X SEO mistakes to Avoid for a WordPress Website

Once you’ve set up your WordPress site, you’ll want to start working on moving it up in Google’s searches. One of those ways is to set up a strategy to for search engine optimization, or SEO. There are some early mistakes you’ll want to avoid as you get off the ground. The good news is that many of these are easily avoidable.

Avoid These SEO Mistakes

Here are some of the most common SEO mistakes, including how they hurt your website.

Posting Poor Quality Content

Did you make a lot of content in advance to throw up onto your site all at once? While having a lot of content on your website can help your website rank in search engines, it’s quality that really counts. Don’t post content for the sake of filling up your blog or targeting a certain keyword. Treat every piece of content as if you were telling an interested customer about the topic of the content. This supports an excellent user experience. Even if you post only one well-written piece of content each week, you’ll help yourself more than posting several poorly-written pieces each day.

Not Providing Text Versions of Rich Media on Your Website

Rich media is anything that includes video and audio or some other interactive element—basically, anything that’s not text. This type of media is exciting and engaging, but it can potentially cause some issues. Search engine crawlers cannot read information from rich media easily. This is why the alt tag is your friend.

The alt tag is an HTML tag that tells the browser to render some text when a piece of rich media can’t be loaded. Google loves alt tags, and so do users who use screen readers. Images have alt tag support built in. Video and other forms of rich content will need some research.

Not Fixing Broken Links

Broken links are those that return a 404 error, which is the internet message for a page that doesn’t exist. These negatively affect your search engine optimization efforts because search bots are unable to crawl your website efficiently. If they can’t crawl your site, they can’t index well. It also ruins your user experience, which is important in the eyes of Google. If your website is riddled with broken links, Google will rank it low. You can find more about SEO here.

Go through your website to make sure that your links lead where you want them to and not to an error page. It won’t boost your rank immediately, but it will get better over time. There are several WordPress plugins that will check for broken links.

Not Using the Yoast SEO Tool

The Yoast SEO Tool is like an SEO pro housed on your site. It’s exceptionally beneficial for individuals who have little to no foundational understanding of SEO. Even if you don’t pay for the premium version of Yoast SEO Tool, you’ll still get a lot of insight and ability to tweak your site so your rank rises up. And it’s user-friendly, set up in a stoplight-type fashion, green means you’re good for SEO!

This tool breaks articles down in terms of Readability and SEO per keyword (limited to one keyword in the free version.) Readability checks for aspects such as how the copy does on the Flesch Reading Ease test, the amount of copy, and length of sentences. For SEO, it looks at your keyword score (how often the focus keyword was used and where), how much copy was written, and use of internal and outbound links. You can quickly add meta descriptions and adjust the slug (the link’s name). And if a lot of that went over your head, there are a ton of tutorials out there for using this plugin. Why not start with Yoast’s?

Not Internally Linking with Relevant Anchor Text

A must for search engine optimization is internal links. Internal links tell search engines the structure of your website. When you post a new blog, it should contain links to one or two other relevant blog posts—such as ones that explain an idea or provide more background information on your topic. And when linking to this posts, you need to think about the anchor text you’re going to use. The anchor text is text on which you click in a hyperlink (in this case, “anchor text”). For best results, it must be relevant to the link (the link leads to an article titled “What is Anchor Text?”) so that the reader has an expectation of what they will see.

You need to be mindful of how many links you create. Using too many links or using the same anchor text in many different places throughout a site can cause your ranking to drop. Language is flexible! Spice it up a bit.

Check Your Website Now

Now that you have an idea of five of the most common search engine optimization errors, it’s time to check your website. The first thing you’ll want to do is install the Yoast SEO Tool Plugin (if you haven’t done so already); it will help make your job a lot easier. Checking your website will be a tedious process, but it’s absolutely necessary. Go through your blog posts and use the Yoast Tool to optimize your blog posts. At this time you’ll want to delete poorly written content or re-write it. Also add internal links if you haven’t, then check for broken links with a WordPress plugin. Finally, add alternate text versions of your rich media.

Once all these tasks are done, you’re well on your way to having a more optimized website. Now it will just take time to see your rank improve!

Author

Chris Hickman is the Founder and CEO at Adficient with 15 years of experience in search marketing and conversion optimization. Since 2006, he founded GetBackonGoogle.com, helping businesses and websites suspended in Adwords to Get Back on Google