Done with design and development of your next big WordPress website, but what still makes your website away from making big in REAL. You did even made hundreds or even thousands of websites – for you or for your clients – but unless and until a proper steps toward understanding search engine optimization (or SEO) of your WordPress website – your website, or in better the hard work is nothing but just a framework in front of the whole world.
Unless and until you have all the SEO things at right place, Google and other search engines takes a harsh stand in learning about both your website and what you are doing. With this article, I tried to work and discuss on things which do often find and notice as common WordPress SEO mistakes. Moreover, I did also provide the solution by which one can improve them themselves.
Mistake 1: Title and Meta Description Missing On The Homepage
Oops, designed a huge awesome amazing website and forgot to add the title and description about it. You do understand well that what your website is, but search engines don’t understand it. Title and Meta Description are the core of SEO and it’s very much important to have it on the place as it not only helps search engine understand your website but also lets visitors explore your website better.
Mistake 2: XML Sitemap Or Sitemap Index
An XML Sitemap or just a regular HTML Sitemap Index will let search engines find well that what pages and posts are there on your site. Having the sitemap on board will make the job easy for search engines to first crawl and then index them. Your sitemap can be either a computer-language file or just like the regular page, displaying all the content links – basically pages and categories of your website.
Remember here if you have got huge content base – mainly if you are running a blog or an internet magazine – then opting for a sitemap index will be the better option. It’s highly recommendable to have an XML sitemap on your site while also you can use a plugin for generating the one for your WordPress website.
Plugin: XML Sitemap & Google News Feeds
The plugin will create feeds dynamically which will comply with the XML Sitemap and the Google news sitemap protocol. Moreover, it’s a multisite compatible plugin.
Mistake 3 – Robots.txt
Just like XML Sitemap, Robots.txt is another important file of your website which do plays a very vital role for your website SEO. Robots.txt is a file by which you give search engines, like Google and other instructions on which file in your website to index and which don’t. Although there is no compulsion to have robots.txt file in place but it’s one of best SEO practice which even can’t be neglected.
Plugin: WP Robots Txt
Although WordPress, by default, have a simple robots.txt file, will dynamically generate robots.txt file within your WordPress site. But, you do might require more and for which the plugin will help you out. The plugin will add an additional field to the “Privacy Settings” admin page.