WordPress blogging is one of the most popular ways to get a website or blog online. This is due to the fact that 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 could make that could ruin your chances of ranking high in search engines. With this in mind, we’ve shown you some of the biggest SEO mistakes you could make in WordPress, so read on.
Why SEO is so important
Everyone who creates a website wants that site to get millions of visitors every month. Many would be happy with a few thousand each month to start. However, first, you need to make your site stand out and you can do that by making it appear in Google search.
Unfortunately, this is not as easy as it sounds, as you 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 is important not to spoil it. 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 that you have copied and pasted from other websites, is a big no-no in Google’s eyes and can hurt your search engine ranking for a long time.
Another reason you shouldn’t copy and paste content is that you could have a day in court and be sued for plagiarism.
Not only should you 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 as a bad light.
Hire a professional copywriter to write unique, high-quality content for you, and you’ll increase your chances of landing coveted first page search spots.
Can Google track your website?
One of the reasons why your blog or site might not be ranked in 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 site crawling” is not checked.
There may also be an issue with the robots.txt file that is preventing search engines like Google from crawling your site, so check this or ask your webmaster to do it for you.
Monitor website health issues
Google provides a free tool for you to check the status of your website and discover a host of things, including the number of indexed web pages. It also tells you if there is a problem with your website and you can find information on how to fix it.
Keeping an eye on this is essential as many people don’t take advantage of this free tool and this is one of the big SEO mistakes you can make.
Meta tags are important to your SEO
Meta tags are a very important part of your SEO strategy and should not be overlooked.
Creating meta tags will prevent Google from automatically assigning them based on queries, which can lead to your site being mismatched and missing correct query searches.
