Top 10 Wordpress Mistakes

It is so good to see a ton of BANS users getting on the train and doing Wordpress BANS integrations. However on quite a few that need help after purchase, I am seeing several of the same mistakes being made on the Wordpress side of things. These are not in any particular order of importance as I feel everyone of them is equally important as the next in building a SEO and user friendly BANS Wordpress site. While there are tons of plugins out there to make every task easier, starting with the basics and learning how to actually make Wordpress work for you in the basic form is very important.

Here are the top 10 mistakes I am seeing:

1. Improper Permalinks Setup - The default setup in Wordpress simply numbers the post in the url. Personally I prefer the month and name setting /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ over everything else, some will tell you to use a custom structure like /%postname%/ which is ok, but if you want to go safe, use the month and name setting.

2. Improper SEO setup - The All in One SEO plugin, even in it's default setting, will do wonders for you. Get the title of the post or page up front in the TITLE tag. This plugin is a necessity for every Wordpress blog.

3. Bad Use of Categories and Tags - I did a post on categories and tags a few days ago. Know the difference and how to properly use them.

4. No XML Sitemap - Once again there is a great XML Sitemap Generator plugin to handle this.

5. No Privacy Policy - If you are going to run an ecommerce site of any kind, you better get use to adding a privacy policy on each and every site. One again the privacy policy plugin cures this.

6. HTML and CSS errors - Not all themes are created equal. Run your site through a validator and fix any major structure errors.

7. Blogrolls Linked to Unrelated Sites - You should be linking out to on topic or semi related sites. You dilute your niche credibility by linking to just anyone who will link to you.

8. No Database Backup - Get in the habit of backing up your database. Losing every post and page on a website is a sick feeling.

9. Not using Akismet - Time management is always crucial and not using a comment spam blocker will cost you precious time.

10. No Unique Content or Post - In order for Wordpress to show it's benefits you need to post to it and post to it as often as you can. This does not include content scrapers or copied articles. It must be yours, on topic and timely.

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