WordPress is bigger than most people think – it runs 15% of the world’s websites, according to a 2012 article in Forbes magazine. You can have great Google ranking success with WordPress. To power your website with the WordPress CMS system doesn’t make it amateurish. It does compromise a website’s ranking ability, though, to simply use the default settings that it comes with. If you are doing your own business website on the WordPress platform, you need to make sure to change a few things around.
The basic defaults
When WordPress is first installed, it comes with a couple of sample pages with well-recognized lines. The front page is titled Sample Page and has the words Hello World. To have these default pages appear anywhere on your website brands you as amateurish. You need to go to the View All Pages/Posts area and delete the defaults.
If your default content appears in a default WordPress category called Uncategorized, that’s a sign of an unprofessional approach too.
Tweaking the Permalinks
WordPress offers you a number of ways to create custom URLs for each page that you create. Unfortunately, the default WordPress way isn’t good for SEO. Google offers some advice on its Webmaster Tools page for how you should create a URL to allow Google’s spiders to index your page efficiently.
According to Google, you should make sure that the text in your URLs reflects what the page is about. The default URL generation method on WordPress, though, simply assigns numbers and other text. You can easily go to the Settings and change the Permalink generation method to follow post names.
Making sure your pages are indexed as quickly as possible by Google
Google has millions of new webpages to index each day. When you add a new page to your WordPress website, it could potentially take Google days to get around to indexing it.
WordPress offers you a few ways to speed things up. If your web pages could appear on important content aggregator websites that are frequently indexed by Google, you could be assured of a spot on Google’s index. The General Settings page on the WordPress Dashboard offers you a number of aggregator choices – FeedBurner, Technorati and BlogSearch, among others.
Is yours a blog or a website?
While WordPress can easily be used as a content management system for websites, it is essentially set up as a blogging platform by default. When you first set up WordPress on your hosting account, for instance, it places the blog on the front page – with posts appearing one on top of the other.
Luckily, you also have the option to choose the website look – with a homepage that always stays the way it is. It’s easy to do this. You just need to go to Settings on your Dashboard and then Reading Settings. Here, you see the choice to either have your latest posts appear on the front page or a static page.
Choosing a static homepage is great for SEO as it helps with a possible duplicate content problem and even with problems to do with getting indexed.
