You should already be aware of blogging basics and you're about to start getting traffic off of your your blog. You must decide on your content topic, focus on keyword density, write and publish your post, ping your social and bookmarking sites and then forward it to your list. Then the search engines identify your blog, increase your SEO rankings and you magically get millions of people to your site within hours. If only it really worked that quickly. But did you know that some of the settings on your blog can be hurting your SEO, making it harder for you to get free traffic?

We'll discuss some of the problems with the settings on your blog that you should adjust so that you're getting the most out of your blog as you can.

Settings For Your Permalinks

Most blogs come out of the box using numbers for the end of the permalink. i.e. domainname.com/?7890 Are you aware of how important these kinds of numbers are to Google? They are useless. You want to adjust this so the keyword you're targeting (which should be part of your post name) is part of the permalink. The settings on your blog must be fixed so the numbers are replaced by the title of your post. Pay attention - if your blog is older you will have to install a new plugin before you change your settings. The plugin (Redirection 2.1.25 - John Goodley) will let you move your older permalinks to the SEO improved links. When viewing the permalinks (that is now the post name) you should also make it more streamlined. The major search engines prefer short permalinks so you should remove the generic words. You should end up with a short permalink, has your targeted keyword in it and makes sense if someone reads it.

Canonical URL?

Are you aware that the major search engines can often see your site/blog as two different sites? You can get to websites on the internet two ways. You can use the "www." or you can leave it off by using http://. The search engines think these are two different sites. Hopefully you are aware that this will hurt your rankings. Doesn't it make sense to have every one of the links and visitors to be seen on just one website versus splitting between "two"? It's extremely critical that this is fixed. One of your options is to use the tools on Google Webmaster. You just update the settings for canonical URL. Another option is to use a plugin to force traffic to one of the sites. The plugin I mentioned above (Redirection) can handle this.

Duplicate Content

Almost all blogs are set up based on the idea that you intend people to locate content in your website as many ways as possible. Visitors think this is awesome, search engines think it's really bad. In addition to the post name, blogs also frequently search by date, author, tag and category. Google will probably think of this as duplicated content. They hate this. To keep these search options available to your readers, you need to update your blog settings. You need to tell the search engines to not index these pages. A plugin called Install Robots Meta - Joost DeValk will do this if the theme you are using won't allow the customization.

These are only a couple of your settings you will want to check when you set up your blog. There are many, many more out there. Make sure you look for these. Find them, fix them, and get more out of your blog... automatically.