WordPress Settings Menu
During the initial setup of a WordPress site, it’s a good idea to go through the
Settings menu first to make sure everything is set up properly. You will find this
settings menu in the left sidebar of your Dashboard. Mouse-over the word
'Settings' and a popup menu will appear displaying the options. Click on the
word 'Settings' and that menu integrates into the sidebar, below the main Settings
heading:
Once we install a few plugins later on, there will be more items in the Settings
menu, but we’ll deal with those as and when we get to them.
Note that I will only be covering the settings that are specifically related to good
SEO.
6.1. General Settings
Site Title & Tagline
The top two items in the General settings are Site Title and Tagline. Later in the
book we will look at creating a custom logo image and using that on the website,
but until you create & upload that image, the Site Title and Tagline entered here
will be displayed at the top of every page on your site.
DO NOT stuff keywords into the site name or tagline fields. Your site name will
most probably be based on your domain name, and the tagline should be a short
sentence specifying your site’s goal, philosophy or slogan.
There is a good article on creating a tagline on the Copyblogger website:
http://www.copyblogger.com/create-a-tagline/
If you need help with yours, I suggest you read that.
E-mail Address
The only other setting we need to concern ourselves with on this page is the
email address. This will be used by WordPress, plugins, and a free external
service (Gravatar.com). We’ll be looking at these later, so your email address
needs to be correct.
6.2. Writing Settings
In terms of SEO, the only setting we need to change here is the Update
Services. These are a list of web services that get notified whenever new
content gets published on the site. Having a good 'ping list' will help your
content get indexed quicker too.
Search Google for “WordPress ping list” and you’ll find a list of sites to include.
Simply copy and paste the list into the Update Services box, and then save your
settings.
6.3. Reading Settings
Latest posts vs. static page
At the top of the Reading Settings is the Front page displays:
This will tell WordPress which if the two options to use for the homepage on
your site. You can select:
1. Your latest posts
2. A static page
If you want to have a static page as your homepage, i.e., an article that does not
change, you can create that article as a WordPress 'Page', and then select that
page here to use as the homepage (front page).
In this book, we will be using a Genesis theme, and the home pages in Genesis
are widgetized. If you're not sure what that means, don’t worry. Just realise that
it’s good, and we’ll look into it later in the Homepage section of this book. To
take advantage of this fantastic Genesis homepage feature, you need to leave the
settings here to show 'Your latest posts' on the front page (which is the default
setting).
Next up on the Reading Settings is deciding how many posts to display on the
homepage and archive pages (like category page, author page, etc), and decide
what information is shown in RSS feeds (something WordPress generates for
your site).
The default setting is 10, which means WordPress will show 10 posts on the
homepage, 10 on the category pages, and 10 on the author page, etc. If there are
more than 10 posts to show, then the remainder will be added, in batches of 10,
to additional pages, and you’ll get a next/previous type navigation to move
between them.
I would recommend you leave the 'Blog pages show at most' set to 10.
Beneath that is the 'Syndication feeds show the most recent' option.
WordPress creates RSS feeds for your site (see my WordPress for Beginners
book if you want to read more on this -
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009ZVO3H6). Your site will have a main feed,
plus there will be feeds for category pages, tag pages, and so on. This setting
tells WordPress how many items to include in the feed. With Google's Penguin
algorithm looking at the over-optimization of inbound links, I’d limit the RSS
feed to a maximum of 10. In the past, webmasters have included 100 items (or
more), and that would mean any site that is displaying your RSS feed will
contain 100 links back to it. Before Google Penguin, that was OK, but not now.
So I would suggest leaving this number set at 10.
You now have to decide what the feed contains, i.e., all the content of your posts,
or just a summary of them. Select 'Summary' because otherwise you are
making if far too easy for scraper software tools to copy (steal), your content.
These software tools monitor RSS feeds and strip the content out. Your content
is then likely to be posted on one or more spammy sites around the internet, and
that's not good.
Later in this book we will look at Google Authorship, and one reason I
recommend you use this is to tell Google that you are the author of the content.
Essentially, when it's set up, any new posts you add to your site will
automatically be tagged in Google with you as the author. Then if someone does
steal your work, Google knows who the real author/owner is, and rewards you in
its search results pages.
The final option on this page is 'Search Engine Visibility'. When some people
develop a website, they want it to be finished before the search engines come to
spider the site. This option allows you to do just that. By checking the box,
your website will basically tell the search engines to ignore it until you decide
the time is right, and uncheck this option.
I recommend you leave this box unchecked from the start, that's unless you have
good reason to not want the content indexed as you create it. As I add content to
a website, I want Google to find and index it as soon as possible. If they see new
content being added over a short period of time, they’ll know the site is under
construction and needs to be spidered more regularly so as to keep their index up
to date. By leaving this option unchecked, you are encouraging the search
engine spiders to crawl your site, and that's a good thing.
6.4 Discussion Settings
The Discussion Settings refer to the commenting system built into WordPress.
Google likes to see visitor interaction on a website, so this is an important part of
your WordPress SEO, and so you’ll want to keep the comments enabled.
At the top of these settings, you will see:
These boxes should all be left checked.
The first option means WordPress will try to send a notification to any blog you
link to in your posts. This lets a site owner know you have linked to them, and
can sometimes result in a link back.
The second option is the first one in reverse. If someone links to your site, then
WordPress will notify you so that you can see who's linking to you. This has
been abused by spammers and you will get a lot of false positives here, but
you’ll still get these even if you disable this option.
The final option simply tells WordPress to allow visitors to comment on your
posts. This is what we want – visitor participation.
The 'Other comment settings' section has a few more options:
Check the first box so that anyone leaving a comment must enter a name and an
email address.
The second box should be unchecked unless you are creating some kind of
membership site where people need to register in order to participate.
Leave the third box unchecked too, unless there is a reason why you want to
close comments on older posts. I personally like to keep comments open
indefinitely, and if there is a post where I want to close them, I can do that in the
'Edit Post' screen, just for that one post.
The fourth checkbox will enable nested comments. This is something that not
only makes the comments look better, but more intuitive for your visitors. This is
because replies to a specific comment will be nested under the original, and this
in turn makes following the conversation much easier.
The next option allows you to spread comments across pages once you get over
a certain number of remarks on the main post page. This is a good idea if your
site gets a lot of comments, because the more you have, the longer the page will
take to load. If you anticipate a lot of comments, enable this option. You can
also specify here whether you want comments to be shown with the oldest or
newest first. I personally think it makes more sense to have older comments at
the top. That way, the comments are chronological, but this is a personal
preference.
Next on this page is the 'E-mail me whenever' settings. Do you want to be
notified when someone comments on a post? If so, make sure that option is
checked. I recommend you check this so that you get instant notifications of any
new comments posted on your site. This means you get to reply quickly. Fast
responses to comments are important, and it makes the visitor feel that you care.
Practising good interaction means there's a much better chance the commenter
will come back and visit your site again.
The second email option is to notify you when a comment is held for
moderation. You can uncheck this, because in a moment we will tell WordPress
to hold ALL comments for moderation, and we are already getting notified every
time someone posts a comment anyway.
In the 'Before a comment appears' section, check the first box, and uncheck the
second.
This will force ALL comments to appear in a moderation queue, and will only
go live on your site once you approve them.
This means the next couple of settings in the 'Comment Moderation' section
are irrelevant, since ALL comments are now held for moderation. We can
therefore ignore that section.
NOTE: Moderating comments might sound like a lot of work, but it is essential.
If you have your site set up to auto-approve comments, you pages will end up
full of spam remarks, and all kinds of gobbledegook. Needless to say that would
take a lot more time cleaning up than moderating comments.
The 'Comment Blacklist' is a good way to fight spam. You can include email
addresses, IP addresses, and certain words in the box. If a comment matches any
of those lines, it is automatically marked as spam. If I end up getting a lot of
spam comments from a particular IP address, I usually add that to this list as
well.
You can also search Google for a “WordPress comment blacklist” which will get
you started. Just add one item per line, and save your changes when done.
The final section on the Discussion Settings relates to the use of “Avatars”.
An Avatar is a small image of the author. If the author of a comment has a
Gravatar (http://gravatar.com/) assigned to the email address, and they use that
same email to leave a comment, then that Gravatar is shown as their avatar.
I recommend you check 'Show Avatars'. I think this helps the comment section
become more active, since visitors to your site can see little photos of real people
leaving remarks. Site visitors like to know who they are dealing with, a face
behind the name as it were, so these images help instil confidence and help gain
site credibility.
I would recommend you check the 'G' rating, so the avatars on your site should
be suitable viewing for all ages.
Also, select 'Blank' for the default avatar. Avatars take time to load, thus
increasing the page load time. With blank selected, if a person does not have a
Gravatar setup, no image is loaded for that person.
6.5. Media Settings
While the settings here allow us to determine the maximum sizes of images in
posts, I recommend you do that manually on a post by post basis at the time you
create them. Therefore, there are no specific settings in the Media Settings
section that we need to change for SEO purposes.
6.6 Permalinks Settings
The Permalink settings are important, because whatever you enter here will
influence the way the URLs are displayed for the pages on your website.
The default WordPress setting will produce URLs like this:
Mydomain.com/?p=123
The '?p=123' parameter in this URL is simply a call for the page with Page ID =
123. This is not very useful for visitors, it looks ugly, and it's certainly not
helpful to search engines.
A lot of people will use the 'post name' option, which uses the post title in the
URL. Actually it uses the post 'slug' which is the portion of the URL that
represents the post. But by default that will be the post title unless you change it.
For example, if you had a post called 'Liverpool win in Istanbul', then the URL
for that post would look like this:
Mydomain.com/Liverpool-win-in-istanbul
Note that capitals are stripped out, as well as some other characters like
apostrophes.
There is a problem that I read about with this permalink structure. Basically, as
the site gets larger, WordPress struggles to locate the post if it only has the post
'slug' (filename), to go on. It therefore takes longer to load pages. In order to fix
this problem, you need to add in either the page ID, or the category into the
permalink. I actually recommend you use a permalink that contains the category
anyway, so even if this wasn't an issue with the latest WordPress, I'd still
recommend you choose 'Custom Structure' and enter the following as your
permalink structure:
%category%%postname%/
Here it is in my settings:
Now the URL of any page will include the category and filename of the post. A
typical URL for a post might look like this:
Mydomain.com/dog-breeds/alsatians
So in this case, the post filename is 'Alsatians', and the post is in the 'dog breeds'
category.
IMPORTANT:
With Google's Panda and Penguin looking for what Google calls 'webspam', we
need to be very careful about choosing the correct category names for our site,
especially if we are including the category in the URL.
For example, if your site is called mydietreviews.com, and you had a category
called 'diets', then a URL might look like this:
mydietreviews.com/diets/hollywood-diet/
This URL has the word 'diet' in it three times. That could well be seen as
keyword stuffing and should be avoided. If you think that this type of situation
will arise on your site with the categories you have chosen, then play it safe and
use this alternative permalink:
%post_id%%postname%/
Post_id is replaced with the ID of the post (basically an integer number that is
assigned to a post at the time you publish it). Your URL may then look like:
mydietreviews.com/1045/hollywood-diet/
A URL like this appears is a little less spammy, yet includes the page_id which
helps WordPress locate the page faster.
At the bottom of the common settings, there are some optional choices:
To understand what these options do, I need to tell you how WordPress assigns
the URL for category pages and tag pages. Essentially, every category page will
have the word 'category' in the URL, and every tag page will have the word 'tag'
in the URL. Therefore, using the examples above, the category page URL would
look like this:
mydietreviews.com/category/diets/
This category page will then show all the posts in the diets category.
Similarly, a tag page URL would look something like this:
mydietreviews.com/tag/fat-loss/
Any posts on your site that were tagged with the term 'fat loss' would be listed
on this page.
OK, back to category base and tag base settings. These will replace the word
'category' or 'tag' in these URLs, with whatever you specify here.
If you set the category base to be 'abracadabra', then the category URL would
become:
mydietreviews.com/abracadabra/diets/
Before Panda and Penguin, category and tag bases were used to keyword stuff
the URLs. Today, leave them blank as they will only get your site into trouble.
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