The term SEO was first coined in the year 1997 by John Audette of a company called MMG WebStep Services. It was listed as a part of several services that were offered on their website.
The SEO service package offered link development, online advertising, and writing and submitting press releases. Interestingly, many digital marketing companies offer the same services today.
The truth is that the core of SEO has not changed since the last 29 years. To simply put it in a nutshell, SEO is all about finding out what people want and creating authority content that satisfies the user intent.
On average 33% of the clicks go to the web page that ranks 1st on search engines. That’s where you want to be if you want your brand to be found.
You can’t rely on your awesome content alone to get ranked on Google. You need to know how to optimize your content for search engines.
In this post we are going to talk about how simple mistakes in WordPress can have a devastating effect on your rankings.
So without further ado, here are the 6 common WordPress SEO mistakes.
1. Don’t check on the Discourage search engines box
This is the easiest way to destroy your search rankings, just one click and poof, you just made your site disappear from the search results.
This checkbox is located in the WordPress settings tab and is labeled “discourage search engines from indexing this site”. This doesn't explain a lot about what it does and it often leads to newbies checking the box.
Even veteran WordPress users check it regularly just to be sure they haven’t accidentally checked the box.
If you find your rankings dropping overnight then this would be a good place to start looking for answers.
2. Avoid having complex URLs
Google prefers content that is user friendly and having a complex URL is the opposite of it. Your URL structure plays an important part in ranking your pages on Google and other search engines. This is why you should keep your URLs as simple as possible.
Lets face it, you wouldn’t want to click on a URL that looks like this, www.example.com/#?123p=3.
It is ideal to always have your target keyword in your URL. This makes it easier for the visitor to know what to expect in the content and what the page is about.
Your URLs should also not be too long. It’s best to have short URLs consisting of no more than 4-5 words.
To simplify your URLs simply go to settings > permalinks in your WordPress dashboard and selecting a permalink that has keywords. The easiest way to do this is to select “post name” and let WordPress take care of the rest.
3. Don’t have more than one Sitemaps
Sitemaps act as a literal map of your website and are essential in ranking your pages. They help search engines understand and navigate your website.
Sitemaps don’t have to be complex if you have a simple site. Larger sites, like an ecommerce store, might require a more complex sitemap but you don’t have to create a sitemap manually you can use Yoast or any other WordPress plugin to create one.
Here’s the thing though, if you are using a SEO plugin then you might already have a sitemap. If you then use a sitemap specific tool then you will have two sitemaps. This can only be considered okay if one Sitemap is for the users (HTML) and the other one is for search engines (XML).
If you are sitemaps are drastically different from one another then that can cause serious problems.
Let’s say that you decided to add all your awesome new content into the new sitemap that you created but Google might still be looking at your old sitemap and ignoring the new content that you worked so hard on.
Not cool.
Luckily, this can be fixed by using Google's sitemap report tool. You can find out which sitemap Google is crawling and add your content there.
Sitemaps are essential for every website as long as you only have one.
5. Not Mobile friendly
It should not come as a surprise that the mobile usage has outpaced desktop usage. Google took note of this back in 2015 when they launched a new search algorithm update which was termed as #mobilegeddon by the SEO community.
Since that update, Google is now looking at your mobile site to judge if it's reliable and useful. Even though all WordPress themes are mobile friendly, there are also other factors involved.
I admit that this is a lot of work, but imagine putting all the hard work in starting a blog only to see it fail because it wasn’t mobile friendly.
Google has made the auditing process simple with their mobile friendly test. Plug in your URL in the bar and Google will show you how your page performs on mobile and how you can improve it.
As a site owner it is your responsibility to give your visitors a positive experience and by following the Google guidelines you can easily achieve this.
6. Don’t load all your content at once
When it comes to the web, the faster the better. Visitors get discouraged by slow loading websites. If that's not enough to emphasize page speed then you should know that Google also considers page speed a ranking factor. You can kiss your chances of ranking on Google goodbye if your site takes a long time to load.
Here is the real problem, as site owners we want to make our website as interactive as possible. For that we add videos, images, infographics, podcasts, and other things. But these elements take time to load and this affects your overall site speed.
So, how do we fix this?
The solution is fairly simple, just start using caching or lazy loading to load your site faster. There are a lot of plugins available in WordPress. Lazy loads the top feature right away and then loads the features that are further down later. This doesn’t make the visitor wait for the whole page to load.
7. Don’t publish heavy content on-site
Content like videos, audio files and larger images are classified as heavy content. These take a lot of time to load and can be infuriating for your audience. If you don’t want to get on the bad side of your audience then don't host these elements on your website.
Host these elements on other platforms and then embed them on your website with a simple code. For example, host all your videos on Youtube and use the embed code to share it with your audience. This will improve your load time while you keep all the cool elements that makes the visitor stick to your site.
Final Words
There you have it, the 7 most common WordPress SEO mistakes that people make. There are a lot of SEO plugins for WordPress that you can rely on. But these tools and plugins won’t do you any good if you don’t know about the hidden mistakes I have mentioned above.
The tools are just as good as the knowledge you have. I just suggest that you start brushing up on your on-page so that you can make most of the tools at your disposal.
Now that you know about some of the common on-page SEO mistakes it's time to focus on your off-page SEO so that you don’t leave any money on the table.