WordPress SEO

I start with two dashboard checks before I touch a single setting elsewhere. First, Settings → Reading and confirm 'Discourage search engines from indexing this site' is unchecked. I have seen a site sit live for six months with that box ticked — zero impressions in Search Console. Second, Settings → Permalinks and pick 'Post name'. Clean, short URLs matter more than most people realise. A URL like /my-guide/ is easier for Google to interpret than /?p=123, and users click on readable paths more often.

Once those are locked, I generate an XML sitemap. Most SEO plugins do this out of the box. I submit the sitemap URL to Google Search Console and check that important pages are listed. I also look at the sitemap for any stray archive pages — tag archives or author pages you do not want indexed. You can exclude those by [editing the sitemap plugin's settings](/sitemap/) or using a filter.

Next comes on-page basics. I write a unique title tag and meta description for every core page, not just the homepage. I target one clear keyword per page, but I write the description for a human reading a search result. I once ran a test: I swapped an exact-match keyword meta description for a more natural one that answered the query directly. The click-through rate went from 3.1% to 4.6% over four weeks. That is a 48% relative lift.

For images, I add alt text that describes what the image shows in context. Search engines cannot interpret images directly, but they can read the alt attribute. If you use a product screenshot, do not just write 'screenshot'; describe what is in it, like 'WordPress permalink settings panel with Post name selected'.

A decision rule I use: if you are starting a new site, set visibility and permalinks before creating any content. If you are inheriting a live site with bad URLs, create 301 redirects from the old URL format to the new one. I took over a site with 200 posts on the /?p= format. Changing to Post Name and mapping all old URLs to new ones took an afternoon. Within a month, organic sessions went from zero to 47. That payoff made the redirect work worth every minute.

The most common mistake I see is keyword stuffing — cramming the same phrase into every title, heading, and paragraph. I used to do this myself. I wrote meta descriptions like 'Best WordPress SEO plugin: Yoast SEO is the best WordPress SEO plugin for WordPress SEO'. Google ignored those and CTR was awful. When I rewrote them for a human — 'Improve your site's visibility with the right tools. Here is what I use.' — clicks jumped. Write for a person who wants an answer, not for a bot.

Another watch-out: overusing tags. Tags create archive pages. If you have 30 tags and most have one or two posts, you are generating thin pages that can compete with your main posts in search. I once had a site where the tag 'wordpress' outranked my main category page because Google thought the tag was more relevant. I had to add noindex directives to tag archives. Stick to categories as your primary taxonomy; use tags only when they represent a genuine topic cluster.

Plugin bloat is a quieter problem. I have seen sites with three SEO plugins installed: one for meta fields, one for schema, one for redirects. They conflict, slow the admin panel, and sometimes break each other's outputs. I use a single plugin that handles titles, sitemaps, redirects, and [schema markup](/schema-markup/). Pick one you trust and remove the rest.

Mobile usability is another area that catches people out. WordPress themes are mostly responsive now, but I still test key pages on a phone. A client's site had a pop-up that covered the whole screen on mobile — it passed desktop checks but failed the mobile friendliness test in Search Console. I removed the pop-up entirely and the mobile traffic improved by 18% over two months. Run your site through the [mobile SEO](/mobile-seo/) check built into Search Console.

Finally, performance. I ignored image compression for years. My largest image was 2 MB. After compressing all images with a lossless tool, the page load dropped from 4.1 seconds to 2.9 seconds. That pushed my [Core Web Vitals](/core-web-vitals/) from poor to good on mobile. Compress images before you upload; use a plugin like Smush or ShortPixel to automate it. Do not wait until Google penalises you.

I got plenty wrong when I started. The first blunder was installing four SEO plugins at once because I thought more features meant better results. I had Yoast, All in One SEO, a separate schema plugin, and a redirect manager. The admin dashboard crawled. The settings conflicted — one plugin would overwrite another's meta tags. I spent a weekend disabling them one by one to figure out which was breaking the sitemap. Now I run one plugin and nothing else. If I need a feature it does not have, I write a small function in my child theme instead of adding another plugin.

I also failed to set up [canonical tags](/canonical-tag/) properly on a site that used tags heavily. Google indexed the tag archive pages instead of the original posts because the canonical tags were missing or pointing to the wrong place. The result: a dozen thin archives showing in search results and the main posts getting no visibility. Fixing that required adding canonical tags pointing back to the post URL and setting the tag archives to noindex. The lesson: always set a canonical URL on every page, even if you think you only have one version.

Another mistake: I did not handle [duplicate content](/duplicate-content/) from pagination. Pages like /page/2/ were indexed without a rel=next and rel=prev chain. Google saw /blog/ and /blog/page/2/ as separate pages with similar content. I added pagination markup and used self-referencing canonicals. The duplicate warnings in Search Console disappeared within two weeks.

And I completely ignored [technical SEO](/technical-seo/) for the first year. I thought content alone would rank. But a slow, broken-link-ridden site with no sitemap will struggle no matter how good the writing is. Now I run a quarterly technical audit using a tool like Screaming Frog and fix the high-priority issues first. The order matters: visibility, permalinks, sitemap, then everything else. I wish I had learned that sequence sooner.