Common on-site SEO issues

When you are trying to achieve a high ranking on the search engines, on-site SEO is one of the most important things to get right. Below are some of the most common problems to look out for and how you can resolve them.

Image Optimization Errors

There are a few image issues that can have a negative impact on your on-site SEO. The most important of these that should be fixed first are broken images and missing alt text. Broken images should be either replaced with new ones or deleted in order to prevent them from negatively impacting your optimization. Image alt text lets the search engines know what the image is of and allows it to appear in relevant image search results.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is one of the most common issues that can be detrimental to your on-site SEO. Having duplicate content across multiple pages of your website it can be difficult to get the right page ranking for your keywords, and in some cases your pages can even end up competing with each other for positions. It is essential to sure your content is unique and valuable both for the search engines and for users on your site.

Broken Links

Having one or two broken links on a large website is not necessarily a huge problem especially if you have properly set up a 404 page, but if you are constantly updating resources, creating new pages and removing outdated ones it is important to make sure your links are updated or removed. Users being greeted with a 404 page when they click links on your website instead of the information they were looking for are more likely to leave your site.

In addition to this, when the search engines crawl your site, broken links can divert them away from pages you are trying to rank, making your site less likely to achieve the position it otherwise might have.

Incorrect Use of H1 Tags

Many sites use multiple h1 tags, have the same information in their h1 tags as in their meta titles and in some cases are missing a h1 all together. It is always best to have one h1 per page and make sure it is relevant to your content and to the page meta title, without being identical.

If you keep an eye out for these issues and make sure to correct them when you are going through your on-site SEO you should see some improvement in your search engine rankings before too long.