The Most Common SEO Issues and Solutions Explained in Layman’s Terms

Search engine crawlers like Google prefer content that is properly structured and has a hierarchy when it comes to heading tags. The H1 tag is the most important and tells search engines what it is the content on each page is about.

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Add an H1 tag to your pages that is relevant to the content you are posting. Try to include keywords in your H1 tag and limit each page to just one H1 tag.

Meta descriptions can significantly increase the chance of someone clicking on your content in the search results. The meta description lets people know what to expect on the page they are about to open. If you choose not to add an optimized and intriguing meta description, the search engine will typically add the first sentence of the page. Usually, that will not be enough to pique the interest of the person searching and they might not click.

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Go through your site content and add relevant and unique meta descriptions to each page to increase your chances of intriguing searchers to click through to your content.

Meta descriptions are the small blurbs you see in search results under the page titles. These give a quick description of what the content on the page is about. These descriptions help both the people searching and the search engine crawlers understand what to expect on each page.

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Avoiding duplicate meta descriptions is important as it ensures visitors will be accessing unique information. Having duplicate meta descriptions can make the ranking process more difficult as engine crawlers will have a hard time figuring out the differences between pages and what should rank and what shouldn't.

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Make sure that every page you post on your website has a meta description that is both relevant to the content on the page and one of a kind.

Contact us if you want us to assist you in writing high converting Meta Descriptions.

Without enough text on a page, Google will have trouble understanding what the content is about.

If Google doesn't know what the content is about, it won't be able to rank your content for the search terms you are targeting.

By adding more text, you are telling Google's crawlers, and your end users, more about what it is you have to offer. Anything less than a few hundred words is considered thin content and will be nearly impossible to rank.

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Add more content to your page so that it isn't considered thin content and has a better chance of ranking. In general the average web page that ranks on page 1 of Google contains 2200 words.

Title tags are vital components of your pages and important pieces of the on-page SEO puzzle.

Title tags appear in search results and let people know what the name of the article or page is that they are considering opening. If you don't add a title tag to your page, it will be much more difficult to rank. Search engines prefer ranking content that has relevant title tags that help people searching make the best decisions.

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Review all of your pages to make sure that they all have title tags that are both relevant to the keyword you are targeting and intriguing enough to get people to click.

It's very important that each of your pages have original and unique title tags. Duplicate title tags can make it more complicated to rank content in search results because search engine crawlers won't know which post to rank above the other. If you want to rank your pages without confusion or without having them compete with one another, creating unique and relevant title tags is incredibly important.

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Go through your pages and make sure that all of the title tags are unique and that you don't have any duplicate title tags.

Title tags need to deliver an important idea to your potential readers in a few words. But the title tag can't be too short. If the title tag is less than 30 characters, it will be difficult for search engines to understand what the content is about and decreasing the likelihood of ranking.

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Make sure that your title tags are long enough for search engines to recognize and so you are able to intrigue potential visitors to click on your page.

It is recommended to keep your title tag under 65 characters so you don't run the risk of having part of it cut out from the search results page.

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Go through your pages and shorten any of your title tags that exceed 65 characters.

Sitemap.xml files can facilitate your chances of ranking by making your site easier to crawl by search engines. By creating a unified list of URLs that you would like to be indexed, the sitemap.xml file ensures that not only will your site be crawled properly but that it will be done quickly and more efficiently.

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Contact us if you want us to help you upload a sitemap.

In order to create a URL that is truly SEO-friendly, one must take into account certain factors that Google deems important for rankings. Some of these factors include the length of the URL not exceeding 120 characters, how relevant the wording in the title is to the content in the post, avoiding symbols and underscores within the slug, inclusion of session IDs, too many different sub-folders, and so on.

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Avoid overcomplicating your URL structure by only focusing on using keywords in your slug that are relevant to the content in the post. Your URL should only contain numbers, letters, and dashes, and you should avoid using extraneous characters such as: !, @, #, $, %, ^, &, *, (, ), [, ], ?, {, }, ;, :, “.

URLs that have more than 120 characters may negatively impact your chances of ranking. Google prefers URLs below that character count. The more words you add in your URL, Google will think the URL is only relevant for specific long tail phrases versus broad and long tail phrases.

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Make sure that all of your URLs moving forward don't exceed the 120-character limit.

SSL certificates are digital certificates that enable an encrypted connection and authenticate a website. They provide your visitors with the reassurance that they will have a safe connection between your site and their device. Moving from http to https on your site is now considered to be something that can help boost your rankings as it provides a more secure, and therefore better, experience to your end user.

The load time of a website refers to the time that it takes for the entire site to render in your browser, displaying all parts of the site's HTML code. This does not include images, CSS, Java, or any other non-HTML codes.

Never has it been more important for your site's load time to happen quickly. If you want your content to rank, it's vital that your site loads quickly. The faster the better.

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Ensure that your website's HTML code is clean and uncluttered. Removing unnecessary plugins, elements, or features can help with load speed. Make sure that you are compressing images and caching. If your server is compromising your load speed, consider upgrading to a better hosting company or a more robust plan.

4xx status errors happen when traffic people trying to visit your website aren't able to access certain pages. This can happen for a variety of different reasons and needs to be checked carefully. These kinds of errors create a negative experience for your user, which in turn can indirectly impact your SEO and rankings.

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If your site is showing an issue with 4xx errors then you should immediately discover the source of these errors.

Broken links lead visitors from one website to another, bringing them to non-existent webpages. Multiple broken links can negatively affect your site in a few ways: They frustrate your visitors and could cause them to leave your site They make it hard for search engines to crawl and index your site’s pages Search engines may view your site as low quality if it has a high number of broken links.

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Remove the broken links from the affected pages or replace them with working links to other relevant pages. Alternatively, if you’re fixing a broken internal link, you can create a 301 redirect for the broken page and send users to a new destination page. This is particularly important if the broken page has backlinks.