5 Common SEO Mistakes When Building Page Content

By Alyssa Wilie

If you’re struggling to get your web content to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPS), you may be held back by common SEO mistakes. Search engine optimization is a complex, ever-evolving field where even the smallest of errors or omissions can significantly impact your search rankings. In this post, we’ll explore some of the most common SEO mistakes that could negatively affect your site’s visibility.

1. Ignoring the Hierarchy of Headings

Headings in content give users a quick summary of your content and makes it easier to browse through large amounts of text. While you can style any heading tag to look like they’re being used in the appropriate hierarchy, the tags themselves must be used correctly for ease of reading. Heading tags used in the correct hierarchy, nested by rank, allow screen readers and search engines to organize better and understand your content. Furthermore, each heading level is given its degree of importance, going from H1 with the highest importance to H6 with the lowest importance.

H1s denote the overall central theme of your content, making it a best practice to include a single, unique H1 at the beginning of each page.

H2s help break up your content into digestible sections about particular topics within the main theme.

H3s-H6s can further break up those topics into smaller bite-size pieces.

Neglecting to provide an appropriate structure for your content can make your content harder to digest and gives search engines little idea of your content’s focus.

2. Not Giving Media Files Descriptive Names

File names are probably the last thing you’re considering when creating content, but they can be essential to search visibility. All major search engines include a video and image search, and giving your media files descriptive names helps them rank accordingly in those search results.

Imagine you run a medical blog that often uses images of imaging (X-Rays, MRIs, etc.) to reinforce information provided in your text. Then a user enters an image search to compare particular MRIs to their own. Do you think this user will have more luck finding your image with its file named ‘image0123’ or ‘brain-mri-chiari-malformation’? This same concept can be applied to images of products, tutorials, logos, and more.

Keep in mind a few best practices when naming your files:

  1. Use hyphens to separate words (not spaces, underscores, or periods).
  2. Do not use special characters ($, /, [, &, etc).
  3. Do not use uppercase letters.
  4. Keep the file names concise (usually no more than 3-4 words).

3. Not Providing Descriptive Alt Text for Images

Providing alternative text is even more important than giving your images descriptive file names. Alternative text is a long-form description for providing search engines (and screen readers) insight into what an image is being used to convey.

It’s important to remember not to stuff keywords into your alternative text, though. The text should describe in detail how you expect your users to view the image by explaining what is in it and how it relates to its content. Having alternative text for every single image on a page is also unnecessary. Images that are purely decorative and have no function can and should have their alternative text left empty.

Writing good alt text for your images is a great way to get them ranked in search engine results and ultimately drive traffic to your site through your images.

4. Uploading Too of Large Images

Another mistake related to images is the simple act of not optimizing them. Marketers often purchase images off sites like iStock and pexels, download the original size, and upload it directly to their site with its full 6000px and 3MBs. If you’re not familiar with image file sizes, that’s huge. Currently, the most commonly used screen width resolution is no larger than 1920px wide, so a 6000px wide image is unnecessary.

Large images can drastically decrease the load time of your pages, especially if you’re using more than one image. Why does this matter, though? Search engines consider your site’s page speed when ranking your site. Not only that, but slow load times can cause users to leave your website prematurely.

Optimizing your images is relatively simple and quick to ensure you’re not bogging down your pages. Image-providing sites usually provide multiple sizes you can download, so instead of downloading the original size, make sure to download a size more appropriate for the width of your content. Then to further optimize your images, you can utilize sites like tinypng.com to compress them.

5. Writing Content for Search Engines Rather Than Readers

With talk about headings, file names, and alternative text being significant indicators of what your content is about, it can be tempting to start throwing keywords anywhere into this content you can fit them. This, however, will be detrimental to your rankings. Google has a people-first approach when assessing content, and if the search engine notices a page being a little too keyword happy, it’ll demerit the content.

When writing your content, you must think about your users first and search engines last. Is the content easily digestible? Does it make sense? Does it provide insightful, comprehensive information? These are the questions you want to ask yourself instead of “Will this page rank well?”. If users like your content, search engines will like your content.

Work With an Expert

Don’t let these common SEO mistakes hold your website back any longer. Mistakes can happen, but the key is to learn from them and use them as an opportunity to improve and refine your SEO approach. By breaking down these common mistakes into manageable steps and taking action to address them, you can improve your site’s visibility and attract more organic traffic.

Want to chat about SEO more in-depth? Then reach out to a member of our marketing team! We’re happy to discuss anything to help optimize your website.