WordPress 24-Hour Trainer, 3rd Edition

Lesson 31Optimizing Behind the Scenes

The previous lesson talked about optimizing your content in ways that help increase your rankings in the search engines. Now, it's time to look at behind the scenes settings that affect how search engines rank your site, as well as how to monitor your site statistics to see how well your SEO and marketing efforts are paying off.

Optimizing Admin Settings

A number of settings in WordPress have an effect on the way search engines see your site.

Search Engine Visibility

When you first installed WordPress, you had the option of making your site visible to search engines, which was a good idea to keep it hidden until you were finished building it. Now, it's time to unblock your site, which you do under Settings&cmdarr;Reading, as shown in Figure 31.1 A.

Figure 31.1

If you forget to uncheck this box, search engines will not index your new site. Most good SEO plugins warn you if you forget, as shown in Figure 31.1 B.

Site Title

Another admin setting that's important is your Site Title under Settings&cmdarr;General. Even if you use a graphic in your header instead of the default text title that many WordPress themes use, this Site Title setting remains important because, as mentioned in Lesson 30, “Optimizing Your Content,” it's used by most WordPress themes when creating the HTML Title tag, which, in turn, displays at the top of your browser ...