WordPress is one of the most powerful and widely used platforms on the internet. In fact 1 out of 4 websites are built using WordPress. But, we can guarantee there are some key mistakes being made that affect the way your site is set up and ultimately how you market your business.
Whether you built your site on a WordPress platform yourself or you hired a marketing company to do it for you, every level of expert makes some mistakes that affect your SEO. The good news is they are easy to fix.
Here are 5 more common mistakes many developers make. For the first part of this series go here.
It’s surprising that so many people forget this!
Everybody has the name of their website or business in their footer, so why not link it to your homepage from this anchor text! This will help with your internal linking strategy as well as help Google recognize your site through branded anchor text.
Doing this won’t cause your site to skyrocket in the rankings, but it’s definitely a best practice.
Publishing more content gives people a reason to regularly visit your site. This also will help you rank for more keywords, which means more opportunities to gain visibility in Google’s organic search results and attract more clicks and traffic.
Google wants to reward sites that publish great content that satisfies users. If you aren’t publishing content regularly, then less people will visit your site and Google will crawl your site less often.
Similar to point #7, updating your content is as important is just publishing it.
When people find your content via search, but discover it’s outdated after clicking through, they will immediately hit the back button and look for another site that answers their question or helps them achieve their goal. Google will notice this and could de-value that piece of content if it doesn’t appear to be providing value to searchers.
That’s why it’s important to regularly review the old content on your site and make sure it’s up-to-date. Ensure that the content is relevant to people today and that you care enough about visitors to update your content. (You can check for these types of pages by checking your analytics for pages with low time on site and high bounce rates.)
Google likes a clean website. That means you’ll want all your links to stay updated and avoid pointing visitors towards any pages that are showing 400 or 500 errors.
To automate this process, simply install Broken Link Checker. You’ll receive emails when links are broken and you can go in and fix them in real-time.
The majority of websites don’t use schema markup at all to influence how their pages show up in search results.
While this doesn’t negatively affect rankings, it may have a huge influence on your click-through rate in Google search.
Even implementing simple star rating schema markup to show Google searchers how your website’s visitors like your content could entice people to click on your result instead of a competitor’s who ranks better than you because of the 5-star rating.
WordPress is a powerful website platform. To make it great make sure you're addressing these common pitfalls. A thorough review should solve any issues given a bit of time.