Common SEO Mistakes That New Bloggers Make

SEO is a process for optimizing the online content for search engines. It works when someone adds a keyword and search engines display results in favor of those pages that have those keywords. In this article you will learn about common SEO mistakes that new bloggers make and how you can avoid them.

Not Setting Up Website For Google To Crawl

If Google can’t crawl your website, simply your website is not going to rank. For Google to crawl your website you need to provide your sitemap. Usually Google will locate your sitemap automatically, but just to be sure you can add it to google manually or if you are using WordPress, then some SEO plugins have an option to upload your websites sitemap for you.

Plus, once you are verified by Google, you will be able to use Google Search Console. And when your website gets noticed by Google, you will be able to see what keywords you are ranking for and what position you are ranking, or if there are any errors on your website, linking domains etc.

More to that, you actually can block search engines from finding your blog or website by accident by marking checkbox in WordPress reading settings that prohibits search engines like Google from crawling and indexing your website.

You can check if you are not blocking search engines, in your WordPress dashboard, go to Settings – click Reading and look for Search Engine Visibility. You need to make sure that Discourage search engines from indexing this site checkbox is not checked.

Not Configuring Your Permalinks

Your WordPress website permalinks should be short and simple with your post keywords. This is one of the most common SEO mistakes that new bloggers make.

You have to make sure that your permalinks doesn’t include the date or a ton of additional words. Your WordPress websites permalinks should be short and simple. If you are not sure how your permalinks look or how you can change them, go to Settings – click on Permalinks. Although WordPress lets you to select between multiple variants of permalinks, make sure that you select Post name. This is by far the best and most SEO friendly permalink option that you can get.

Using Incorrect Headings In WordPress Post

Incorrect headings is another one of those common SEO mistakes that many new bloggers make. Good thing is that this mistake can be easily fixed.

Headings in your WordPress posts is super important when Google crawls your website. Make sure that your WordPress post has only one H1 heading. In WordPress your title box will automatically become H1 heading, so just make sure not to add more H1 headings by accident. The H2 heading should be the bulk of your headings with H3 and H4 being sub-topics of your H2. Basically think about your headings like chapters in a book. Your heading should resemble a chapter or important topic you will then elaborate on.

Not Adding Alt-text To Images In WordPress

Every image you upload into WordPress gives you the option to add Alt-text. If you want to optimise your WordPress websites SEO, you should write alt-text for every image you add.

The alt-text describes what the image is about if you your visitors are vision impaired or if that image on your website suddenly is not loading.

Not Optimizing Your Images In WordPress

As you can see, there are a lot of reasons your websites SEO could be bad. One of them is image size. Image size heavily affects your websites load time.

First of all images should contain keywords in their title that are relevant to your blog post. Whats even more important than that os is size of the images. Uploading big files on your blog is known to speed down your website loading time, which reflects poorly on your websites SEO because Google take website speed into consideration when ranking blogs and articles. There is a lot of ways for you optimize the size of your images. For example you can use one of many WordPress plugins that will help you optimize images on your website. Here is 5 WordPress plugins for image optimization.

Using Unnecessary WordPress Plugins

Plugins are great and they make bloggers life much easier but if your WordPress website has plugins that you are not using – remove them. Plugins that you don’t need are an unnecessary strain on your server and slowing down your site.

You can review your plugins and decide which ones you do not need to keep by going to Plugins – clicking Installed Plugins. There you can deactivate any plugins you don’t think you need. Then check over your site to make sure you haven’t accidentally deactivated a feature you need. If everything works just fine without the plugins that you deactivated – you can delete them completely.

Keeping Unused WordPress Themes

Perhaps when you started your blogging journey, you were uncertain how your website should look and tried multiple WordPress themes. Now that you are happy with how your website looks, you should delete all unnecessary themes. For your WordPress website to function properly you need only your active theme and latest WordPress default theme just in case. To delete unnecessary themes go to Appearance – then click on Themes. Here you will see thumbnails of all the themes you have installed. Make sure that if your active theme is a child theme that you don’t delete the parent theme. To delete theme click on the theme thumbnail, then click delete. WordPress will ask you if you are sure that you want to delete this theme – click ok.