011 – Top 10 Common WordPress SEO Mistakes

00:00.37
peteeveritt
Hello and welcome to this episode of the wp seo show I am your host p and I’m joined by my brother from another mother all the way from Norco California it is Jeffrey patch how you doing.

00:12.55
Jeff
Heyo. Don’t highlight my town. Nobody wants to come here.

00:18.55
peteeveritt
I only I literally only said it because we were talking about it like 2 minutes ago ah

00:22.63
Jeff
Ah, little little spoiler I’m trying to ship pete over here for a ah for a get-together one of these days so we’re working on that so we’ve been talking about California destinations and um, my town is not 1 of them not one of them.

00:31.74
peteeveritt
We’re working on it m.

00:38.56
Jeff
So we’re just going to move on from that topic.

00:41.75
peteeveritt
Ah, so yeah, how you doing Matt has how’s the week been.

00:43.80
Jeff
Ah, it’s been a bit busy but um, you know and know I’m always talking about the weather where you’re still are in this like dry wind crap and so we’re just all miserable with this. We just want it to like I don’t care if it gets hotter or colder right now I just don’t want it to be dry and windy like it’s just all. It’s just. Ah, we’re sich goldielocks is here looking for the perfect the perfect Southern California weather which is like that’s just like the worst thing to to complain about in the world I admit so.

01:10.20
peteeveritt
Ah, yeah, well, it’s it’s very wet here in Britain. In fact, it’s so wet that Mrs Everett Mrs E has gotten so wet on every dog walk this week that we’ve decided that she’s really some underwater kiwi and does some kind of like rain dance every day in this. She’s she’s twigged that she wears she’s won a particular jumper and on 6 of the last seven days has got like absolutely drenched when she’s taking the dog for a so so we yeah that that that jump as a bad omen for the weather.

01:42.54
Jeff
It’s It’s so funny because it’s so dry where we live and we had a really rainy year this year which was good. We really needed it. But um I don’t mind I don’t mind the rain I don’t like oh no, it’s I’m getting wet I’m outside like it doesn’t bother me. But. And me and my whole family whenever it is raining. It’s just funny how many things we don’t do because it’s raining. We’re like no, we don’t want to do that Drive. It’s raining. No We don’t want to go do that. It’s raining no and it’s like oh man people get rained on every day Somemed in some areas you know? So we’re still spoiled.

02:02.14
peteeveritt
Ms.

02:12.35
peteeveritt
Yeah, yeah, we we can’t we can’t be that picky in the Uk so there’s ah, there’s a there’s a saying in the it that we have over here which is there’s no such thing as in Clement weather just in inadequate clothing.

02:26.27
Jeff
Um, I almost agree with that except I would say I like I would prefer cold because I can always put more clothes on but when it’s hot. You can’t take off all of your clothes I mean not in public.

02:35.64
peteeveritt
Well you you could but hang and and this podcast isn’t rated for adults. So I think we need to maybe Curb this conversation where this is going.

02:40.90
Jeff
There still may it still may not need be enough.

02:48.11
Jeff
Well yeah on Youtube I do specify. It’s not for kids just to be safe. But yeah, ah.

02:51.15
peteeveritt
so so okay so on Youtube you have that option in in in the podcast podcast players. You don’t have that option. Your option is explicit or not explicit. So you know I wish there was like a not for kids option which maybe doesn’t mean explicit but means not for children. Um, but.

03:11.41
Jeff
Right? Yeah, that’s like ah like a fine line to like say this is not for kids like well I mean it’s not inappropriate but it’s not for kids like.

03:17.41
peteeveritt
I mean in all honesty I I don’t think many kids ah be too bothered about what we’re saying I’ve got a I’ve got a nine year old and a twelve year old and I don’t think either of them would sit through 40 minutes of us to yacking on they’d they’d be switching off back on a fortnight.

03:28.69
Jeff
No yeah, neither of I haven’t even gotten my kids to click on the Youtube b link and subscribe I would say he can just give us a subscribe on Youtube and they’re like oh yeah, we will. Yeah, we will sure just give us a minute and they still haven’t done it but 1 of them I think it was like our third week One of them texted me when she was at school which is a no no but she did it anyway.

03:38.69
peteeveritt
Ah, yeah, yeah.

03:48.20
Jeff
And she was like hey what’s the link to your podcast and I was like are you like talking about it in class or something she was like no my friend wanted to know and I’m like did your friend want to listen. She’s like no like okay well here’s the leak. Ah.

03:59.55
peteeveritt
Ah, this is this is just the conversation of my dad has a podcast and and your friend is like no he doesn’t She’s like yeah I can prove it. What’s the link down. Yeah, absolutely.

04:02.14
Jeff
I feels.

04:10.78
Jeff
Um, and then everyone was like cool. We don’t care all right.

04:17.30
peteeveritt
Absolutely and he’s with some British guy and I still don’t care. Ah.

04:19.14
Jeff
Hey, speaking of not caring everybody who’s listening right? now is probably sick listening to us talk about the weather and whatever else. So why don’t we talk about what we’re going to talk about today.

04:28.40
peteeveritt
That might be a good idea that might indeed be a good idea. So if you might have guessed from the title of this podcast that it is about the 10 most common wordpress mistakes s wordpress seo mistakes that we don’t want you to make anymore. Un funnily enough. We have a list of 10 of them. So mrjpwhy don’t you kick us off with them all.

04:48.41
Jeff
Yeah, we’re prepared. We are prepared and we have talked about some of these and various capacities on here. But we thought it would be really helpful to just kind of make a quick hits list. Go down talk about it kind of review these because I’ve seen. Many of these not many but several of these this week actually and you know I’m sure anybody listening has made at least one of these I know that I have I know my team it happens. So let’s talk about them. Let’s try to you know, get on top of them. The first one. It has to be the absolute most obvious one yet. The one I see most frequently left behind and that’s forgetting to uncheck that little box in the back that says hide this from search engines. You typically do that when you’re developing and building the site. You don’t want all that content index and everything and then you launch it it so many times that gets forgotten about and what happens. Google doesn’t it’s no index google doesn’t look at it. It doesn’t get picked up. You know your your clients waiting there for weeks going hey are we ever going to show up in Google search results and you explain to them. Well it takes time you know and then you go back and you check and your village forgot to uncheck that and you are embarrassed.

05:48.65
peteeveritt
Absolutely absolutely and you know, ah that the thing with that is it takes like an inordinate inordinate amount of time to then reappear in the search engines and it’s just like it’s squeaky bum time from start to from the minute that you realize what you’ve done. And you get that little red flag in the admin bar at the top that says no Index is on and it’s like your heart just sinks. Oh We’ve all been there. We have all been there.

06:08.59
Jeff
Um, yeah, yeah, yep I Really actually am happy about that I notice this it’s kind of nerdy. But I’m really happy about that red Index thing and I don’t remember when that appeared in wordpress but I know it hasn’t been there forever.

06:24.20
peteeveritt
How another do I.

06:28.27
Jeff
Um, but I caught that just on a client site this week and that’s why I said I saw that this week site’s been up for a couple months and I know for a fact because we’ve got the checklists that it was ah it was done somehow somewhere somebody was in there goofing with things and it got checked again and I don’t know if you know the client is aware I have no idea. But. At some point. Thankfully, it didn’t affect the results at all. But but you know we we don’t want to end up in that situation.

06:51.39
peteeveritt
Absolutely absolutely so rolling straight onto number 2 is not performing keyword research which has to be 1 of the banes of my life when you.

07:05.16
Jeff
Sister.

07:08.14
peteeveritt
When a client on boards a site or comes to me with some consultancy and they’ve got pages named completely random things because it made sense to them at the time that they were building the site out and it just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. The end of the day your website is a marketing tool in order to get it to rank for something that the user is going to see it needs to be using the language. The user is going to search with. And if it doesn’t They’re not going to see it then you’re not goingnna get the traffic then they’re not goingnna get any sales and then you’re gonna make that my problem and then my life becomes hell and it just no, just just.

07:45.67
Jeff
Ah, your your life becomes employed. What are you talking about.

07:51.94
peteeveritt
Ah, yeah, okay, maybe ah but you you you get the idea.

07:54.33
Jeff
Ah, you know, let’s actually retittle this one. These are the 10 mistakes you should be making before you call us for help.

08:01.43
peteeveritt
Ah, so yeah, so please please do some keyword research first. Um, you know it doesn’t have to be It’s not like you need to do groundbreaking keyword research or go completely into every nook and cranny of the client niche in order to find the. The most specific to no, but it needs to be applicable to what the searcher is going to search and if you if it doesn’t pass that filter then just try a little bit harder.

08:29.69
Jeff
Yeah, I’m not sure I have a great example off top my head right now. But I’ve been really amazed at doing qre research the last couple years how many times the keywords that you come up with or that you know you uncover are really obvious like they’re the exact ones that you had in mind so you kind of go. Why don’t you even bother doing it. But then you get that data right? and you see like what the search volume is how difficult it’ll be the search volume is one of the most important ones to me in kind of putting like putting yourself in check and saying oh yeah, that’s actually 1 we should work for because it has the volume.

09:00.20
peteeveritt
Now.

09:03.16
Jeff
Whereas there’s so many times like in our onboarding process with new sites. 1 of the questions is are there any keywords that you know you you must ring for that you you know in your heart and soul that you just have to ring for right? We ask that and sometimes we run through and it’s like you know it only gets 10 searches a month right? like. So usually it shouldn’t be your focus and you don’t know that unless you do the keyword research.

09:21.73
peteeveritt
I would say just just to maybe tie this one off because the actually keywords light and lines as nightlessly up for for tip 3 in a second but when you’re running keyword research also take into account the cost per click information because if you’ve got.

09:34.41
Jeff
Faith.

09:38.21
peteeveritt
If you’ve just because a keyword has a lot of traffic doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to get a lot of sales or inquiries from it could be a very top of funnel type type term so in order to distinguish the terms which other people are getting conversions from. If you look at the cost per click data. You know, somebody’s spending thirty cents a click to be on page one for a particular term. They’re probably not getting too many leads from it if somebody else is spending $30 a click for ah for ah, a click to be on page one. They’re far more likely to be getting. Ah, leads or conversions or whatever. The conversion metric is that you’re working for so whilst you may not run ads for these terms considering the cost per click information can be key to determining where traffic that is likely to convert will sit.

10:25.95
Jeff
Yeah, and then if you can you know rank organically for those terms that people are paying $30 you know every time you get a clickthrough I mean you’re not making $30 but in a sense you’re getting a $30 click that for free I mean in a sense.

10:34.20
peteeveritt
Um.

10:42.14
peteeveritt
Yeah, yeah, absolutely absolutely so rolling onto number 3 Mr J p

10:44.15
Jeff
Yeah, roll rolling on the number 3 and this feels a little contradictory over what we’re just saying but that is actually overusing your target keywords and you know this is the old style if you’ve if you’ve been in the industry. You’ve been online long enough. You remember you know? Ah, if. If we were to build seo hive like ten years ago our homepage would say hi. We’re a white label seo provider that does white label seo for white label. You know what? I mean we would say the same thing over and over It’s just so annoying. Yeah for digital agencies that work with wordpress clients and I mean just oh boy.

11:11.71
peteeveritt
Yeah for agencies that need white label support for their white label Seo services contact.

11:22.88
Jeff
And and there was I mean it’s so funny I just laugh at the times when you would read a website and you would read it and you’d be like obviously they’re just trying to you know, get those clicks in there and it doesn’t actually read for a human. Well it turns out Google’s figured it out. They’re done doing that keywords you know that? yes they matter they need they need to be there. But at the same time.

11:37.50
peteeveritt
Yep.

11:42.44
Jeff
They track so many other vital metrics that show you how the content is helpful. Um is it. You know, organize in a proper way feel free to help me out with some better terminology here. But you know the whole helpful content that we’ve talked about is an amazing thing because now Google is trying to rank things based on. Actual real world performance.

12:02.63
peteeveritt
Yeah I think I think the 2 biggest elements that feed into this from an Seo perspective are um, our natural language processing. So how you how you actually write in order. So that. Natural language processing is the process that the search engines use to read a page to see if it reads like its natural language. Essentially so I it’s written for a human not for a not for the not for the algorithm and then the second thing is the helpful content. Update that you’ve just mentioned which has seriously moved the bar on. How content needs to be helpful. It needs that you know a user should be able to read a piece of content and actually when they get to the the end of it be more educated or be able to take a different action than they would have before they started reading a piece of content that piece of content. So you know if you’re if you’re. Hi those 2 things then then you’re you’re doing really well. But yeah keyword stuffing is has been a no no for ages and and you know you you can’t do that anymore. Link stuffing is exactly the same I mean how many sites have we had where you had. Ah, links like hundreds of links in a footer some of them colored the same background as the colors as the yeah footer bar so you couldn’t see them and yeah well yeah, absolutely and and that that of course means that.

13:17.71
Jeff
Plumbing Los Angeles plumbing San Diego plumbing New York City plumbing you know for for somebody based in Wichita.

13:26.64
peteeveritt
That you know you can’t have the duplicate content which that strategy did did sort of employ. So all of that kind of stuff not overusing your target Keyord. You got to use it enough. You’ve got to introduce them properly. We talked about that on a previous show. Um, but yeah, not overusing them is is a key thing now while we’re talking about. Content on the page. The fourth tip is about leaving development links within your within the site when you push it live I e not updating the address from the staging address to the live. The live domain name when you push a site live and. Again, this has to be 1 of the most common the most common issues we see when we when we get sites on boarded to us that there is just some gobbledy urls involved in there from staging sites gone by that haven’t been updated properly. Um, so. please please either we we did a we did a whole episode on how to launch a website properly. We we did discuss this this element in that to a bit more length than we’re going to go into today but please make sure you’ve got a plugin in there something like better search replace or if your you know if your host does it when they when you set the primary domain. Um. Ah I use cloudways for for my main host when I change that primary domain they go through and update the database for me so it it kind of does it and but I still do have better search replace in there for you know for for belt and braces. So.

14:45.68
Jeff
Um, yeah.

14:50.78
Jeff
Yeah,, we’ll actually check just to be safe just to make sure one didn’t get missed and have we have literally migrated hundreds of websites to like cloudways using that migrating tool and it works fantastic. But there has been ah, a handful where for some reason there were few I don’t know if they were maybe encoded in a certain manner but there are few yeah urls that don’t magically get picked up and we’ve got to do it like that. The other big thing that gets left out with a lot of these tools whether it’s cloudways or any of them. Is if yeah urls are hardcoded into any of the theme Files or any of the widgets or anything like that because it usually won’t review those so you know and that’s not the best practice obviously but it does happen and we catch those sometimes too.

15:31.36
peteeveritt
And sometimes you have to be careful with even the page builder that you use as well I mean Divy Divvy has a process. For example, if you’re moving a divvy site that you have to go through a specific process in order to to transition the site from one url to another and oxygen had the same thing from memory. So yeah, you.

15:37.82
Jeff
Ah.

15:49.55
peteeveritt
You might there might be specifics. You need to be aware of but please make sure that when you send a site live. It is all on the proper live url that the Ssl certificate is correct that all of the links are running on HttpS rather than http. Um, yeah, that it.

16:01.26
Jeff
Out.

16:06.20
peteeveritt
It’s it seems like such a small thing and it it’s not a fun process to go through particularly if you have to unpick a massive site with all of these issues but look it.

16:12.18
Jeff
But real real life horror story. We had a client do part with us last week for a more niched provider they’re in real estate market or something and they you know they worked with an agency that’s like dedicated to that and that’s fine. Move their site over and everything is broken. It’s been that way for a week and I keep emailing going you guys. You didn’t change the yeah urls and so all their yeah urls are pointing to a staging site that’s on the new agency’s things and I’m going every customer has this big error where with all these things it’ll all over it when they go to visit that videos don’t play the images don’t load.

16:35.42
peteeveritt
Yeah.

16:43.54
Jeff
And so this happens and this is and I’m not trying to talk trash about this company I don’t know them from anybody else, but they’re a professional company and they made the mistake so it happens all the time. Yeah I’m not trying to you know crap on them I’m trying to show you that Even the pros make the mistakes.

16:50.57
peteeveritt
All the time.

17:04.17
peteeveritt
Ah, so where are we going? What? what’s what’s next? what’s number 5

17:07.75
Jeff
Yeah, another kind of thing to check when you’re you know in a technical world is looking at your images um a few years ago optimizing your images was a huge thing now wordpress kind of takes care of most of it for you. Um, it’s still you can still make some mistakes in this area though. So my big kind of suggestion. My general suggestion is use jpegs because even if they are massive wordpress will shrink them down to like twenty five sixty pixels or something and it doesn’t. Pretty good job compressing the Jpeg it’s not the best you could do better but at a bare minimum. This is fine if you use p and g’s on the other hand though those do not compress as well and the file sizes can be massive, especially if they’ve got transparency or things. So.

17:50.57
peteeveritt
And.

17:56.93
Jeff
My my kind of just you know like I said this is the real basic. But if you’re using images and they’re theyre photographs right? There should probably be a Jpeg. Um, we’ll talk about web ps in a second but it should probably be a Jpeg and if it’s a graphic like somebody designed and drew a box and then has bold colors that can be a p and g um. Using those 2 you pretty much are going to avoid any major problems. But if you have you know giant background images and they’re saved as pngncs. They could be like ten twenty megabytes um same thing with like background videos and stuff we recommend hosting videos on a third -party platform or a cdn um. And then I guess said I mentioned ah webps and that’s kind of a newer technology and they are great. They’re much smaller. They’re optimized. They work really well. But I still haven’t fully adopted it because there’s still a few people that use like an old browser that doesn’t load them properly or they don’t you know if you sometimes you click them they turn into downloads rather than. Embed. So you know these things can be remedied and fixed and approached. But we’re not quite doing that yet just to be they leave things on the safe side. But for people to just like throw in a whole giant gallery of you know 20 megabyte p and g files the site just or the homepage itself. You know can just become massive and impossible to download. So then that could really be. Ah, detrimental for your site speed and and indexing it.

19:13.25
peteeveritt
1 one tip I suppose I would have with with the whole image thing is you know if you if you do use a service like short pixel or you I don’t know EWWW I don’t know how you pronounced I was sort of call it you anyway.

19:22.97
Jeff
In.

19:29.21
Jeff
Um, I yeah know yeah.

19:31.63
peteeveritt
You know who I mean E Ww Ww Ww Io Um, they both have parts of their plugin which are which hook on to the WordPress Image uploader so they will actually use their compression engine instead of wordpresses compression engine just as you’re uploading Media files.

19:42.71
Jeff
The.

19:48.72
peteeveritt
So if you do already use those services or you’re going to use them for the production site once it goes live get them in there early because then as just as you’re dragging stuff into the site through the build. It’s doing the job for you as well. So you don’t need to. It’s just something you can then set and forget it’s It’s that easy.

20:00.83
Jeff
Yeah, yeah, it’s nice to do it from the get go from the very beginning that will convert a minute. He’s right, It definitely convert or compresses them better and you can adjust it too. You could say you know I I want to compress the hell out of this I don’t care if there’s a little pixelation or you can say you know, let’s let’s keep it real clean but you know just try to get what you can out of it.

20:12.68
peteeveritt
Um.

20:18.35
peteeveritt
The one the 1 thing I would say about use plugin so EW I moved from short pixel to ew ww w because for a number of reasons but e w w w has built in Cdn network.

20:20.41
Jeff
Um.

20:37.85
peteeveritt
Which granted short pixel does but you got to pay for a higher tier for it whereas with E Ww ww it is it is lumped within the the standard fee and I’ve got to say it works a treat. However, however, when you move the site the site.

20:39.70
Jeff
A.

20:54.80
peteeveritt
The the the Cdn gets linked to the domain. So if you’re gonna use you within a if somebody’s still listening to this. They’re gonna think I’m absolutely say Anyway, if you’re if you’re using this. The.

21:04.16
Jeff
I have no idea what is EWWWW do I don’t even know. But.

21:10.90
peteeveritt
Yeah, absolutely. So if you’re using it through the development process by all means put the image uploader in that you know get the plugin in there do that but do not set up the Cdn make the Cdn part of the go live process because it really will make your life easier when you need to send the site life. That’s all I’m saying.

21:25.93
Jeff
Yeah, and you probably don’t want to be piping your development changes back and forth the Cdn all the time anyway, um yeah I do I like I mean I’m we’re not going to get into it now. But I’m kind of curious why you moved away from short pixel because I I still use that for the most part.

21:28.56
peteeveritt
Absolutely absolutely. Absolutely.

21:40.31
Jeff
But that’s because bought a whole bunch of lifetime credits and it just has worked pretty well so kept using it but 1 kind of warning I will throw out there is well we’re both talking about the paid you know services from both of these companies. Um a very popular one is wp Smussh or smush it or one of those.

21:43.85
peteeveritt
M.

21:56.52
peteeveritt
Yes.

21:58.52
Jeff
And I see that installed on tons of sites and I mean it works fine. In fact, I’ve liked some of their features but the problem with the free one is it doesn’t optimize your main image. The the original one it only it only optimizes your thumbnails. So I have seen.

22:08.38
peteeveritt
Okay.

22:13.98
Jeff
So many people run this on like sites with like thirty forty fifty thousand images in their library and it takes like literally days and it made no difference because they’re using all the sites or all the pages are referencing the full images and those don’t get compressed like that’s they’re kind of.

22:28.42
peteeveritt
Yep.

22:28.93
Jeff
Well if you upgrade we’ll we’ll do that for you too. It’s like well that’s the 1 we actually want you to do so basically what I’m saying is I can’t see a benefit of using smush if you don’t want to pay for it if you just want the free version I can’t see a reason to use it.

22:37.30
peteeveritt
Right? Fair enough fair enough fair enough. So we’re now hedging on the on the themes of the next tip tip number 6 which is ignoring technical seo features particularly within the build. So we look. We do? Um, we’re not gonna go into this in great detail because episode 9 which was two weeks ago was all about the importance of technical seo. So if you want to deep dive into this go and check out episode number 9 if ah if we remember when we’re do in the show notes we’ll make sure that there’s a link over to it directly from this episode but yet look just. Get so much of technical seo is almost a set and forget feature if you code it right? if you build it right? if you set it upright at go live that you know there’s there’s pockets of time where you need to be considering these features. But if you get it right? At that point. Then actually you’ve done 65 70% of the legwork that the client is ever gonna need as they’re using the site going forward. You can’t control the content I completely appreciate that. But you can control the way things are coded the way that tags pull out into the um you know into the front end the way schema is set up. You can control the way that. Images are optimized like we’ve just been saying yeah and and how they are delivered through cdns or or whatever you you can do all of that stuff and that’s kind of the expectation when a user comes to a web professional to to get a site built so just get it right first time and then you know have it in your checklist have your processes around. It.

24:13.15
peteeveritt
Or get a team like seo hive involved. We have a product that will help help you? um you know help identify these issues and fix them for you but just get it done first time and then as I say you you know you’re handing over a good product to the client when you’ve done that.

24:26.82
Jeff
Yeah, and I will raise that um do this on your development starter site.

24:32.19
peteeveritt
Yeah, yeah, yeah enough said, just do that. Ah.

24:37.99
Jeff
Ah, there’s a whole episode right? there? Ah and we’re done. We’re done no but you know if you’ve got the structure in your development site then you never have to I mean you need to go. We need to check these things and actually that kind of segues into the next one.

24:45.72
peteeveritt
Ah.

24:54.79
Jeff
Did we actually made a list for this podcast if ah, anyone listening can’t tell and it’s going so much smooth repeat I like it. We should do this more often. Ah and I’m really surprised how well things segwayed I’m not sure we meant to do that. But anyway.

25:07.90
peteeveritt
You mean you’re not sitting there thinking what the hell’s he going to say next.

25:12.71
Jeff
No I am but you know but I’m not caught completely off Guard. So That’s that’s what’s great about it. So Keep keeping me honest, keeping my attention span going um the next one is is one that I know I’ve said before and that’s. Run your Seo program through its onboarding. It’s wizard. Whatever the startup thing is just just install it and run it through it just go through do the best job you can. Even if you know nothing about It. You will do good. Um, you’re not going to hurt anything probably by adding the basics and I mean.

25:39.54
peteeveritt
Ah.

25:44.89
Jeff
When you go through these steps. Um, they’re very simple. What is the site name. What is you know the contact information it asks this stuff so it puts it in the schema. So it delivers it to Google properly and all that stuff is easy to find. Um, yeah.

26:02.39
Jeff
I saw a post on Facebook the day someone said hey I saw the seo hive guys were talking about how they like Seo Press so we’re going to. Ah, we’re going to use that one and and pull out whatever it was and that’s great I’m so honored we love seo press. We think they’re great, but unless you’re using like Yoast and I’ll tell you why I’m saying that one in a second There’s really no point in taking out your sd your current Seo plugin. Whatever you’ve got is probably fine. Just go through the stats and make sure it’s good. Um, the reason I say yo and that’s not to talk trash about them. But it is. It’s it’s got to be the least featured seo plugin out there. Because they want you to pay for the premium and and all that stuff whereas everything else just includes all the features most of them don’t do anything more than the other one does or anything better. They just do it a little bit differently and pete pie just moved his head in a way that says no no I know 1 reason why this one is better. But for the.

26:47.85
peteeveritt
No I wasn’t it wasn’t that so go.

26:52.42
Jeff
For the most part. It’s 6 and one half dozen the other but the point is just run through the wizard because it’ll take care of the like 80% of the most important things for you.

26:59.14
peteeveritt
Yeah I was thinking two things I was thinking one was it will also take out the line. This is just another wordpress website from the tagline field in settings which is another giveaway that nobody’s nobody’s even looked at that page and and the other thing I was thinking was. Remembering being on a panel show a panel being on a panel with a podcast ah was on a panel that was featurd in a podcast that was hosted by Godaddy and I was very honored to be there anyway. This guest was was a bit late so we started without him and I was asked a question about. Seo plugins and gave a very similar response to you which is well you know you can use any of them. Ah, as long as it’s not yoast and just as I finished speaking our late podcast guest arrived who was one of the development team from yoast plugin who I then had to justify myself to who had just spent. The last 3 minutes in the waiting room listening to me trashes plugin. That’s what I wrote. That’s why my head went.

28:01.70
Jeff
Yeah, oopsie. It’s I mean it’s nothing wrong with the plugin. It’s the og. You know I mean I don’t know if it is the original one but it’s been there for as long as I’ve been doing a wordpress stuff so give credit to to them and the things that they’ve done forwardpress and in the industry. But the fact of the matter is the last time we looked into the premium options. It was like seventy five bucks per site per advanced module. So if they were a local business. They needed to pay seventy five bucks for that if they wanted something else. There’s another 75 on top of that and so it just you know it doesn’t make sense. When seo press I think is like $39 a year or something like that it and you can use it on dozens and hundreds of websites. So it you know it just made sense but it doesn’t you know, not not not necessarily trying to ding their business model if it works for them. Great and I’m sure there’s plenty of people that are happy paying it.

28:42.57
peteeveritt
Similarar I was going to say about 40 or fifty bucks for you? yep.

28:58.12
Jeff
So good. Good for them. Not me. Ah.

28:58.93
peteeveritt
So absolutely. So then the next one number 8 now this this one’s a little more complicated or more in depth than some of those that have have passed before but this is about making sure that you do not have a flat url structure. So what is good practice for Seo is to nest content. So that means that you have you know everybody knows that the homepage sits on the main url so seo hive dot co that is that is our homepage a flat url structure would then mean that every of the url sits. Directly under the homepage so you’d have seohi.co/localseoseohive.co/thecontentplan seohive.co/.. This podcast is about the top 10 mistakes that you can make ah when setting up a wordpress website they all so ah are the same. Of the same weight to Google Google can’t group any of them together because you haven’t nested any of them together now. The reason that this is important is that some keywords are more competitive than others and that means that certain keywords in order to rank meaningfully you have to prove an authority. Ah. In that particular content area for a specific thing and you can do that by nesting pages. So if let’s take us for an example, we can have a page which is seohive.co/whitelabelseo. So then.

30:29.85
peteeveritt
Within that we can then have white label content writing we can have white label local Seo. We can have white label technical seo but they would all be children of the white label Seo page. The url structure would be seohi.co/whitelabelseo/localseo for example for the local Seo Page so really if you think about your website as a family tree with the homepage sitting at the top as like the matriarch you don’t want every other page to be a brother or sister to each other you want to have you want to have little family units within that that then denote um, ah allow you to denote authority in particular areas and that means you know. Most client websites we work with they want to rank for a number of terms. You know what for some terms 1 page might be enough or you might need 1 page and 1 child and that that is that is it others however might need a dozen pages or two dozen pages because it might be far more competitive. So you’re you’re building in the structure in order to do that and the number of websites we get through where everything is just for homepage forward slash and then the url it does my head in and really the easiest thing to do is to nest the pages. However, 1 word of warning if you’re doing this to an existing site if you’re moving pages around.

31:34.83
Jeff
Is this this is it.

31:45.10
peteeveritt
You need to make sure you put 3 or 1 redirect in from the original url to the new ah url. Otherwise you’ll get a whole lot of errors for someone else.

31:50.60
Jeff
Yeah, don’t just go changing it and think oh I fixed everything? No no, you changed things. Hey do you want to roll into number ten because I realize that might actually just be a good segue.

31:54.49
peteeveritt
Absolutely.

32:00.29
peteeveritt
Okay, so number 10 will skip number 9 You can finish with number 9 in a minute. Yeah, so the next one yeah is about creating internal links now everything I’ve just said is is to do with flat structure.

32:06.14
Jeff
I’ll come back to that one.

32:17.62
peteeveritt
That essentially is 1 method of creating internal links. However, you can make internal links by using content around your ah you know around your site as well and this really does apply to blog content. So if you’ve got if you’ve got a section about white label seo let’s run with the same example, we. Might not want to create two dozen pages under that to do with white label seo we might have we might just want the ah one top level page about white label seo and then the 3 or 4 children which are our services to do with that. So how do we then prove further authority in this area where we do that by creating blog content. And then using internal links to link back to those appropriate pages and passing authority that way on target keywords that’s the first thing with internal linking make sure that the links are on target keywords not on phrases like click here or read more or you know see see this whatever it might be needs to be on the target keyword the real key with this is about actually spending some time reviewing past content so that it links almost forward in time to content that you’ve produced in the future. So if you go and create a new a new page today about. Um, let’s say about local Seo. We we go and create a new local Seo page and we want to go and find some links for it. Well, let’s go back in time through our archive of blog topics and find where we can put links in from some of the older content that reaches forward in time to the new local Seo page.

33:50.96
peteeveritt
It’s not a process that you necessarily want to do with every piece of content you create. We. Do do that as part of our content pathway. But we ah it it. You know if you’re working on a client website or they’re paying you for a few hours a month or a few hours a quarter you know what grab a coffee spend 20 minutes and just. Look at their new blogs and look at their old blogs and see if you can bring some links from the past over to the future and you’d be amazed. How quickly you can start to build links that way if you want to automate the process slightly I realize this is quite a long one.

34:18.17
Jeff
Um, yeah.

34:23.48
peteeveritt
You want to automate the process slightly then there are some plugins you can use. There’s one called link juicer which is a wordpress plugin where you can actually put in um into a post the the keywords you want other places to link to on that post and it will go and find them for you. It. Kind of accurate but it it does miss a few because you you need to set quite a lot of parameters and another option that I frequently use is a tool called inlinks net which is an external um, an external setup. It’s a code of Javascript that you pop in the header of the site. But it basically just goes and does the same thing but it it is. It’s more detailed than the the wordpress plugin but nothing is as good as going and doing it yourself.

35:02.17
Jeff
Yeah, it can be really helpful on the blogs like you mentioned, especially old ones. They can really kind of boost. They’ve been. They could be sitting there for years and if you go through and do that you could really create some juice. Um I’ve ah been seeing a client did a really good job of this. We’re launching a new.

35:08.61
peteeveritt
Yeah.

35:18.27
Jeff
Dentist website soon and they’ve gone through you know all the service pages and there’s great information about each type of service. There’s obviously a lot of different things that dentists do um and any time that it references you know say preventive dentistry or cosmetic dentistry. It always will go and link to those pages. And so that’s not the blog content’s a little bit different but it helps support all of those help strengthen them and then also helps. Um, what was the ah what was the term I was going for there but um, helps solidify that and I’m afraid our call froze because Pete’s face is just totally stuck and I don’t know what to do now. So I’m just going to go into 10 and hope this is still recording so the last one we had was ah reviewing your performance and performance speed optimization. So this is obviously one that gets talked about just endlessly online. Um I’m a big fan of wp rocket and that’s what we install on pretty much. Every site that we start caring for and want to get some performance improvements out of um if you can go through and just set up the kind of basic caching and get the technical spear I’m sorry the page load speed at you know, close to a hundred around ninety or so then usually you’re you’ve done a good job with it. Um. Depending on how the site was built is going to. You know that’s going to depend on or how much work you need to put in to do that is really going to depend on what was used if there’s big videos if there’s flashy sliders of everything those things are a lot more difficult to optimize but are you back.

00:03.21
peteeveritt
Okay, cool hang on it says fail to start recording the following. Participants may be experiencing connection problems. Jeff.

00:29.48
peteeveritt
You’re back. Okay.

00:31.00
Jeff
Well well, it’s recording now. So I guess it’s working all right? Well we might have had a little technical glitch there. But we’re picking things back up. So the last one on our list actually is. Ah, reviewing the performance and or making some kind of you know, basic performance optimizations. Um I think the real easy way to do this is use something like the wp rocket. Um, that’s my kind of performance plugin of choice I know perf matters. There’s all kinds of different ones out there. But the. It’s just one of those things that we do on every site we launch? Um, we implement kind of basic caching optimize the delivery of the css and we defer Javascript. You can do a lot more but usually that um we I’m sorry we lazy load images as well. You can do a lot more but you’ve got to check everything make sure it doesn’t break any functionality make sure things load make sure contact forms still send make sure popups pop up I mean these are all the things that break almost every time when you just slap a performance plugin and click all the boxes. So don’t do that please don’t do that I’d almost rather you not do anything. Um.

01:30.49
peteeveritt
E.

01:40.89
Jeff
Got to check it. Be sure it all works. But um, you can also you know, avoid a lot of those issues too in your builds as well. So when you’re building things you know these days don’t use a slider. Don’t use too many fancy effects and things like that I mean they’re all you know everybody loves their their bling and their fancy stuff but all of those things. Effect performance and it’s just going to cause headaches. So I try to shy away from most of those. Um, but yeah I think these days like using the the block editor. It really doesn’t load too much. In fact most of our sites are ranking close to. Ah, 95 to 100 without any performance update or any performance optimizations just by using optimized images and you know a good theme so there’s a lot that you can do there but there’s also the basics will cut out I mean we’ll cover like 90% of what you need to accomplish there. So.

02:12.94
peteeveritt
Commitment.

02:28.38
Jeff
Definitely you know approach performance. Check your site speed scores and see what you can fix there if you if there is anything.

02:31.93
peteeveritt
Absolutely um, my little tip on that one is if you’re using a plugin to optimize the delivery of images now you can do this through wp rocket or this could be through something like the Cdn through you that we were talking about earlier. Um you make sure that you set.

02:46.81
Jeff
See.

02:49.50
peteeveritt
Ah, the ah option for setting image dimensions because that will seriously help your um culminative layout shift scores when it comes to that. So basically what that will do is put the dimensions of the image on the container so that when.

02:59.18
Jeff
Oh yeah.

03:04.22
peteeveritt
Page loads because the because the image is going to lazy load in the gap. So when the page loads all the content is in the right place and the image will just fill the hole rather than if you don’t set that the the placeholder for the image will actually close up so that then the text everything that’s underneath. It will have to move down when the image loads and that’s what gives you? The. The lower comments of layout shift score because that’s exactly what Cu of layout shift is um.

03:29.84
peteeveritt
Yeah, absolutely absolutely And and.

03:30.12
Jeff
But that’s a good tip and and that’s a big rank. That’s a not ranking factor but that’s a big factor on these tests too. Um, it’s kind of funny that and that remind that shows me how I know I’m a weirdo because I actually like get a kick out of seeing the website’s load like that which is not right? but Like. Just love how things are I Love knowing how things are built like I love taking things apart I Love looking at them So when I like see the structure coming together I’m like ooh. Oh but that was not good for user Experience. Ah.

03:49.10
peteeveritt
Yeah, absolutely absolutely. But that’s yeah, that’s ah yeah, ah, considering if if you’re going this far into it. It’s literally a tick of a box. So just don’t forget to tick the box. But considering point one we made was about forgetting to untick a box I think it’s important though we mentioned. The boxes do tick as well as the ones to untick ah so and and that’s it. That’s our top 10 wordpress mistakes ah that we hope you avoid making directly because you’ve listened to this bug. No not because of that but because it’s good way to deal with.

04:09.00
Jeff
Um.

04:16.66
Jeff
That’s our 10

04:23.41
peteeveritt
Ah wordpress and to deliver sites for clients.

04:26.99
Jeff
Yeah, a lot of these you learn from trial and error some of them you learn by listening to our podcast so you’re welcome.

04:31.98
peteeveritt
Well if you enjoyed this show which we really hope you have because we’re really enjoying making this show. Ah, but if you and that’s no word of a lie I’m not just saying that we genuinely do get a kick out and making this and but if you do enjoy it.

04:42.88
Jeff
Um, no.

04:44.22
peteeveritt
Ah, please make sure that you subscribe in your podcast photo of choice or if you’re watching it on Youtube go and hit that subscribe button and if you’re really really want to become a super fan. Make sure you’re gonna leave a comment on Youtube or leave us a 5 star review on Itunes or Spotify or somewhere like that because that would absolutely make our day. And if we don’t see you in the next step. Ah, if we don’t see you in the next episode. No if we don’t see you in the comments or the reviews we will see you in the next episode have a good week. Everybody.