There are quite a few WordPress settings that you need to remember and constantly check to ensure that they are working or running properly and sometimes people forget very important settings that aren’t talked about often. Most people always understand that they need to enable plug-ins to get to them work and to change the theme and basic settings like this, but some of the most vital settings are usually overlooked by people.
One of these settings that most people often overlook is the privacy setting which is the setting that will determine whether or not you will be found by search engines. Sometimes by default this will be switched to block the search engines from accessing your blog and if you do this then you won’t be indexed or receive any search engine traffic. This setting is under the settings area in the WordPress admin section and called privacy. Make sure that it’s switched to the option that will allow search engines to crawl your site, after all the most targeted traffic comes from the search engines and you’ll need this traffic to make any money as a blogger.
The second setting is the permalink structure which is in the same row as the privacy button in the setting menu on the WordPress admin. By default the permalink structure is set to page number but you definitely don’t want this for SEO purposes and instead you’ll want to not use any of the options except for the custom option. The custom option allows you to set your own permalink structure and there are two options ideal for SEO purposes.
Either…
/%postname%/
Or
/%postname%//%category%/
Either of the two is great for SEO purposes as you should be making sure your title has your keywords in it. Using the second option might be beneficial but depending on your category names it may also not be beneficial. If you use keywords as category names then by all means use the second custom permalink option, but if you don’t then only use the post name option.
Both of these settings are important to making sure your blog is set-up properly and you should double check both of these settings if you have any doubt.
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