WordPress SEO The Ultimate Guide to WordPress SEO Settings

WordPress was originally designed for online publishing, so it’s inherently SEO friendly, with a substantial set of built-in tools for managing WordPress SEO Settings easily and quickly from the Settings menu on the site’s Admin dashboard.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a must for getting traffic to your blog or website. Making a new site search-friendly can be a challenge, though—especially for those without a lot of web development experience.

5 Essential Settings within WordPress

Learn how to optimize your blog posts or website content with these simple settings.

1. Setting Site Title and Tagline

WordPress themes come with the option to customize the site’s title and tagline within the Settings > General. Keywords should be saved for the title tags & meta descriptions as those are seen in the SERPs (search engine results). The tagline is a brief description of what your business is about. These are general settings and not page specific.

2. Managing Visibility Settings

In some cases, you might not want your site to be visible to search engines, such as when it’s still under construction or undergoing a makeover. But forgetting to uncheck the visibility settings means the site will remain invisible and can be indexed by Google.

3. Customizing Permalinks

Each post and page on a WordPress site has a custom URL, but the default one consists of a collection of numbers and isn’t particularly search-friendly. From Settings, select Permalinks and select “post name” to create a custom permalink structure that includes keywords from any blog post or page title.

4. Setting Up the Web Address

In earlier days, every web address began with “www.” Now, that isn’t necessarily so, but many people still search for websites using this prefix, so having it as part of the website name could improve the site’s visibility in search. SEO settings in WordPress allow users to choose whether their domain will display the www or non-www version of your site’s URL. From Settings>General and add your preferred URL to “Web Address” and “Site Address.”

5. Setting Image Data for Search

Customizing these settings presents more opportunities to add searchable keywords that can be accessed by search crawlers.