While WordPress and SEO go well together if done correctly, there are some common pitfalls to avoid after installing WP for the first time. Some of the pitfalls include not using an SEO plug-in, installing too many plug-ins, URLs that are not SEO-friendly and Duplicate Content. Here are more details about the top 4 common mistakes.
Not Using an SEO Plug-In
Some people with little SEO experience think that all you have to do is install WordPress, select a Theme and the rest will take care of itself. But, this is not so. You’ll need an SEO plug-in to help rank your webpages. My recommendation is the All in One SEO Pack at it is simple, yet powerful for creating per page titles and meta tags including the homepage. The Yoast SEO plug-in is not my favorite because of the red, yellow and green buttons it uses and some SEO assumptions it makes (but other SEO’s swear by it).
Installing Too Many Plug-ins
Since website speed is a ranking factor in Google, it is important to use a webhost with fast servers and in general, don’t install too many plug-ins. You may, however, want to install a single plug-in to help the loading time of your website like WP Total Cache, WP Super Cache or WP Super Simple Speed. Just don’t overdo it with dozens of plug-ins (I know it is tempting) as this can slow down a website considerably.
URLs That Are Not SEO-Friendly
Inside of WordPress under the Permanent Links settings are some common settings that can be used for the linking structure. The Post Name is probably the best of these predefined settings for SEO. But I recommend using the Custom Structure instead along with this info: /index.php/%category%/%postname%/ What this does is give a descriptive URL using both category and post name which helps Google to know what the webpage is about.
Duplicate Content
The Google Duplicate Content Penalty has been around for a few years now. And WordPress makes it pretty easy to serve up duplicate content to the search engines. Duplicate content can appear in posts, pages, archives, categories, tag archives, author archives, date archives, searches, etc. to name a few places. Using the All in One SEO Pack plug-in you can noindex many of these duplicate pages. In addition, if you only select one category for pages or posts this will help as well.
The above list of WordPress mistakes for SEO are very common. Of course, there are many more not listed here. Take care, be aware and please share these tips with others!
Hi Kevin
There is no doubt that almost every blogger or webmaster do these WordPress mistakes once in their life.
& These mistakes help them to learn something new again and again with time.
You have listed here almost all the major WordPress mistakes which bloggers do including me.
I have also did so many mistakes in my WordPress blog. I can remember when I started my 1st blog, I never created any BackUp of my WordPress site. One day, by mistake I deleted the database of my blog from Cpanel and It created a major issue in my site.
I didn’t knew anything about it so I started my blog again by re-installing the WordPress.
That was the unforgettable mistake because It contained hard work of almost 2 months and I completely losed it by deleting the database.
After that day, I always take complete BackUp of my each site.
Thanks for covering such a nice article so that people can learn about these mistakes and also can avoid them. 😀