Tweaking Your WP Settings For S.E. Karma

There’s no 2 ways about it – the tweaks you make to your basic Wordpress blog ( Permalinks, Privacy, Discussion rules etc.) can make all the difference to your blog in the eyes of the Search Engines. Using the recommended plugins ditto…

But, oh unenlightened one, if you cannot even be bothered to set up a decent theme or two  and  pre-install some funky plugins for me then you are the China to my exploited Tibet – and we are just not going to see eye to eye – hence, No Swap!

But here’s the thing – all those tweaks, plugins ( paid or otherwise) need to be re-uploaded and re-installed to every blog every time and their settings re-changed/tweaked. This was a pain for me – especially after Blog Swap #10 so I’m an advocate of WP Cloner for those of you who are into this in a serious way.

If you’re just swapping half a dozen blogs or less then, in my opinion, you don’t need it but if you’re serious about building a real blog network it’s a massive time saver.

For a starter, what a nice welcome for your new blog swapper to see that Akismet has already been activated with your Wordpress.com API key! No skin off your nose right? Just had a second thought on this and would now suggest you remover your API key just before transferring, new user can add their key to re-activate, as Wordpress does suggest you never share your API key.

Next I make sure that Permalinks have been set to something search engine friendly such as:

Others may tell you otherwise, and that’s cool, be these are my preferred settings and have worked OK so far for me. You’ll note that I don’t use these settings in THIS blog but that’s because I’m not too interested in it ranking in Search Engines as I expect it to be more a viral, word of mouth thing for those clued up enough to see the possibilities. ( That’s you by the way, you smart sausage you!)

Another setting, recently brought to my attention and in my view good for automated content blogs, might be: /%category%/%postname%/ as it’s getting your main keyword in the category.

Now, re the All In One SEO plugin these are my preferred settings:

and, continued:

As I’ve said before – these are MY preferred settings and I’m not saying that they’re the best, or better than anyone elses, BUT if you are not familiar with WP tweaks you could do a worse I reckon!

I also like to add a nice big PING list in Settings > Writing. Here’s a link to the one I use. Just cut and paste it in. I’d suggest adding this after you’ve done a Caffeinated Press run as otherwise you’ll be pinging WAY too much and often.

Or you could get the free MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer plugin which allows you to enable/disable pinging via a check box.

All the above settings and a few more ( re SE Loophole recommendations) are already in place if you are swapping with me !