5 Huge WordPress SEO Mistakes: Avoid Them at All Costs

If you’re about to launch your first WordPress website, congratulations. Running a website is an amazing adventure, and WordPress makes it so easy that just about anyone can do it. A website is nothing without traffic, though, so putting a website up and filling it with content is only part of the equation. The other part is search engine optimization or SEO.

SEO is the practice of optimizing the content on your website to make it as easy as possible for Google’s ranking algorithm to understand what your site is about and display it for the correct search terms. Every web publisher wants traffic, so every publisher engages in SEO to some extent.

One of the problems with SEO is that when you look for information about how to do it, a lot of what you’ll find will be general advice and won’t be geared specifically toward WordPress. You might be left with some confusion as to what you should and shouldn’t do, and that can lead to serious pitfalls later. We’re going to help you avoid some of those pitfalls in this guide.

People have different opinions as to what you should do in order to earn a high ranking on Google, but there are several things that you definitely shouldn’t do. These are the biggest WordPress SEO mistakes and how to avoid them.

Stuffing the Site’s Title with Keywords

When you set WordPress up for the first time, one of the first things that you’ll do is choose a title for your website. You’ll do this under the “General” section of the “Settings” menu. One of the biggest SEO mistakes that new WordPress website owners make is filling the “Site Title” field with all of the keywords they’d like to rank for. That’s a bad idea because WordPress automatically adds the site title to the title of every post and page by default. Having a site title that’s overly long and full of keywords will make your site look spammy and unprofessional when it shows up on search results pages. The site title should be just the name of your website and nothing else. Save the keywords for the titles of your pages.

Changing the Permalink Structure After Launching the Site

After you’ve entered a title and tagline for your website, the next thing that you’ll want to do is configure your site’s permalink structure. You’ll find this in the “Permalinks” section of the “Settings” menu. You should choose your desired permalink structure before adding any content to the site. If you do it later, you’ll force Google to reindex your entire website and could end up losing rankings as a result.

When you choose your permalink structure, you should almost always use a structure that includes the post name because you want a page’s main keyword phrase to be in that page’s URL. If you’re writing an article about the Geek Bar brand, for instance, you want the URL of the article to be something like “mywebsite.com/geek-bar” rather than “mywebsite.com/?p=123.”

Not Editing Your Theme’s Footer

Is your website using one of the default themes included with WordPress? If it is, every page on your site will have the text “Proudly powered by WordPress” in its footer along with a link to the WordPress website. You might be a big fan of WordPress, but do you really want to send so much of your hard-earned link juice to them? WordPress makes plenty of money with or without your endorsement, so take the time to customize your theme’s footer. You can do this in three ways.

• You can install a plugin that strips the advertisement from your site’s footer automatically. This is the easiest solution, but you should choose your site’s plugins carefully because each one presents a potential security risk.
• You can edit your theme’s footer.php file manually to remove the endorsement. This is also fairly easy to do, but you’ll need to do the edit again each time you update your theme.
• You can create a child theme. This is a little more challenging than the first two methods, but once you’ve implemented the change to your site’s footer through a child theme, you won’t have to do it again.

Not Implementing a System for Custom Meta Descriptions

Although WordPress is fairly good for SEO out of the box, it does have a few shortcomings that you’ll need to correct. One of those shortcomings is that WordPress doesn’t have a built-in way for you to customize the meta descriptions of your pages.

A page’s meta description doesn’t have a direct effect on its rankings. In other words, it’s not an SEO factor that Google’s algorithm considers when deciding how to rank a page for various searches. Google may choose to display a page’s meta description when it appears on search results pages, though, which means that creating custom meta descriptions gives you an opportunity to provide additional information that encourages people to click through to your site. In that way, meta descriptions can have an indirect effect on your website’s SEO because pages that have higher click-through rates tend to earn higher rankings on Google over time.

Many WordPress themes have built-in ways for you to input custom meta descriptions for pages, usually by using custom fields. If your theme doesn’t have that feature, you can add it by installing an SEO plugin. Yoast SEO and All-in-One SEO are two popular plugins that you can use for this purpose.

Switching to Another Domain Name Variation

As your website grows, you may eventually start to receive so much traffic that you’ll outgrow your original hosting company or plan. When that happens, you might decide to migrate to another host – and at this point, it’s possible to make a critical SEO error.

Depending on your current host’s configuration, your website’s domain name is displayed either as “www.domain.com” or just “domain.com.” You’ll choose your preferred variation when you originally set the site up.

If you ever change web hosts, it’s important for you to set the new host up to use the same domain variation. That’s because Google’s algorithm considers “www.domain.com” and “domain.com” to be different domains. If you switch to the other variation after your website is already established, it’ll force Google to reindex your entire site – and there’s no guarantee that your rankings will remain the same.