3 on-page SEO blunders you need to avoid
The success of a business has a lot to do with its online presence nowadays. Review sites, social networks, and online reputation have become daily jargon when it comes to having a business. They have been embedded into the vocabulary and daily activities of all companies that wish to make it big.
Word of mouth has been replaced by hashtags and mentions. For those companies that ignore their online presence failure is surely in their near future. Companies that understand the importance and value of a great online campaign and website depend on many techniques to get their website to Page 1 of search engines. One of the tools or means by which they expect to achieve such a lofty and ambitious goal is through search engine optimization or SEO for short. Through SEO, businesses are doing whatever they are able to so that Google, Bing, and other search engines rank them high on the results, giving them more exposure and more likelihood that a user will click on the link that will direct them to the company’s homepage.
SEO entails a number of factors that play a role in helping a website climb to the top. One of those factors, arguably the most important one, is on-page SEO. What is on-page SEO, exactly? It’s essentially all the components of a web page that have an impact on web page rankings. Some examples are HTML tags, the URL, content, and title of the web page. Even though on-page SEO is crucial to the success of a given site, many go about it all wrong. Here are some bad on-page SEO tactics that will bring your page to the lower part of the rankings instead of to the top.
1. Ignoring the importance of titles
The title tag of your website and the title users see when the go to search engines make up your presentation card. If you do not take them seriously, chances are few people will want to go to your website as much as you think they should be going. Titles should be very concise as to what search engines and readers are going to find once they click on the link. Titles which are not clear or which are misleading will surely lead to a lot of users bouncing from your site. Moz has an excellent guide on how you should go about your site’s title and title tags.
2. Forcing keywords
Another essential of good on-page SEO is using keywords appropriately. Unfortunately, many go about it all wrong. It’s quite common to see a website filled with keywords in the title and throughout the content. While search engines will only punish sites if there is clear keyword stuffing, readers may get tired quickly of the same keyword over and over again. Content should read naturally, and by using too many keywords it’s impossible to do so. Those in charge of writing should focus their efforts on making sure that the word they want readers to search for is definitely in the title. Once they have that covered, they should write and let keywords appear naturally.
3. Broken links
Building links to your site has been a pillar of SEO since it began. Link building is still relevant given that having others recommend your site will help you get to the top of search engine results pages. In order for any strategy aimed at getting links to work, it must ensure two things: external and internal links cannot be broken. In other words, the moment a reader clicks on a link, they should not be received with an error page. Too many broken links and the word is sure to spread and that means getting fewer visitors to your page in the long wrong. If that weren’t enough, broken links cause search engines to use up more resources for their crawlers then they would prefer. That is never a good thing. Therefore, a company must constantly analyze how links are behaving and solve any broken links as soon as possible.
On-page SEO is perhaps the most powerful way to get to the top of rankings. It helps sites bring in more visitors and search engines have an easier time crawling the page to make sure it is ranked appropriately. However, when it’s done wrong or when a company is not entirely committed to it, tragedy is the most likely result and with it low traffic. Not enough traffic going towards a website could lead to a drop in the rankings as well. Getting back to the top once you have slipped is possible, but it is going to be really hard to achieve. So, how about not waiting for things to go south before you take care and pay special attention to on-page SEO. Your readers and search engines will appreciate it.
