Wordpress tip - Set page order for Pages on blog

If you have Pages in your wordpress.com site, not blog posts but the static pages, you should set the page order for them.

This is a little tab at the bottom on the right of the edit page. But default this is '0' Zero so they sort alphabetically. This can be fine, but as I found when I set one of these pages to be the homepage of a blog, as the site uses it for their main site and do not blog much yet. I found that if I change the name away from 'About the restaurant' the first page is no longer the first link in the menu.

I could not think of a better A word to start with and had added restaurant to my usual 'About us' title for SEO but now I find that because the site title is not the first words in the title it does not come up first in Google.

In google it ranks the words closest to the start of the title or header more, so you want your company name first on the homepage. But this should not be first on your other pages they should have page title and then site title. As then you get blocked the other way because all your titles can look the same to google as they all start the same. On Wordpress they do have the page title followed by the site title which Blogger does not, but I can not change it for the home page.

All this brought me back to searching 'the black rat restaurant' in Google and the site now comes 3rd for what is really it's own url! now it is not so bad because it is a victim of my own success as the first places are this blog and another site with a review of the restaurant. But the site could be loosing traffic as people may not click from these 2 sites through to the main one.

This is when I noticed the page order option and by setting the order of all the top level pages I can have the homepage first in the list but name it 'The Black Rat' rather that about and then I get first in the google listings I hope ;) I'll look next week and see.

My only thought now to further fix it is dropping the 'The' as that is a stop word even being part of the actual name. Think I'll test and see...