 Hey, what is going on everyone? Well, you might have noticed I've been a bit quiet here on YouTube and that is because I have been locked away working on my latest project, the ultimate SEO for WordPress and when I'm working on something at this scale, something this big, I just get into ultra focused mode. So I thought what a better way to emerge back here on YouTube than by sharing a free lesson from my new project. In this one, I'm going to share with you the most common critical SEO errors and mistakes that I've seen in my career working on WordPress websites. And if you want to know more about the ultimate SEO for WordPress, then check out the link inside the description or go ahead and ask me anything that you like inside the comments. And please use this as a guide to help you while you are building your WordPress websites to avoid making these big mistakes. Here they are. We are going to look at the most common WordPress SEO mistakes. This is specific to WordPress and those of us building WordPress websites. This right here, you can keep this as a list. You can keep this with your checklist. You can just keep it as something to reference when you are building your site, especially if you are in the earlier or new days of building WordPress websites. The first big mistake is going to be not turning on that no index when developing a WordPress website. This is a very, very common mistake that I see happen a lot of times. So a lot of the times we start a new website, but we just leave it index. So Google is already crawling that incomplete website. Another thing too is maybe you created a staging website. Maybe you're working on a site and you clone it over to something else, but you leave that on index. And if you have both the live site on live in the Google search, and if you have the staging or clone site also live in the Google search, well, you're going to create duplicate content and you're going to harm the SEO on the website. The next big mistake is going to be the complete opposite. And that is not turning off the no index after completing the site and pushing the live. And this is a massive, massive, massively critical mistake. One that I've seen happen way too many times. And that is a website gets completed by a web developer turned over to the client, but back inside the settings is still checked as far as saying, please do not show this to search engines. Meaning that the website is completed, but it never gets indexed. It's nowhere to be found. It's completely hidden. And this could happen. I've seen it happen where sites were completed and for years, they were not coming up in Google searches and they wondered why. And it was that simple mistake that was actually very, very huge. The next thing is changing the URLs in a rebuild site without using redirects. So that is something that when I was new, I had no idea. I had no clue that I had to do this. And I know I'm more than sure that I am guilty of messing up some SEO when I was new because I was never taught any of this. This is why I'm so glad for anybody here. I'm so happy for you. If you are new to WordPress that you are taking the course. This is what I needed to learn when I was new. Now, when we do get a rebuild, which look at most of the times, new projects are rebuilds. The client has a site they want a new site. We don't really know about those URLs in a page and how to keep them and make sure they match on the new page. Well, anything on the original URL is going to be lost. There's going to be 404s, leaks are going to be broken. You don't know about the backlinks, what external websites are pointing to that page. You're going to cause a huge loss of SEO value. Search engines are going to look at it as a new page with similar content. It's going to look at as cannibalization. It does so much harm, but it's also something that most people just don't know about when they start building WordPress websites. The next really big air is going to be letting clients guide the content structure where the web builders, where the web designers. Now, it's not saying that clients don't understand how to, you know, create a content structure. Some of them do. Some of them are actually really good at it. I know clients that websites aren't their specialty, but they understand content. They understand marketing and stuff. But still, we have our specialty and we're being hired as a website specialist. It's up to us to use our expertise and especially when it comes to the content. We need to be able to structure it. One of the big mistakes I see a lot of web designers making. And look at I was guilty of this as well. And please do not get offended if you are doing this right now. Because at some point, I think we all do it. But that is not building the website yet until the client gives us all of the content. I feel like that helps us with scope creep. It helps us to get the website done quicker. So that way we're not waiting on that content from the client. But at the same time, you know, what if our client is a lawyer? They're used to documents and they send us big, long war docs, just full of content. What are we supposed to do with that? So if we could learn how to create the structure ourselves and how to guide the client with the content inside of our builds, we're going to not only make the clients life a whole lot easier, we're actually going to make it easier for us as well. Next up, all right, not taking the time to properly add page titles and meta descriptions. Very, very often when I do get a website that we didn't build, usually these are just left blank. They were never set up and we cannot expect a client to do this on their own. This is something that we need to do as we build the website. Next big mistake is not setting up those age tags. You know, some of this has to do with the way WordPress has been built and the way they show age tags based on font size, which is a wrong way to look at age tags. Another way is just out of either laziness of not setting those age tags when we're adding our headers or of just not knowing and understanding how these really work and how we should utilize them. And then the last one, this is the big one. And I have a feeling that a lot of us are going to be doing this in the course and this is something I don't want you to do. And that is getting stuck in perfection, especially when it comes to SEO. You start to take those next steps. You're really good and good at it. You understand how it works, consuming tons of content, taking this course, taking free courses to, you know, follow in Aharefs YouTube channel, which I love that channel, by the way. But then it's like you get stuck on what is the perfect keyword? What's the right keyword? Or if I choose this keyword, am I going to mess everything up? Don't worry about it. Remember, here's the thing about SEO. It's the optimization, the growth. It's about optimizing content, about optimizing those keywords. And that means you are continuously working on them. You create a blog post and you want to rank in that blog post. You don't just write it once and try to get the perfect keyword. You write it. You use your best judgment on it. You put it out there. You get those metrics coming back and you look at what's happening. And then you keep going in and optimizing it every 60 days or so. That is how you optimize it. So don't get stuck in perfection. Don't feel like you need to have the perfect H1, the perfect keyword density. Just follow the best practices. That's the reason why we're using checklists. Checklists for me help to move forward. And that is what a process does. A process guides us forward. And as long as we're going forward and applying best practices and using our best judgment, well, two things happen. One, we are productive. We keep moving forward. But two, we keep learning. Because the next time you do it, you're going to be better at it. It's all part of the process and it's a wonderful journey. I love it. I hope you do too. But here's the thing, keep this cheat sheet. As long as you know that these are the most common mistakes and you have your awareness up on them, that is already giving you a huge leverage. And it's just there to help you out as you are building those best practices until they become second nature. That's it for this lesson. I'll see you inside the next one. Thank you. I hope you learned something to help you out inside of your next WordPress project. And if you did, make sure to check out the ultimate SEO for WordPress. This is exactly what I wish was taught to me when I was learning WordPress and SEO. That's it for this video. And I do got a couple more coming up right around the corner. I got something for Elementor, something for Bricks, both SEO focused. Those are coming up next. So make sure to subscribe and do all that good YouTube stuff so that way you can get notified when those drop. Well, that's it for this video for this lesson. Thank you for watching and I will see you inside the next one.