6 Common WordPress SEO Problems You Can Fix
Setting up a blog or a site on WordPress is one of the best things you can do, but there are ways to make it better. Later versions of WordPress have fixed problems or have plug-ins to take care of things like making sure your blog has optimized its potential.
Keep in mind that even if you don’t code, a lot of these options are possible with plug-ins from WordPress that do all the work for you and there’s lots of user documentation so you or your webmaster can figure out what’s going on.
1) The first major problem people run into is not having unique meta tags or h1 tags or having the same h1 or meta tags on every page. Each page on your website ( and most importantly, your homepage) needs its own unique (can’t stress this enough) set of meta tags. This include keywords, title and description, all different. Also, don’t stuff these areas with keywords.
A good rule of thumb is stick to 5 to 7 words for the title or h1 tag – include an exact 3 or 4 keyword phrase in there that people search for. Ex: The Children’s Sun Protection Blog, no more than 10 keywords in the keyword tag and no more than 250 characters for the description. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is a great free tool to do your preliminary keyword research.
WordPress plugin (s) that can help: All in One Seo Pack (general consensus is that this is the best), HeadSpace2, SEO Title Tags
2) Various WordPress themes either don’t use the h1 tag properly or they don’t use it at all. To fix this, add an h1 tag with the appropriate page title in it somewhere on the page, preferrably before the content begins. Also, in some themes the main blog title is the h1 and the post titles are h2. This is a fine alternative to the solution above.
WordPress plugin (s) that can help: All in One Seo Pack
3) Way too many unimportant links on the homepage. This goes for any site; keeping the amount of links on your homepage to under 40 is a good rule of thumb; no more than 20 is even better. Google only ranks a limited number of posts and pages from low PR websites, so it’s better to push the most important parts of your site and remove links to the less important pages / sections.
WordPress plugin (s) that can help: All in One Seo Pack
4) No alt text on your images. Its important to add alt text to your images so they can be spidered by the search engines. Make sure to add an alternate description to each image you upload using the visual editor.
WordPress plugin (s) that can help: Photodropper
5) Duplicate content. If you have content on your site that has been published elsewhere previously, there’s a chance you can get smacked with a duplicate content penalty. But take heart; if you really want to leave the content on your site, add a <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX” /> tag to the header of the page that has the duplicate content. This tag will tell the search engines not to spider that page. Also, if you’re creating a post in WordPress, there is an option way in the bottom that allows you to choose a noindex option for robots, so keep that in mind as well.
WordPress plugin (s) that can help: All in One Seo Pack, KB Robtos Txt
6) No sitemap.
WordPress plugin (s) that can help: Google XML Sitemaps
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Hi, thank you for this useful information.
Best Regards,
Jessica
I just installed the xml plugin but I have an error. Good post by the way, thanks!