Search engine marketing (SEO) is a marketing effort that helps your business rank at the top of SERPs (search engine results pages). While every aspect of SEO is important, on-page SEO helps ensure more targeted traffic comes to your site. Knowing the do’s and don’ts of on-page SEO is just as important as knowing what to do.
Keep reading to learn about some of the most common on-page SEO mistakes you may make, but that you should take steps to avoid.
Duplicate Content
If you publish duplicate content on your site, your rankings will suffer. Search engine crawlers don’t know the difference between original and duplicate content. It’s also estimated that up to 50% of all websites have duplicate content issues. If you have one in this group, it’s best to fix the problem quickly. Having unique content is a must to rank well in search engines.
Missing Alt Tags and Broken Images
While search engines are smart and getting smarter by the day, they rely on alt tags to let them know the image. It’s been proven that around 45% of all websites have images with no alt tags and another 10% of sites have broken images.
If this is the case for your site, crawlers will rank it lower if these issues are discovered. Along with hurting your on-page SEO, this also impacts UX (user experience). Also, if someone visits your page with broken images, they are more likely to bounce away quickly. You want to avoid a high bounce rate because Google will take that to indicate a low-quality website.
Using Nofollow Tags to Hide Certain Pages
Today, most website owners are hiding some of the content from search engines. This is done to either prevent duplicate content issues or hide a page designed for customers only.
The issue here is using the “no-follow” tag, which is not effective. While hiding pages are found, if you don’t do it the right way, it may cause issues for your SEO. If you want to hide pages from search engines effectively, you need to add this HTML to the top of the page:
<metaname=”robots”content=”noindex,nofollow”>
Low-Quality External Links
Today, more than ever before, Google wants to rank quality, authoritative websites high. What this means is that the content present on your site matters. So does the content you link to from your website.
Your anchor text, which is the words that you use to link to another source, needs to be relevant to the content that you are linking to. The unnatural language will look spammy to search engines and may reduce your rankings. You can use SEO tools that are available online to scan the outgoing links and discover any that may be impacting your SEO efforts.
With the tips and information here, you can achieve the desired results with your on-page SEO efforts and achieve the success you want and need for your business and website.