WordPress SEO Disasters + Lessons Learned – WPCAST023

In this week’s episode, we discuss SEO for WordPress and quick tips on what you should be setting up.

The Changelog

David is experimenting with price points and plans for Easy Pricing Tables.

The Core

Stories:

* One of Doug’s clients:

* Tripled his traffic simply by moving to EfficientWP hosting.

* Then hit by a manual penalty for thin content and rankings plummeted.

* One of David’s old projects:

* E-commerce store on Drupal that was rebuilt on WordPress.

* They forgot to turn off “disallow search engines” on new site after migration.

* Turned it on again and traffic went back up.

* Doug’s AdSense site:

* Bought a thin content AdSense site, made some quick SEO and ad placement changes.

* The site went from making $20/month to over $100/month.

* It got penalized and now makes just a few dollars a month.

* Still came out to a 3-4X ROI, but no interest in pursuing AdSense sites anymore.

* David’s AdSense site:

* FishOilBenefitsHQ.com

* Did some grey hat SEO and link building.

* The site went on to make $100/month.

* First Penguin update completely wiped out traffic.

* He decided to let the domain name expire.

* David worked on a Shopify E-commerce store:

* Found duplication issues and implemented the rel=canonical tag.

* Organic search traffic doubled as a result.

Plugins:

* WordPress SEO

* The best plugin for basic on-page SEO.

* No need for anything else, including sitemap plugins.

* As Dan Norris says, “Yoast it.”

* Google Analytics by Yoast

* Integrates Google Analytics with your site.

* Allows you to remove your own visits (logged in users) from your traffic stats.

* See Episode 16, Maximizing the Potential of Google Analytics.

* Simple 301 Redirects

* Allows you to easily set up 301 redirects for deleted and moved pages.

* Fixing your 404 error pages helps with SEO and reduces lost traffic.

* Use the Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool to crawl for 404 errors.

* nRelate Related Content

* Generates a list of related posts.

* Internal links help for SEO, as well as keeping your visitors engaged.

Do you have any horror stories? Please share your comments and questions below!