The 3 On-Page Flaws Bleeding Your Site’s Authority Pt. 2

How duplicate titles, missing alt text, and unflagged external links quietly drain your ranking power.

Photo by Myriam Jessier on Unsplash

Continuing with the most overlooked SEO related issues, you can check out Pt.1 where we discussed on Missing H1 tag, Missing Meta-Description, and Missing Canonical.

Note: I will not only list out the SEO related issues, but also provide a step-by-step instructions on how to fix those issues as well. The platform I’ll use across the articles will be WordPress.

1. Missing Img Alt Text

Img Alt Text is displayed when the browser can’t load/fetch the image.

This looks more harming that most of the site owners realize, Google official SEO documentation suggests that every website should have an Img Alt Text.

Step-by-step fix:

· Go to WordPress Admin Dashboard (/wp-admin)

· Navigate to Pages → Edit page

· Locate the image on the page that is missing alt text

· Click on the image to select it

· On the right side Block Panel, click on ‘Settings’

· Look for the ‘Alternative Text’ field

· Add a descriptive alt text that explains what the image shows (e.g. ‘Red sports car parked on a street’)

· Avoid generic text like ‘image’ or ‘photo’ — be specific and descriptive

· Save changes

2. External Link Missing Nofollow

Other SEO related issue is the external link missing nofollow, this means that your website links externally to another website with plain hyperlink that includes “nofollow” fixing this is crucial for any website that contains too many externally pointing links.

Step-by-step fix:

If it’s a button with an external link:

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· Go to WordPress Admin Dashboard (/wp-admin)

· Navigate to Page → Edit page

· Click on the respective button, then click on the 3 dots and edit as HTML

· look for ‘rel=”noopener noreferrer”’ and change to rel=”nofollow”

· Press the Save button for the page

If it’s a link embedded into a text:

· Go to WordPress Admin Dashboard (/wp-admin)

· Navigate to Page → Edit page

· Click on the respective text which contains the embedded link, then click on the edit button

· Click on Advanced, and then tick ‘Mark as nofollow’

· Press the save button for the page

3. Duplicate Title

Each of the page title must be unique, you can’t have several pages with the same title.

Step-by-step fix:

· Go to WordPress Admin Dashboard (/wp-admin)

· Navigate to Pages → Edit page

· On the right side panel next to Save button, click on the 3 dots

· Look for Rank Math, if not installed, install Rank Math SEO Plugin

· Click on Edit Snippet and look for Title

· Make the title unique for this page

· Save changes

I’ll continue writting article on other common SEO related issues like the ones above. If you found this article helpful, make sure to like and subscribe to receieve more article updates.