digital marketing
By Carrie-ann | Jun 14, 2017 | Search Engine Optimisation, SEO

Search Engine Optimisation issues guide

Nearly everyone with a website wants it to rank highly with search engines, but sadly most website owners have very limited knowledge about search engine optimisation – especially technical search engine optimisation.

If you want to learn more about common on-site search engine optimisation issues so that you can improve your SEO ranking, don’t worry. Here’s everything you need to know about SEO issues and how they affect your ranking.

Title Tag Problems
Title tags are essential for search engine optimisation. This is because search engines use title tags to index websites, and web users also use them to decide if they want to click on your website. If you don’t include title tags on your website, it may be indexed incorrectly by a search engine. Issues can also be caused by duplicate tag titles (titles that are the same as titles on other websites), overly long titles and titles that are too short.

Missing Image Alt Tags
Missing image alt tags can massively affect the ranking of your website. This is because search engines can’t see images, so they use image alt tags to learn what is in the picture. This means that search engines won’t pick up your image if you don’t include image alt tags, or they will index the image incorrectly if you use the wrong tags.

If you want to increase your SEO ranking, make sure that your images include relevant tags that accurately describe the image. It is also useful to include relevant keywords.

Missing Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are essential to your website, as they help users to decide if they should click on it or not. While meta tags are less important to search engines, they are one of the most important factors for people who are looking at your site. Make sure that each page on your website includes an accurate meta description with relevant keywords.

Duplicate Content
The most common issue that affects SEO ranking is duplicated content. The internet is filled with websites and webpages, so most websites include some level of duplicated content. However, this content can lower your website’s SEO ranking, as search engines won’t know which pages are more important than others, so the pages will start to compete with each other. It also means that the content on your website isn’t very original, so it is less likely to be useful. Try to make sure that you only provide original content for your audience.