Fatal WordPress SEO Mistakes to Avoid Like the Plague

First published in 2014, rewritten in 2026 so the advice holds today.

WordPress powers a huge share of UK business websites, from one-person shops to national retailers, precisely because it's easy to get a site live. That ease is also the problem. Because so many people build their own WordPress sites without SEO experience, the same handful of mistakes keep turning up and quietly capping how well those sites perform in search.

None of what follows is complicated. It's mostly about getting the basics right and not undoing them later. Here's what to check.

Get your URLs and page names right

Keywords still matter, and they still belong in your URLs. A page at yoursite.co.uk/iphone-16-review will always serve you better than one sitting at yoursite.co.uk/?p=1847. It's clearer to Google, and it's clearer to a human deciding whether to click a link on Google or share it with someone else.

Check your permalink settings in WordPress (Settings > Permalinks) and make sure you're using a structure based on the post name, not the default numeric one. If you inherited a site with messy URLs, don't rip them up without a plan: changing URLs on an established site means setting up proper 301 redirects from the old addresses to the new ones, or you'll lose the ranking value those pages have built up.

Use an SEO plugin, but don't let it run the show

Yoast SEO and Rank Math remain the two big names in this space and either will handle the technical basics well: title tags, meta descriptions, sitemaps, canonical tags, and basic schema markup. Install one, set it up properly once, and it will quietly do a lot of the heavy lifting.

The mistake is treating the plugin's traffic-light scores as the goal itself. A green tick for "keyword density" or "readability" doesn't mean the page is actually good, or that it answers the question someone typed into Google. Use the plugin as a checklist, not a target to chase.

Link between your own pages properly

External links pointing at your site still carry weight, but internal linking is just as important and far more within your control. Linking older articles to newer, relevant ones, and vice versa, helps Google understand which pages on your site matter and how they relate to each other. It also keeps visitors reading rather than bouncing off after one page.

Make it a habit whenever you publish something new: go back and add a link to it from at least a couple of older, related pages. It takes a few minutes and it adds up.

Forget Google Authorship, focus on real author signals

The original version of this advice told readers to set up Google Authorship, which linked articles to a writer's Google+ profile picture and byline in search results. Google shut that programme down not long after this article first went up, and Google+ itself closed to consumers in 2019, so none of that infrastructure exists any more.

What replaced it, in effect, is Google's ongoing emphasis on E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust). In practice that means:

• giving named authors a proper bio page on your site, with genuine credentials or experience
• using structured data (Author and Organization schema) so search engines can connect content to a real person or business
• being consistent about who wrote what, and keeping older content updated rather than abandoned

It's less of a quick technical fix than Authorship was, and more of an ongoing editorial habit. That's a fair trade: it rewards sites that genuinely know their subject rather than ones that simply filled in a form.

Stop indexing pages nobody should find

Every WordPress site accumulates pages with no search value: thank-you pages after a form submission, internal search results pages, tag archives with two posts in them, staging pages that never got cleaned up. Google can and does index these by default if you let it, and a site cluttered with thin, irrelevant pages sends a poor quality signal.

Use your SEO plugin, or the WordPress settings directly, to set these pages to noindex. It's a small piece of housekeeping that's easy to forget once a site has been live for a few years and content has piled up.

The takeaway

Most WordPress SEO problems aren't exotic. They're clean URLs left unset, internal links never added, real author credibility never demonstrated, and low-value pages left to clutter the index. Work through these five areas properly once, keep them as part of your regular publishing routine, and you'll have removed most of the self-inflicted damage that holds smaller WordPress sites back.