The settings of every post you published affect SEO whether you intentionally want them to or not. In this post you will discover how the 4 of them influences what Google do with our articles more-so as bloggers.
You might have heard or read about them before without really understanding their relationship to SEO. You will learn how to tailor your post to Google and your readers in few minutes.
Post settings are of 4 types. They include;
(i) Index
(ii) No index
(iii) Follow
(iv) No follow
I will explain them one after other. So pay maximum attention and grab this lesson for your benefit.
Starting with ‘Index’,
This means that Google or whatever search engine that are scanning the web every day, every hour and minutes looking for new materials to add to their indexed database of websites will include the article as a possible search result. That’s pretty simple!
Secondly,
‘No index’ is just the opposite of ‘Index’. I am sure you guessed it right. That is you don’t want Google to include an article in their search result yet. It could be that the page isn’t finished or you want to grant access to only people you personally send a private link to and hence you don’t want it indexed.
Thirdly,
‘Follow’, this basically has to do with links. When somebody links to you, like they have an article with a resource section and they put a link to your website. It kind of reflect a vote of confidence in your site. That is the url was valuable enough that they want their users to be able to continue learning more about that topic in your website.
Now when somebody links out to you they could do one or two things. They actually have the option to make it either ‘do follow’ or ‘no follow’. Now ‘do follow’ will provide you with SEO benefits. Here is concept, each website has it’s own amount of authority in Google’s eyes and they can send some of that authority to another website through links. So when you have someone’s link on your website and you make it ‘do follow’ you are going to pass some authority unto that website. Same thing applies when someone have your link on his/her website. Vice versa!
Lastly,
‘No follow’ on the other end doesn’t provide any SEO benefit. So the person who is linking to you is not going to pass any authority unto you. Though when people click on the link to your website they are still going to find your information there but it’s not going to help you in the search ranking.
So note that ‘Do follow’ is going to move your ranking up a little because of the perceived authority by search engines. So that is the differences between the four (4) post type settings. In the next section I am going to show you how to apply them practically even a combination of them is possible.
Here is how to apply these 4 post type settings on your WordPress blog.
• You need to download the ‘WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast’.
To do that, click on ‘Plugins’ at the left bar of your WordPress website.
Click on ‘Add New’.
Use the search bar to find ‘ WordPress seo by yoast’ and install it accordingly.
It should be the first one among the options. Because you will find other useful plugins by Yoast.
Go to ‘Plugins’ again and click on ‘Installed plugins’ this time. Search for the yoast SEO plugin and click on ‘settings’.
It is from the settings you can change options regarding index, no index, follow, no follow and basically the combination of them…You will soon discover the type of situations the four combination can be used for.
You can only use this feature of the ‘Yoast SEO’ when you are creating a new post or a new page.
The ‘Yoast SEO’ manager is located at the bottom of every post or pages. So when adding a post do scroll down to set these 4 settings for the best SEO condition based on what you want to achieve at that point in time.
Below is how the Yoast SEO interface looks
To adjust the post type settings simply click on the second menu item of the Yoast SEO
I do believe the above explanation of the 4 types of settings will enable to adjust the options favorably at any given condition. You can scroll up the article again to have a recap of the details on the 4 settings.
Once the post is updated the settings become active and influence the way search engines respond to the article.
Conclusion.
When you set a particular article to ‘Index’ using the drop down arrow in the above image that means you want Google to be able to put it in their database so that people can search and find it. Then if you select the ‘follow’ option then you want the links on that article to be able to provide benefits to whatever page they link to internally or externally.
This second condition is very sensitive as it has daily occurrence. Let’s say you have a form on your website whether a contact form or a comment form and people are dropping their links alongside their comment. You can simply decide to ‘index’ that page and select the ‘no follow’ option. So that people leaving spamming links on your website won’t have any benefit for their action.
Lastly, if your website is still under construction or a particular page you are working is not yet complete and you don’t want Google to start showing it to online searchers then your best option is ‘No index’ and ‘No follow’
Bonus tip: When so doing a sponsored post on any blog it best you negotiate with the blogger to make your content settings as ‘index’ and ‘follow’. WOW!
Every day, I’m grateful for a chance to share an idea, strategy or challenge with you. I appreciate the attention and your trust, it would be impossible to do this without you.
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