7 WordPress SEO mistakes you better avoid

1. Reliable web hosting

If you don't have reliable web hosting, your website will be unavailable to users when searching or loading may be slow. Such a problem negatively affects your ranking in Google.

Investing in reliable hosting is therefore crucial!

Our own web hosting is powerful and reliable, making your website perform faster and better.

2. A reliable SEO plugin

One of the reasons for this popularity of WordPress are plugins, which are pieces of code that extend the functionality of your website.

There are great plugins today that guide you to optimise your SEO score, such as RankMath, Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack. These are today's most widely used SEO plugins that help you optimise your content for search engines and stay ahead of your competitors.

At Funkhaus, we use RankMath, in our opinion the best and easiest SEO plugin on the market today.

3. Basic WordPress Settings

WordPress contains some basic essential settings that need to be configured.

These basic WordPress settings not only provide an improved user experience, but also influence your ranking in search engine results (SERP). For example, make sure your website can be read by Google (indexing), and that your permalink settings are on point.

WordPress permalinks settings allow you to determine the permanent URL structure of your posts, pages, categories, and archives. The permalink structure plays a big role in SEO and site ranking because the URL is the gateway for the crawler.

The WordPress permalink settings allow you to choose your default permalink structure. You can choose from common parameters or create custom URL structures.

In WordPress, you can find the permalink setting in Settings > Permalinks.
We recommend choosing the "post title" permalink structure, as it is best for good SEO.

4. Image optimisation

Optimising images is another important task. The smaller an image is, the faster your web page will load.

For WordPress, there are again many plugins to optimise images in WordPress, including Smush and ShortPixel Image Optimizer.

Best-practices for web-optimised graphics:

Image Size
Every image contains a certain file-size, which we prefer to keep as small as possible.
A rule of thumb: an image you upload in WordPress should not be larger than 300kb. If your image is larger anyway, it affects the load time, and the SEO score Google gives your page - especially on mobile devices.

Want to optimise images before loading them? Then use online tools such as TinyJPG. This tool is free and will help you shrink large images dramatically.

Alt text
Alt text (also known as "alt description", "alt tag") is the written text that appears in the place of an image on a web page if that particular image does not load properly. So placing the right alt text is important for accessibility and image SEO. Try to place the right alt tag in front of the image that best describes the image.

Image description
Image description is slightly different from "alt text", alt text is 'image alt text', the image description is the description of that particular image displayed below the image to further describe the image.

5. Category management

Poor category management is another WordPress website SEO mistake. Keep categories simple within your news articles or projects. If you link news articles to just one or a few categories with relevant tags, Google will know how to rank your site contextually for those specific categories. If you have a large number of categories and tags, then search engines will not make a decision on what your news article is linked to.

Less is more, so keep it clear and uncluttered for your visitors and for Google!

6. Duplicate content

Google defines duplicate content as: "Duplicate content usually means large blocks of content, belonging to the same domain or spread across different domains, that are identical or substantially similar. In most cases, this content is not originally misleading."

Duplicate content is therefore content that appears in multiple places on the internet. In a technical word, two different URLs lead you to the same content. This may belong to the same domain or to another domain.

Duplicate content can cause Google to downgrade your website, which will lower your SEO ranking. This is because content appearing in multiple places on the internet makes it difficult for search engines to decide which version is most relevant to a given search query.

One of the best ways to solve the problem of duplicate content is to set up a 301 redirect from the "duplicate" page to the page with the original content.

7. Focus on On-page SEO

On-page SEO is the practice of optimising individual web pages to rank higher and generate more relevant search engine traffic. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimised, as opposed to off-page SEO, which refers to links and other external factors.

On-page SEO is crucial for a website. It includes many tasks such as:

• Good keyword research.
• Setting up a proper title and meta description.
• Formatting content.
• Optimising speed.
• Mobile compatibility.
• Manage hierarchy in headers (H1, H2, H3, ...).
• Add internal and external links.
• ...

Make sure your On-page SEO is on point and stays that way.
Does this sound like Chinese? We would be happy to help you with SEO advice and optimisation.