If you’ve just setup WordPress on your site, from an SEO point of view, there’s quite a lot you can do after you’ve installed WordPress.

The most first thing you should do is to double check that your blog has been made visible to everyone including search engines and archivers. Navigate to /wp-admin/options-privacy.php (or Privacy under the Settings menu in the admin) to check this. The first radio button should be selected “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati and archivers)

If this option is set to “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors” , it will cause the robots.txt to be updated with a rule to block all spiders from indexing the website, it will add a robots meta tag “” into the head section (if wp_head is used) of your sites source which will also tell search engine spiders to ignore your site. Pings to ping-o-matic and any other RPC ping services will be stopped and the update services will be hidden.

It’s recommended that you install a couple of plugins to enhance WordPress’s functionality. The All in One SEO Pack is a free plugin, you can download the plugin here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

Take a look at the feature log for full details as to what the all in one seo pack provides. In short, it generates meta tags automatically, improves wordpress’s canonical URL’s and allows you to fine-tune everything.

Another recommended plugin to install is “Google XML Sitemaps”. This allows you to generate an XML sitemap from the wordpress admin from which you can easily update. View the plugin page here.

Take time to search around for any other features you’d like to add to your WordPress blog, with 10,246 plugins and counting in the plugin directory, there’s a good chance you’ll find it.

Related posts:

1. An Introduction To WordPress As A CMS
2. SEO Must-have: How to Connect your WordPress Blog to Twitter
3. Using WordPress Plugins and Optimising WordPress To Improve Search Engine Optimisation
4. The Future of WordPress 2010
5. Top Free CMS Plug-ins for SEO

Tags: privacy settings, Search Engines, seo point of view, spiders, wordpress

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 12th, 2010 at 11:56 am and is filed under Search Engine Optimisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.