do to keep the Google algorithms happy. These are must-do changes to ensure that your site gets ranked.
We will cover the following:
- How to ensure your blog is indexed by search engines?
- Which permalink structure should you choose?
- How to get a free SSL Certificate?
- Why you should use XML sitemaps to get your site indexed?
Before we begin, here’s the table of content for this course. I recommend starting from the first chapter if you are new to blogging & want an overview of how to set up a successful blog. This is a standard section meant for first-time TBS visitors. If you’re a returning visitor, please feel free to skip this section & move ahead to the module content below.
This is one of the chapters of “The Blog Strategist’s Master Blogging Course”. This free course includes multiple chapters covering the A-Z of everything you need to know to achieve blogging success (and mostly everything you would probably find on a $497 paid blogging course). I know it because I personally bought and went through thousands of dollars worth of blogging courses and scoured through 1000s of articles & videos on blogging over the last decade!
- How to Start a Blog & Make Money (in 2025)? – Introduction
- How to Choose the Right Niche for Your Blog?
- How to Choose the Perfect Domain Name for Your Blog? (or avoid a crappy name atleast!)
- Where Should You Host Your Blog? (I recommend Dreamhost)
- How to Get a Free Domain Name & Host Your Blog on DreamHost?
- Which Blog Theme Should You Use? (I Recommend GeneratePress)
- Which Blog Plugins Should You Use? (+Plugins I Recommend)
- WordPress SEO Settings – Understanding What Google Likes
- How to Write the Perfect Blog Post? (Writing Module)
- How to Get Visitors from Google? (SEO Module)
- How to Drive Visitors from Pinterest? (Pinterest Traffic Module)
- How to Make Money from Your Blog?
- How to Set-Up Your Blog for Long-Term Success? (Email Traffic Module)
- 17 Things I Truly Wish Someone Told Me When I Started Blogging!
- My Final Thoughts on Starting a Blog
At The Blog Strategist (TBS), my mission is to bring the kind of premium content you would see on $497 blogging courses to my fellow bloggers, for free. I don’t sell blogging courses, I hate putting information behind paywalls and I am not an affiliate sellout recommending anything & everything for a commission. Every single word in TBS is written from my heart (and constantly updated), there’s zero AI bulls**t.
I am transparent about what I do, I publish monthly income reports, operates this blog as a public case study and believe in genuinely helping my readers scale their blogs. I do not write for search engines or social media, but to create truly helpful content for my readers – that’s my mantra.
Click here to explore the Free TBS Master Blogging Course.
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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 DreamHost, your site should automatically have free 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.
I hope this guide was useful to you. If you feel there is something I missed out, any doubts or suggestions you have – please let me know in comments section below. I promise you I’ll try to incorporate all genuine feedback to make this guide even better. Please don’t limit to just feedbacks, let me know your views & thoughts on this topic!
And if you liked the guide & found the content helpful – kindly share it with your friends, with someone you feel will benefit from it. Also, please feel free to bookmark the guide or pin it so that you can access it anytime!
With that, you now have made the most important SEO settings changes. Your blog is now well designed, fully functional, and SEO optimized. And your set-up procedure is completed.
The next step is to create kick-ass content that’ll give immense value to your readers. Let’s see how!