7 Common Wordpress Seo Mistakes And Their Easy Solutions

photo credit: magerleagues

1. Problem: The homepage doesn’t target a specific keyword combination that people actually search for.

Solution: Add specific keywords to the homepage title, use a plugin like ALL in One SEO Pack to rewrite the default wordpress titles.  If you don’t know any specific keyword phrases offhand that also sound good to use for marketing purposes try keyword research.  An easy starting place is:  https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

2. Problem:  The homepage, posts, or pages are missing header tags (most importantly the h1 tag) or they’re not targeting the same keywords as the title tag for that page/post.

Solution:   Some themes do not use the h1 tag properly or at all.  Add an h1 tag with the page title in it somewhere on the post and page templates.  Usually this is put first before the content begins.  Also in some themes the main blog title is always the h1 and the posts are h2, this is not the way I setup the semantic markup, but it is a ‘correct’ alternative.

3.  Problem:  All of the various sections (pages, posts, categories,  archives) do not have unique meta tags and/or h1 tags

Solution:  Every page on your website needs DIFFERENT meta tags, a unique title, description and keyword tag.   There are wordpress plugins which will help you do this automatically by using the content in the posts / pages themselves again see the All in One SEO Pack Wordpress Plugin.

Additionally it would be beneficial if each page contained a 4 word exact keyword phrase in the title tag and also on the page in the h1 tag.  You can use any keyword research tool to find exact phrases.  A free one that gives information on google’s searches is located here:  https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

4.     Problem:  Too many links to unimportant sections on the front page

Solution: Please  reduce the amount of links on your front page.  I would try to keep that number below 40 and for your site we would personally recommend only 20.  (more pages dilute the “importance value” of each page, since your site has no page rank and a high amount of posts and pages which Google will not return in the main results.  Google will only rank a limited number of posts and pages from a low pr website, so it’s better to push the most important parts of your site and have those link to the less important pages / sections).   One easy way to do this is with a simplified front page before they get hit with links to every single section of the site.

5.    Problem: No  alternative text tags on images so the search engines can’t tell what keywords to associate with the image.

Solution:  Make sure to add an alternate description to each image you upload using the visual editor.  Alternatively think about using time saving plugins like Photodropper which insert photos with alt text and credits right from the editor itself.

6.    Problem:  Duplicate content - You have content available elsewhere on the web in your site.  This can hurt rankings as search engines only like to rank the same content once.

Solution:  Please exclude that file in your robots.txt file, or add a <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX” /> tag to the header of those specific sections of the site.

7.       Problem: The site contains structure errors are in the actual html and css.

Solution:  Although it’s not important It’s not important for rankings that your site validate perfectly, but any major errors should be fixed - Run your site through http://validator.w3.org/ and fix any major structure errors.

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