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Sometimes In SEO, It Boils Down To A Tie Break

Two similar companies, with similar products and similar web layouts, it’s not unheard of. I mean just take a peek at Amazon and Chapters. When it comes to books, they sell identical products and their websites reflect that. While they are more in the retailer game, the logic applies to any industry.

In a competitive market, like vying for Google’s top position, often times the thing that will push one site ahead of the other will be how many smaller on-page ranking factors you’ve checked off.

Before we can get started, I want this post to be a little more than an info dump, so if you’d like to see how your own content relates to the points below you’re going to need to inspect the elements on your own web page. If you are unsure how to do this here are a few links:

Inspect Elements Chrome

Inspect Elements Firefox

Inspect Elements IE

So now that you’ve got that under control, here are five things you can do to ensure that your website is just that little bit more competitive.

Images with Missing Title Attributes

This is mess to anyone who doesn’t understand HTML. The code in the box above is the HTML that loads up your image. The circled bit is what we call a title tag. It’s a piece of text that gives a more information about an image. Making sure that it’s filled in gives the spider crawling more details on the content of the image.

Images with Missing Alt Tags

This is the same image as before. However, this time we’ll focus in on the alt tag. The difference between the alt and title tags is that a title tag adds information, while the alt tag serves more as a backup. They are very important for people who have disabled images on their browser and thus depend on the text in the alt tag to describe the image. It’s also a very important tag for persons who rely on web readers to navigate the internet. Having this tag means that your website is useful to a wider spectrum of users, thus you get a bonus point in Google’s eyes.

Links with No Anchor Text

No need to inspect elements for this one, an anchor text is this: seo company Vancouver. That same link with no anchor text would look like this https://www.thinkprofits.com/. It’s important to have the right anchor text,  like a title tags as it provides the spider crawling your website with additional information as to what the link is providing the user. Essentially, it provides context for the link to exist in.

Missing Meta Tags

A meta description tells the browser what the page is about. Also It should never be longer than 160 characters (basically the length of one sentence). If done properly it’ll show up in the actual search results. It’s a good place to put in a relevant keyword and it’ll also be the first thing many searchers see, so better make sure it reflects the message that’s on the web page.

Pages with Duplicate Content

Duplicate content on the page is one thing, but the real insidious one is duplicating tags and other HTML elements we’ve hit on. Since people don’t really see them, it’s tempting to think that what works on a page can be copied into another. Doing that is exactly how you’ll lose the tiebreak. It’s always a good idea to conduct a website audit every now and then. This time take a deeper dive, look at the important tags and make sure they’re all customized.
What do you think? Did you find any of the issues mentioned above? For more on optimizing your website subscribe to our blog, we talk about it all the time. Otherwise, if you’d like to learn more about website audits simply contact us.