WordPress blogs are one of the most popular ways to put a website or blog online. This is because there are thousands of plugins and themes to download, many of them free. While WordPress is easy to get started with, there are mistakes you can make that could ruin your chances of ranking high in search engines. With this in mind, we show you some of the biggest SEO mistakes you could make in WordPress, so read on.
Why SEO is so important
Everyone who builds a website wants that site to receive millions of visitors each month. Many would be happy with a few thousand each month when they are just starting out. First though, you need to make your site stand out and you can do this by getting it listed in Google search.
Unfortunately, this is not as easy as it sounds, as you do have competitors after all, unless you have a totally unique product or service. SEO is a way to rank your website on Google, so it’s important not to mess it up. With this in mind, you’ll want to avoid the SEO mistakes below.
Avoid duplicate written content like the plague
Putting duplicate written content on your website is one of the biggest SEO mistakes you can make.
Duplicate content, which means content you’ve copied and pasted from other websites, is a big no-no in the eyes of Google and can hurt your search engine rankings for a long time.
Another reason why you shouldn’t copy and paste content is that you could have a day in court and be sued for plagiarism.
You should not only make sure that all the content on your website is unique, but you should also try to avoid duplicate H1 tags. Again, Google sees this in a bad light.
Hire a professional copywriter to write unique, high-quality content for you and increase your chances of landing coveted spots on the first page of search.
Can Google crawl your website?
One of the reasons why your blog or site might not rank on Google is that the search engine is having trouble crawling your site.
If you have your site hosted on WordPress, make sure the box that says “Discourage sites from tracking” is not checked.
There may also be a problem with the robots.txt file that prevents search engines like Google from crawling your site, so check this out or have your webmaster do it for you.
Monitor issues with website health
Google provides a free tool for you to check the status of your website and find out a whole host of things, including the number of web pages indexed. It also tells you if there are any problems with your website and you can find information on how to fix those problems.
Keeping an eye on this is essential as many people don’t take advantage of this free tool and this is one of the biggest SEO mistakes you can make.
Meta tags are important for your SEO
Meta tags are a very important part of your SEO strategy and should not be overlooked.
By creating meta tags, you prevent Google from automatically assigning them based on queries, which can cause your site to not match and miss out on searches for correct queries.