SEO or Search engine optimization plays a vital role in determining the role and success of your website. To enhance the ranking and visibility of your website, you need to adhere to site-specific SEO parameters. Surprisingly, even the expert businesses end up making massive SEO mistakes that prevents them from gaining a good position in search results. In this blog we have compiled a list of major SEO mistakes and how to repair them.
Slow Loading Sites
Slow loading sites irritate the visitors and compel the potential clients to look for other options. Along with these immediate disadvantages, it also affects your Site SEO in the long run as each time the customer clicks the back button it sends a negative signal to the search engine that your site is not user friendly. Eventually it affects your ranking,
The prime reason of a slow loading site is the heavy images that consume loads of data. If you wish to retain the images but still want to reduce the size of your site to enhance its speed, then here are a few plugins that you could consider:
Plugins for caching the static content including CSS/JavaScript files, images, etc. that can significantly improve the loading speed
- WP Fastest Cache
- WP Super Cache
- LiteSpeed Cache
Plugin for Reducing HTTP requests and merges CSS and Javascript files and organizes them in groups
- Fast Velocity Minify
No Responsive site
An increasing number of people use phones to access the sites and if you don’t have mobile friendly responsive WP site, then you would find it difficult or almost impossible to connect with this vast majority that could include a number of targeted audience and potential clients.
WP offers you a number of mobile friendly responsive themes that look equally great across different devices and come with friendly UI. These themes offer uniform visual quality and user experience across all the popular iPhone/Android devices, Smartphones, laptops, iPads and a number of other popular mobile devices.
URL Structure
Titles and URLs matter a lot not only for the readers but also for the search engine crawlers with smart reading and comprehension capabilities. So make sure that you should use the quickly comprehensive straightforward title for your post. At the same time ensure that your page URL precisely reflect its content and intent.
Some page URLs are either too long to be understood quickly and even more difficult to be deciphered by the search engine crawlers while others look outright intimidating with unintelligent numbers or irrelevant letters. It repels the readers and also discourage the search engine crawlers from fetching your webpages in related search queries. Relevant URLs will not only help the readers to take quick decisions when your webpage appears during search results, but also helps the search engine crawlers to fetch your webpage during the relevant search queries. Eventually it will improve your site's visibility.
Here is how you can change the permalink of your website:
- Click on settings in the WordPress admin dashboard and select settings
- Now click on permalinks that will display the entire list of various URL types
- You can edit the permalinks of the desired URL(s) to make it sound reader (and SEO) friendly that can improve the visibility during relevant search engine results
Here is how you can fix it:
- Instead of the default day and name option, select the option Post name that will allow you to edit link name.
- If required edit the URLs to quickly reflect the objective of the page or the name of the post.
Another easy and better option is to use Yoast SEO plug-in that allows you to change the permalink right in the writing interface of any blog post. You can see it just below your post title. Click on the edit button at the end of the permalinks that will allow you to edit the title.
Keywords Management
Have you ever wondered how did the average post by your competitors ranking high in the relevant search engine results while your well-researched post on the same topic does not even rank in the first 5 pages? The reason might be the keywords. Even a highly valuable blog can lose its impact and fails to achieve good ranking if you forgot to include the right keywords or have not set them properly in the key sections.
Keywords are highly important for any website as it guides the search engine bots and allows them to quickly id your relevant pages during the specific search queries and fetching them in the search engine results.
One of the most popular mistakes made by bloggers or site owners is to write highly engaging posts without using the right keyword strategy. It will effectively prevent your high value posts rank high during relevant search results while allowing your competitors to simply copy your ideas, rephrase them and use the right keywords strategy that allow them to gain a prime ranking over reusable period of time. Using right keywords and positioning them appropriately can hep you a long way in getting better visibility and the appropriate ranking that you truly deserve.
For that you need to use the fine blend of exact keywords and long tail keywords and place them at appropriate positions across your post. You also need to use the keyword in Meta description, SEO title and other important sections while avoiding keyword stuffing.
Meta Descriptions
Internet users are short on time and would love to see the brief summary of every URL to know its relevance. If you have not specified the Meta data then Google will automatically show a permissible preview of the first portion of your webpage. The preview space is determined by pixels and it is very possible that it shows just an abruptly curtailed sentence that fails to give any idea about your webpage- for instance it might just show the curtailed introductory sentences automatically culled from the first paragraph of your webpage. It doesn’t give any idea about your webpage and thus discourages the users from clicking on your URL and continue looking for better options. It adversely affects the CTR that in turn affects your SEO negatively. So it is advisable to create Meta data for every page of your website in such a manner that it should offer the quick summary of your page.
Also you can see a preview of how the Meta data will look in the Google snippet.
- Ensure that the snippet delivers the quick, straightforward and complete summary and not end abruptly in the middle of a sentence.
- The maximum limit is 320 characters
- Make sure to include the major keywords relevant to the post or page title
- Include call to action to help your readers take quick action.
- One of the best tools to confidently take care of you website's SEO viability is Yoast
Yoast is a user friendly plugins that not only allows you to preview your snippet but also offers a wide spectrum of SEO parameters, suggestions, alerts and summary about any specific page. While its free version is highly competitive you might like to go for the premium version if you have more specific demands.
Conclusion
Whether you have written an awesome blog post or created a user friendly webpage on WordPress site, you would need to optimize it for the search engines in order to claim a good position. Many people are not really serious about SEO and it denies them a good visibility in the search engines thus making it difficult to attract the interested visitors or targeted audience. You need to have a clear and straightforward SEO strategy to enjoy a better position during relevant searches instances.