Technical SEO Mistakes You Should Stop Making On Your Website

You have probably done everything right on your website but even then you don’t see any improvement in your organic traffic. Maybe backlinks are an issue, maybe social media is an issue. Though chances are it is neither of those but rather the website itself that is tanking your organic traffic. 

For good organic traffic on-page, SEO is definitely important but it is tough to combat the need for a sound technical strategy. Some easily resolved technical issues come up in SEO while you are in the process of building, structuring and coding a website. 

But do not worry even if you missed out on these issues during the initial phase, you can always go back and fix them. They will only then stop negatively affecting your rankings. 

But first, some basics. 

What Is Technical SEO?

This is what makes your website crawlable, indexable and was to understand for search engines. 

Just think of your website as a store, in which you need to make sure that the front is nice and pretty so that people passing by walk-in. But at the same time, you need a strong foundation lest the whole building falls. 

Google has a very different way of reading content. It reads your content but at the same time, it also reads the code that you put in the backend of the website. If your website is not built following these specs, you won’t gain visibility. 

Now that you have a brief overview of what technical SEO is, let’s have a look at what mistakes you are making and how to fix them. 

You Don’t Use SSL 

SSL stands for ‘secure sockets layer’. It is used by websites to secure traffic between browsers and web servers. It is pretty easy to see whether or not a site uses SSL. All you need to look at is the Url. If it says “https” it's secure. If it just says “Http” that extra layer of protection is missing. This can have a negative impact on the search ranking. 

Https is used by Google as a ranking signal, so it is imperative that you implement it on your website to ensure that every page is secure. For beginners, you need to purchase an SSL certificate from a provider. The second is to install the certificate on the website.

Finally, all you need to do is set up 301 redirects to ensure that all links coming to your website go to the https version of the website.

You Have Duplicate Content Issues

Duplicate content is like instant death to organic traffic. 

Google penalizes duplicate content almost instantly. It is considered to be a sign of plagiarism and even when it isn’t, Google has no idea which page to give priority to. 

It is as simple as it sounds. Just ensure that everything that you post on your website is unique, Also ensure that you implement https properly. Otherwise, you might end up with two pages with the same content on one website; one Http and one https. This does not bode well for either. 

Your Site UI/UX Leave A Lot To Be Desired 

A site can be a visual wonderland and have the best value-based content running it- but if by any chance the page loading speed goes over three seconds, your bounce rate will jump up to 40% of all the users and send your business to your competitors.

Slow loading time directly impacts other factors as well:

  • Mobile ranking 
  • Users Bounce
  • If users hit back and then click another search then that is counted against you in search

4XX Errors Run Rampant On Your Website ( Most probably 404s)

The death call. 404. 4xx errors are a hindrance to both your website user experience and the site’s crawl ability. Be assured that neither Google nor your users will be very forgiving in case this error pops up on your website. 

Be careful that your pages don’t have any broken links on them and even if they do, you fix and redirect them accordingly. 

Another strategy that works great is if you customize your 404 pages and hope that your users don’t bounce. 

You Fail In To Make Your Website Mobile Friendly 

Mobile has steadily grown to account for about half the world's internet traffic on a global scale. This number is also not going to be slowing down any time soon. 

Google is very aware of the importance of mobiles and so has been taking out updates that make web browsing via mobile much easier. These changes include mobile-first indexing and the integration of page speed as a reigning factor for ranking on mobiles. 

Google Fails To Index or Crawl Your Page Properly

You can keep going on and on doing your keyword research but absolutely nothing on this planet can help you out if your pages aren’t being indexed properly. If you are sure that you have written a great piece of content, but even after a couple of weeks it does not seem to rank then you might have an indexing issue on your hands. 

To check this out all you have to do is go to the Google search console and then put in your site and ensure that the number displayed there is the same as the number you want to be displayed in the search results.

The Robots.txt and Sitemap.xml Files Are Improperly Formatted or Missing

Search bots require two major things to crawl your website. One is the robot.txt files and the other is the XML sitemaps. The thing with them both is that they are widely different from one another. Your sitemap is a list of all links on your website that you want Google to index whereas robots.txt has another job

  • They allow the bots to crawl your website 
  • They tell the bots about which pages to ignore

The Crawl Depth Of Your Website Is Comparable To Mariana Trench 

The crawl depth is the number of clicks that it takes for a user to get to any page of your website or blog post on your website. 

There should be absolutely no more than three clicks between the user and their intended action. This ensures that the site is not only more efficient for Google to crawl and index but rather the users are better off too. 

Crawl efficiency can be increased in various ways :

  • Use tags and categories for all blog posts and link them via the sidebar available on your blog. 
  • Use breadcrumb navigation 
  • Try and use internal links as much as possible

You’re Overspending With Thin Content 

A crawl budget is the upper limit of the number of pages that Google will crawl on a website. This is why it is important that you don’t plagiarise content on your website. If your content is not up to the mark then there is a chance that you are just wasting your time and effort. Google will not rank your site. 

If you have too many pages try to add as much value-based content to them as you can. Some pages might even be worth non-indexing or deleting, the point is that the bots should only focus on what is important on your website. 

Break A Couple Of Redirect Chains 

If you have too many 301 redirects then your technical SEO credibility might get hurt. So, you and make every redirect you create worth the effort. You can see on certain programs if redirects are an issue for you and then accordingly clean up your website.

You don’t have to be a Technical SEO Master to ensure that your website is in great condition. All you have to do is think from the user's perspective and you will do a great job. Other work can be done via the right software.

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