6 WordPress SEO Mistakes to Fix for Better Rankings
6 WordPress SEO Mistakes to Fix for Better Rankings
Have a WordPress site?
Need greater visibility in the SERPs and more traffic?
Obviously you do!
Genuine progress with a WordPress site all starts with your SEO.
In this post, you’ll become familiar with some of the most common WordPress SEO mistakes and how to fix them.
Avoiding or fixing the following 6 mistakes will provide some incredible opportunities to help your WordPress SEO today.
1. You Forgot to Set Your Time Zone
How about we start with something simple: setting your time zone.
Why is this important?
Whenever you schedule posts on publish in the future, you mark a time of day to share the content.
If your time zone isn’t set accurately, you won’t be sharing content when you think you are.
This could influence everything from views to shares of your work, ultimately hindering your organic engagement.
You can choose your time zone by going to Settings, then clicking General.
You’ll see a section labeled Timezone that allows you to pick from a dropdown menu.
2. Your Database Connection Isn’t Established
If you get a notification that there’s an error establishing a database connection, your screen will look something like this:
If that is the situation, there are a few possible solutions:
Contact your WordPress hosting provider. It’s possible there’s something wrong on their end.
Open your wp-config.php file. You can do this via a file manager or file transfer protocol (FTP). If need be, edit the file to correct the names of the database, host, username, and password.
Check to ensure you haven’t been hacked. Despite WordPress’ SEO-friendly nature (there are bunches of explanations behind this, including all the SEO plugins like Yoast), it’s more prone to hacking than other sites. Contact your developer or use a security tool to check if it’s been hacked. If it has, change your login information immediately, and reestablish the site using your backup (more on that below!).
3. You Don’t Have an XML Sitemap
A XML sitemap is exactly what it seems like: a map to your site in XML format.
If you haven’t made and submitted one, now is an ideal opportunity.
Use your Yoast SEO plugin to take care of business.
Within the plugin, click on SEO, then go to XML Sitemaps.
Slide the XML sitemap functionality button from Disabled to Enabled.
Use the hyperlink to see your sitemap, and then submit it to your Google Search Console. It’s as simple as that!
Also, remember about Bing Webmaster Tools as well.
4. You Aren’t Making Use of Footer Space
To improve inter linking and keep people browsing your site for a longer period of time (eventually increasing engagement and conversions), add a link to your home page and other important landing pages in your website’s footer.
When Google crawls sites, they use branded anchor text to support them.
This strategy adds to that, so it’s very useful, despite its oversimplified nature.
5. Your Content Rollout Is Irregular
The more you publish content, the more keywords you’re attempting to rank for and the more possibilities you need to rank on search engine results pages.
It’s also obvious that the more you post (and post consistently), the more likely it is that you’ll get quality traffic.
6. You Have Broken Links
Ensure you’re checking for broken links consistently.
Broken links can show up if external links changed or if you adjusted your own permalinks.
It’s not hard to track down broken links, and you don’t have to determine this WordPress error manually.
You can use a bit of something called Broken Link Checker, a plugin meant solely for WordPress users.
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