There you are, pleased as punch that you have installed WordPress, added a great looking theme and have been working tirelessly adding loads of unique and compelling content.
You have been a slave to your stats and spend hours pouring over your analytics and yet those damn search engines have not sent you an ounce of traffic.
Even the mighty Google has not indexed your site.
You will spend hours pouring over your stats and checking all the things that you can think off.
Yet still no traffic, you may even start to worry that Google has banned you for some unknown reason You will no doubt do what I did and get really despondent and think that this bogging malarkey is a complete and utter waste of time.
Worse still you may have wasted a load of money on "get traffic quick" schemes and yet your blog is getting no traffic at all.
Yes, this happened to me in the early days of working with WordPress and I struggled for days to get to the bottom of this issue, yep even techies struggle with this stuff! Then I had one of those "You stupid idiot" moments, you know the one where you cant believe how stupid you have been, the answer was starring me in the face.
So here is the cause for your lack of traffic.
When you install WordPress or use the one-click install via your web host the chances are that the install will by default set your blog to be private and will in affect block search engines from indexing your site.
I am not sure if this is a default setting or just unique to my host, but every site that I have done has had this setting.
Thankfully the fix is easy.
Let The Traffic In- Go to your WordPress dashboard and go down to the settings menu and expand it.
You will then see various options one of which is the word Privacy.
Select the "Privacy option and then check the box marked "I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, technorati) and archivers" Then click the save changes button.
Changing this setting will ensure that all the search spiders will be able to index your site in their listings.
Clearly just changing this setting will suddenly open up a vast flood of search engine traffic, you will still need to work on both the on-page and off-page optimization, but it will start the ball rolling.
You have been a slave to your stats and spend hours pouring over your analytics and yet those damn search engines have not sent you an ounce of traffic.
Even the mighty Google has not indexed your site.
You will spend hours pouring over your stats and checking all the things that you can think off.
Yet still no traffic, you may even start to worry that Google has banned you for some unknown reason You will no doubt do what I did and get really despondent and think that this bogging malarkey is a complete and utter waste of time.
Worse still you may have wasted a load of money on "get traffic quick" schemes and yet your blog is getting no traffic at all.
Yes, this happened to me in the early days of working with WordPress and I struggled for days to get to the bottom of this issue, yep even techies struggle with this stuff! Then I had one of those "You stupid idiot" moments, you know the one where you cant believe how stupid you have been, the answer was starring me in the face.
So here is the cause for your lack of traffic.
When you install WordPress or use the one-click install via your web host the chances are that the install will by default set your blog to be private and will in affect block search engines from indexing your site.
I am not sure if this is a default setting or just unique to my host, but every site that I have done has had this setting.
Thankfully the fix is easy.
Let The Traffic In- Go to your WordPress dashboard and go down to the settings menu and expand it.
You will then see various options one of which is the word Privacy.
Select the "Privacy option and then check the box marked "I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, technorati) and archivers" Then click the save changes button.
Changing this setting will ensure that all the search spiders will be able to index your site in their listings.
Clearly just changing this setting will suddenly open up a vast flood of search engine traffic, you will still need to work on both the on-page and off-page optimization, but it will start the ball rolling.
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