There are numerous on-page SEO mistakes that may prevent you from achieving 1st page rankings.
In this article you will discover the top 5 most important on-page/on-site SEO mistakes you should avoid.
Some of these problems are harder to solve than others, but if you can manage to have most of them solved, then you will have a greater opportunity to stand out from your competitors in the search rankings.
1. Poor site structure
Why is it wrong?
Aside from making it easier for the search engines to index your page, it is highly recommended to have a well thought site structure including clear directory paths and intuitive internal linking structure.
Google is continuously adding elements to their algorithm that appreciate the usability of your website.
How do I correct it?
No matter if your website has 10 pages or 1000 pages, it is important to organize all the information into categories or subfolders.
All navigation menus should be built methodically and should never be more than 3 clicks away from any other page on your site.
This will lead to an easy to use website that will be more easily traced by search engines.
How is it changing?
This is something that will always be important to your website.
As Google’s algorithm evolves, it would be better able to determine how your site is from the point of view of the user experience.
For that reason, it is crucial to properly organize the architecture of your website as soon as possible.
2. SEO unfriendly URLs
Why is it wrong?
The SEO unfriendly URLs are those that are dynamically generated or contain special characters or technical parameters.
On the other hand, SEO friendly URLs contain keywords that are easy to read and to understand, both for search engines and users.
How do I correct it?
If you’re using WordPress, then you can simply solve this common onpage SEO mistake by editing the Permalink Settings in order to modify the way you organize your URLs.
These changes will be applied throughout your entire website.
For more information on this subject, we highly recommend this article/tutorial from WPbeginner: http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/seo-friendly-url-structure-for-wordpress/
On the other hand, if your website is custom built, you should get in touch with your programmer and ask him to create dynamic URL rewrites using the “htaccess” file.
How is it changing?
Like the site structure, this will always be important for your website’s performance and positioning on Google.
SEO-friendly URLs plays a big role on optimizing your on-page SEO.
Why is it wrong?
Title tags are probably the most important factor that can influence the SEO of your page.
By placing your target keywords in the title tag, you’re essentially allowing Google (and your users) know that these terms are related to the content of your page.
Many sites do not take advantage of this and as a result, do not rank high enough.
Instead, many sites try to optimize their pages with keywords that are not related to its contents. The Google algorithm has become increasingly better distinguishing “relevance.”As a result, it is very unlikely that your FAQs page, for example, ranks for one of your important search terms.
How do I correct it?
In order to fix this on-page SEO mistake, it is important to do a thorough analysis of your keywords before optimizing the title tags.
Once you know what terms you want to position yourself, you can then choose the relevant pages on your site whose title you’re going to optimize.
If you have content that is related to those terms but think your website should rank for them, it is better to create new, relevant pages rather than trying to optimize for keywords on pages that are not related to those terms.
Thereby, assuring you that the content on your site matches the search intent and provides the best user experience possible.
How is it changing?
Since the title tags have always been an important factor in positioning, they have been a constant victim of black-hat SEO techniques like keyword stuffing.
As a result, Google has become efficient at recognising spam, and tuned the importance they give to the title tags.
While Google has recently made some minor adjustments in how they see the title tags in the search results, it is clear that this is still a crucial on-page SEO ranking signal.
4. Slow-loading website
Why is it wrong?
The loading speed of your site is a factor that directly affects your ranking.
If this is not sufficient reason to optimize, it can also affect bounce rates, conversions and user experience.
How do I correct it?
There are many ways to speed up your site, such as JavaScript and CSS compression, optimizing your images and leveraging the browser cache storage.
The best method to fix this on-page SEO mistake is to visit the Google PageSpeed tools and analyze the performance of your site.
If you’re using WordPress, we highly recommend you to use a caching plugin to improve your website’s loading speed. We personally recommend and use the Comet Cache Pro caching plugin.
How is it changing?
This has become increasingly important, as the web has become more complex.
Google officially added the website’s performance to their search algorithm in 2010 and today it continues to be an important ranking factor within the on-page SEO category.
5. Duplicate Content
Why is it wrong?
It is considered duplicate content if you are serving the same content from different URLs.
Among other reasons, it is inconvenient because search engines have trouble deciding what to index page and direct links to their metrics (trust, authority, link juice, etc.).
How do I correct it?
To correct this on-page SEO mistake, you need to choose the most important page from among all the URLs you have with duplicate content.
Once you’ve determined the main page, you should then place the “rel = canonical” tag pointing to this page on all of the other URLs that you don’t need to get indexed.
This tag tells the search engine that although you may have multiple pages with the same content, there is one in particular that you would like to get indexed.
How is it changing?
While Google is becoming better and better determining which pages to index/rank, it is still important to make sure your duplicate content issues are solved in order to get as much “trust” as possible for your site.
