WordPress SEO Mistakes So Easy to Make

If you’ve bought into on-going reports and general chatter that insist WordPress is the most wonderful CMS ever created that’s already SEO’d in a big way right out of the box, sadly you’re barking up the wrong tree…sort of. WordPress is indeed brilliant and has great SEO potential, but in terms of already being primed and ready to hit the highs in Google, yeah right!Be realistic – how can any CMS be pre-loaded with SEO goodies when it’s technically just a blank canvas upon which a site or service will be built? Obviously it cannot, but the good news is that WordPress does at least make it easier than a fair few other platforms to give your SEO a good kick in the right direction.That is of course, unless you’re making one of the all-too-easy-to-make mistakes that might well cripple your campaign before it ever gets off the ground.    XML Sitemap…Or NotIn the words of Google: “Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover.”Now, there’s a pretty simple rule when it comes to SEO advice – rumors and unverified reports you can take or leave, but when Google breaks silence and tells you something straight up, you listen…and listen well! XML sitemaps send Google and Co. a whole bunch of information that’s crucial to make sure your SEO gets to where it needs to be. This is particularly true for newer sites that haven’t yet built many quality backlinks as it’s up to you and you alone to make sure Google finds all of your site’s relevant pages.Bad Tags, Bad CategoriesThe importance of using solid categories and consistent tags across your WordPress posts is a subject of debate, but as far as top-level SEO professionals are concerned, it’s the kind of minor tweak that costs nothing and might just make a big difference. Does Google examine all of your tags and make its decision accordingly? Not exactly, but if for example your site has a pretty sizeable chunk of articles that are tagged with let’s say “Tea Pots”, then Google is at least going to know that tea pots are a core subject of your site. And the same also goes for categories – it’s all about bumping up your keywords and content with quality and relevance in mind.Google+ AuthorshipIt doesn’t matter whether you’ve decided you love or hate Google+ as there’s no chance in hell it’s going anywhere in the near future. And what’s more, Google’s love for its own creation means that in order to win as much favour as possible, you need to abide by their rules and guidelines. In the case of Google+ authorship – as in that thing where a little picture of you appears by the post you wrote – this is looked upon with more than a little favour by Google. And if that wasn’t enough to convince you, studies have shown that click-through rates increase enormously when the author’s picture appears by each article she or he has written, as opposed to just a name that could of course be made up.