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It is essential for you to optimize your website for your visitors. Optimization certainly heightens your chances of ranking well in search engine results. It is commonly referred to as your organic search performance.

There are various factors and SEO tactics to guarantee top rankings. You need to research more on the various aspects of your website that can be customized to satisfy your prospective customers as well as the web crawlers!

However, first and foremost, you need to have knowledge about the common on-page SEO mistakes as well as their solutions or workarounds. On-page SEO implies both the content as well as the HTML source code of a page that can be optimized. On the other hand, off-page SEO refers to links and other external signals.

Here is a list of the top on-page mistakes along with their respective fixes:

Irrelevant meta titles and meta descriptions

The meta title is often considered to be the most vital on-page ranking factor for search engines. In addition, the meta description helps the searcher to determine which of the results displayed is beat suited to their needs or purpose.

Irrelevant meta titles and meta descriptions

• Every page should have an exclusive page title as well as meta description. These should be relevant in reflecting upon the content on the specific page.
• Keep the meta titles and descriptions precise. Search engines display around 60 characters for every page title and 160 characters for a meta description. Any characters that exceed 60 and 160 respectively are not displayed in their search results.
• Trim off the stop words from the title. Stop words include words like ‘and’ ‘the’ and ‘of’ etc. Such words take unnecessary space. Platforms like WordPress automatically cuts down stop words for you.
• Suitable keywords should be present in your titles and descriptions. Remember that these keywords should appear like they have been forced into the title or description. Include them in a natural and relatable way.
• Create your meta title and meta description in such a way that they appeal to your target audience in a split second. Do not forget your ultimate goal is to tempt searchers to click on your listing in the search results. Incorporate the keywords that you’re targeting for that page. As told earlier, it should appear that the keywords present are suitable, descriptive and enticing.

High loading time

Those pages are often abandoned that take ages to load. The ideal scenario is when a page loads in one second!

Solutions

• You can use Google’s “Page Speed Insights” tool to evaluate the speed of your site both for desktop as well as mobile. You just need to enter the URL of your site into the tool. This helpful tool even provides all possible issues and their respective related to loading speed.
• Remember oversized images take a longer time to load. So keep your images small. Exclusively for WordPress site, you can consider adding the WO Smush.it plug-in to make sure that your images load fast.
• Remove all the unnecessary bells-and-whistles that might be reducing the speed of your site. These useless items might include flash graphics or other unnecessary plug-ins.
• Do not forget to enable the compression feature. It significantly speeds up page load time by effectively reducing the bulkiness of your content. The concept is similar to that of a compressed zip file that effectively stores and shares documents.

Meaningless content

Google returns only the most relevant and meaningful results to the users’ queries. In short, it shall not consider those contents that are only created keeping search engine in mind and not to serve the purpose of humans.

Focusing all the concentration only on your website’s homepage while neglecting the other web pages, is a big mistake.

Solutions:

• Prefer writing long resourceful articles than short ones. Longer contents rank higher on Google in general. 600 words is the ideal count for minimum limit.
• Concentrate on every page. Include only authentic and relevant content. Avoid repetition of content. If duplicate contents are found, your site might be penalized that causes a huge drop in your site’s rankings.
• The page title should be reflective of the web page content.
• Make sure to go for a good quality source while outsourcing your content.
• You can consider including prominent buttons such as ‘download this form here’. This effectively enhances the click-through rates, impacting your site’s SEO ranking as well.

Inadequate keyword research

Though last but definitely not the least, this point is very crucial to keep in mind while implementing SEO strategies. Keyword usage can take you to the top or the bottom of the ladder! Keyword research is crucial. It gives you a clearer idea as to what are the demands of your target customers and how to fulfill those. After all, Search marketing focuses on quality too apart from quantity.

Solutions:

• Google provides certain free useful tools meant for keyword research. Some common such tools include Google AdWords Keyword Planner Tool, Google Trends etc. These tools provide a thorough knowledge of the method of researching and selecting the right keywords.
• Think from a searcher’s perspective while adding the keywords. Your services or products might not be the most relevant keywords after all. You need to know about the current market trends and customer demands to get a hint of the right keywords that come up in the minds of your searchers.
• Do not get fixated on single keywords. Focus more on the themes or topics and then grasp the keywords.
• Prefer keywords that constitute of 3 or more words. Though these keywords have less volume, they have the potential to bring more targeted customers to your site.