5 On-Page Optimization Mistakes to Avoid
On-page optimization hasn’t really changed much over the past few years, but there are 5 mistakes many websites are still making and they are super easy to avoid.
1. Not Including Images
If you aren’t including images in your website’s content, you are missing out on one of the easiest ways to increase visibility and attract more traffic. An infographic published by Jeff Bullas suggests that articles with images receive approximately 94% more views than articles without images. Furthermore, consumers think product images are the most important element of an e-commerce store, more so than product descriptions and even ratings/reviews.
2. Title Tag is Too Long
Another all-too-common mistake that many webmasters and Internet marketers are guilty of making is using an excessively long title tag. According to Moz, Google displays between 50-60 characters in the title tag. Therefore, titles consisting of 61 or more characters will get cut off. Keep your titles short, concise, and relevant to the pertaining page’s content.
3. Description Tag is Too Long
Of course, Google also places a limit on the number of characters is displays in a website’s description, which is usually around 150 to 160 characters. If you don’t specify a description tag for your pages, Google will pull a snippet to use instead. Keep your description tags under 160 characters for maximum visibility.
Tip: Keep your titles and descriptions concise and accurate. This rule applies to images as well.
4. Not Interlinking Content Together
When you create a new article for your website, try to interlink with other articles that you’ve written in the past. Known as “interlinking,” this is beneficial for both visitors and search engines. Interlinking your pages together helps visitors find relevant information about a particular topic, and it also encourages search engines to crawl more pages on your site. You can interlink your pages together by manually creating the links by hand, or you can use a third-party plugin.
5. Keyword Stuffing
In the past, it was relatively easy to achieve a top rank for a specific keyword simply by “stuffing” that keyword into an article. Google has since caught on to this deceptive practice, penalizing offending websites. So keyword stuffing today will likely have the opposite effect by lowering your website’s search ranking, or worse, having your website removed from Google’s index completely. There’s nothing wrong with including keywords in your articles, but you should only use them when it makes sense and adds real value to visitors.
Tip: If you’re on WordPress, you can use the Yoast SEO plugin to check the length of your title and description tags, keyword density. Yoast has become the de-facto standard for SEO WordPress plugins, so be sure to install it on your site or blog.
