The Most Common Onsite WordPress SEO Mistakes:-As we all knows WordPress is well optimized for search engines but it isn’t perfect. There are various onsite SEO mistakes that user makes. Specifically WordPress site needs help in two areas:
- Additional functionality in form of advanced SEO plugins such as Yoast SEO.
- Effective application of onsite SEO features.
In short you are only responsible for optimizing your WordPress site for search engines. If you’re not following SEO basics any widgets or plugins that you have installed will be of little use. Keeping this in mind we have created our today’s post with most common SEO mistakes along with guidance to how to avoid them.
- Not Optimizing your Permalinks:- permalink is good for two things:
- Giving visitors indication of what the page represents
- Indicate relevancy to search engine.
You may ensure that your permalinks structure is defined correctly through backend Settings. After setting up your permalink structure you have to make sure that each of your post permalinks are optimized for specific keyword that you are targeting.
- Not Optimizing your post’s SERP’s presentation:- because of a lot reasons I would love to consider Yoast SEO plugin so invaluable is its pages/posts optimization options. If you haven’t optimized your pages, posts by filling up SEO fields provided by Yoast SEO plugin. You’re missing out few important optimization tricks.
- Focus keyword:- this will allow you to assess how well optimized your pages/posts as whole for primary keyword.
- SEO Title:- this enables you to adjust your meta title to be search engine friendly.
- Meta Description:- it allows you to build manual description for your page/post. This will displays in SERP as well as in other places.
- Poor Interlinking:-there are a number of benefits to link between blog posts on your website. This may includes links like lower bounce rates or increase user engagements. But for SEO purpose we concerned with relevant links. In simple words, if google sees that you are linking with relevant pages within your site. They better understand your site’s relevancy to particular topic.
- Poor External Linking:- Although it seems unreasonable, you can positively affect your SERP ranking by linking to relevant and authoritative sites. This is for the following reasons:
- Relevancy factor as discussed in interlinking section.
- Google like to see refer to others
- Poor Image Optimization:- when it comes to Common SEO mistakes, most often is poor image optimization. Search engines can’t consider text in image form. That’s where alt & title tag come in.
- Poorly Structured Headers:- HTML headers provide google context pertaining to relevancy of your site. Content written within header tags are weighted more heavily than those contained within main content of your site. This is axiomatically important that you include relevant keywords within header tags whenever possible. But it’s also important that your headers are structured appropriately.
- Instructing Search Engines to Index Too Much:- a lot of people make mistakes of thinking that Google will crawl & index their entire site whereas Google crawl entire site but not index all posts/pages. In reality you don’t want Google to crawl all of your content –only the stuff that is worth ranking. Anything else is superfluous & does you no advantage being in Google index. Specifically pages includes:
- Unused taxonomy/archive pages
- Privacy policy
- Legal disclaimers
- Not proving an XML sitemap:- an sitemap is by no means important but not providing for search engines is like giving complicated directions to someone. It’s not easier for search engines if you tell them what should index.
- Focusing on Meta Keywords:- this is complete waste of time because Google doesn’t consider meta keywords when ranking websites. Meta keywords historically be used by spammers to such an extent that Google now apportions to give no value to them. So if you are still using Meta keywords then stop using it.
- Duplicate Content:- many people always tell you that duplicate or pirated content is your Worst enemy. If Google sees your published content is available elsewhere it will unleash holy hell on your website until there is nothing left than garble HTML. In reality this is not true always. Google doesn’t penalize site for using duplicate content. Instead if it see two webpages with largely same content. It will try to figure out which was the original publisher of the content. Then it will give the priority to that page in search results over other.
For deep understanding you can visit on page optimization guide here.