What are the most common mistakes that can stumble my small site SEO & ranking progress?

Most of online entrepreneurs and novice webmasters often associate small site SEO and ranking progress with an in-depth keyword research solely. Of course, that should be the very first thing to be done for improving their site SEO/ranking growth over time. But limiting themselves to the keyword research solely is a terrible mistake – simply because there are many other places, particularly regarding some core technical aspects of on-page SEO, which should be taken into close consideration as well. While fixing the following top frequent mistakes won’t take too much time or effort, keeping everything as it can stumble your further progress once and for all. That being said, below are the most frequent occurrences regarding on-site SEO and further ranking progress that MUST be fixed on short notice. So, consider at least the following issues – to be fixed before anything else.

Top 3 Issues with On-Site SEO Stumbling Ranking Progress Most Frequently

Having Pages with multiple URLs without Setting up Canonical Tags

Make sure to use a canonical tag to determine a preferred URL – and therefore help the major search engines (like Google itself) clearly identify the primary page that should be indexed. Given that one single page may generate quite different URLs (for example, through the user path, backlinking, or syndication), setting a canonical URL tag (i.e., an HTML element to be placed in your site’s HTML header) can help you prevent most of the issues related to duplicate content. And that is actually what seems to be preventing small business sites from ranking growth most frequently.

Getting Seemingly “Unnatural” Backlinks without “Nofollow” Tag Attribute

Next, you should check all your “unnaturally earned” external links (i.e., those built as paid links, generated within comments, or any other way of user-generated content without your control). That way, make sure to have a “nofollow” HTML attribute embedded for each and every unnaturally earned link you have within your website’s SEO link profile. Doing so, you will not only make your external links pass the user trust/authority “earned” with your content, but can also eliminate the lion’s share of potential concerns from the viewpoint of the search engines. That’s it.

Missing H1/H2/H3 Tags or Their Incorrect Usage

This is the last major issue, which may potentially cause obstacles to your on-site SEO & ranking progress when overthought or done not fully correct. Although there are many debates regarding the right usage of H1/H2/H3 heading tags, their direct impact on your website’s organic rankings in Google’s SERPs should never be underestimated at least for two reasons – they help the search engines correctly identify the relevance and topical importance of your content, in line with making things easier for LSI (i.e., Latent Semantic Indexing). 

With all that in mind, make sure to run a quick spot-check procedure to detect at least these top frequent mistakes:

• Use only single H1 header tag for each page’s primary heading.
• Split the key content categories with the relevant H2/H3 subheaders, making them rich with keywords.
• Don’t forget to have the right H3/H4/H5/H6 subheaders for every important subcategory and links (when applicable).
• Never use the same search terms or “exact-match“ content within several headings.
• And make sure to check your heading tag order – maybe you have it reversed (i.e., H2/H3 tag usage for top-level heading structure).