Technically Optimise Your WordPress Site

Pages with a duplicate page title / Meta description

Google is all for original content and fresh ideas, anything that is duplicated makes it more difficult for Google to understand your site, so original titles for each page is an easy and effective method to please search engines. This again would be edited in the same way as the previous two, by going into edit page on WordPress and changing all your page titles appropriately if any of them are duplicated.

Pages missing a meta description

Missing a meta description may not affect your SEO directly, however it is very important, as your first point of sale is often your page title and meta description in Google search, it is your first chance to sell your product or service to your customer with a snappy and effective description. If a meta description is not specified, then search engines will display some copy from the page instead. This will therefore be unlikely to give a good description of your page and will be bad for attracting potential customers to your website. You should try to keep your meta descriptions between 150-160 characters to maximise your chances of achieving a better number of clicks from potential customers. A meta description can be added to your page using WordPress in the same section that your page title is added.

Pages missing Google Analytics

Google analytics should be on every page if the user would like to be able to view what’s happening within their website, things like referrals and traffic. Google analytics can also allow you to set up other tracking tools and will do all the work for you. You must have a Google Analytics account set up, and the analytics are put onto the website in the code on each page on your site.

Pages with a low word count

It is recommended to have at least 250 words on a page to improve your technical optimisation for your site, however exceptions can be made for non-key pages, such as contact pages. This is because if a page has a low word count then it gives the search engine less content to look at, this means it is more difficult for the search engine to understand the page and to judge whether it is a good quality page or not. Therefore, to improve your on-site SEO it is strongly advised that your key pages include over 250 words, and don’t forget your all-important keywords. On your WordPress site you can click edit page in the toolbar and more than likely increase your word count by simply adding to the content on the page, which is easy to see and edit.

Pages with duplicate content issues

Once again, in the same way that a duplicate page title or meta description is harmful to your SEO, pages that have content that is considered as duplicate can be even worse. Duplicate content is bad your site as search engines may not show both pages because they are forced to choose which version is likely to be the original, or most relevant version. Therefore, if you have pages with duplicate content you are jeopardising your chances of getting the desired high rankings. There is no one way to change duplicate content specifically for a WordPress site, other than changing the content and ensuring that no content is the same across your site.

Links missing anchor or ALT text

If a link is missing ALT text, then it makes it more difficult for a search engine to understand the context of your site and therefore more difficult to decipher whether your site is worthy of a good ranking or not. Therefore, it is important to add ALT text to your links to ensure that the search engine is not going to struggle to read your site and give it a good ranking. This can be done by simply putting text that is relevant to the link as anchor text in your <a> tag when linking to a page.

Images missing ALT text / Title text

Using ALT and Title text is an easy way to give search engines a further understanding of what is happening on your site, as you can include relevant keywords in them, giving the search engine an understanding of what the image is, and how it relates to the page. Using your keywords in ALT text and title text will improve your likelihood of ranking higher for your search term as Google will understand that your page is relevant to this keyword, providing that the rest of the page is well optimised for your keywords. Try to ensure that all your images across the site do have ALT text and title text. These can be added in WordPress in the media section, where you will find all the images on your site, simply click on the image and on the right-hand side will be a section to add ALT text and title text.

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