According to Anna Lebedeva from SEMrush, Technical SEO is like a skeleton of the Website. Anything that happens to grow on its bone will be significantly affected by the way they are shaped. However, when it comes to technical SEO, it’s often complicated from where one should start and what SEO errors one should take care of first. We have tried to list some of the Technical SEO mistakes which affect user’s friendliness and overall performance. It is essential to go through all the issues to improve overall site’s health. It is critical to prioritize the mistakes while fixing as all of them cannot be fixed right away. The focus should be on the most important pages which are generating business through organic traffic.
In general, the website owner must consider its website’s health based on three grounds.
- Site Structure & Crawlability
- On-Page SEO
- Technical SEO
Ground 1: Site Structure and Crawlability
SEO of a website is effective only when search engines can crawl all the web pages of the site. The Googlebot must crawl and index the entire website before letting it appear in SERP results. Moreover, any error in this step might neutralize your efforts of doing SEO. The primary crawlability and site structures that one should avoid are listed.
Links & Redirects
Links and redirects become very useful to enhance the user-friendliness of the website as they let users navigate through the whole website easily enabling them to grab all the information on the site. However, the problem occurs when broken internal links are present on the website leading users to see 4XX errors. Since Links and Redirects build a pathway for users on your site; these errors must be fixed right away.
Sitemap & Robots.txt
Sitemaps are vital for any website which is being optimized for SEO as it is through the sitemap.XML Google understands the structure of the site. About 13% of the all the websites are having format error in their sitemap file. Fix the format error if you happen to find some in sitemap.xml.
Ground 2: On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO is implemented on every page of the website. This technique is ultra-important to gain higher ranks on SERP results. That is all about optimizing the content and HTML of the pages to improve their rankings. Below are the critical On-Page SEO errors that one should watch out for.
Content
Content is the soul of a website when it’s come to accomplish best SEO results. Search engines prefer the sites having quality content. Content also affects Technical SEO based on following three factors.
- Duplicate Content – Almost 66% of the websites have a severe duplicate content issue. Apparently, in some cases, it is unavoidable to use duplicate content, but those pages must have a canonical tag on them. However, try to use original and fresh content to avoid losing ranking and penalty from Google. Unique and Quality content will give your website an edge over other sites.
- Low text-to-HTML ratio – This issue occurs on the pages which contain very less content. However, it is inevitable to have less content on some pages like Contact Us, but this practice must not be implemented over other pages of your site.
- Low Word Count – Each webpage must have at least 300 words content on it. Search Engines give priority on their SERP results to the web pages having Higher Word-Count. Therefore, it is recommended to fix this error and write at least 300 words for each page.
Meta Descriptions
Meta Descriptions are essential part of On-Page SEO. It helps in increasing Click-Through-Rate of the page and search engines also consider Meta Descriptions as deciding factor when it comes to providing ranks on SERP results. However, about 63 percent of the website owners disregard Meta descriptions entirely while 54 percent of website owners use duplicate Meta descriptions. Duplicate Meta descriptions are more harmful than left out ones. It is so because search engines use the content of the webpage to assign a Meta Description to it. However, it is not a good practice to leave Meta Descriptions blank and remove duplicate ones right away if you have any.
Title Tags, H1 & Images
Another Factor that affects the On-Page optimization involves Titles, headings and images. Surveys have revealed that most of the websites don’t put alt tags on their images. Titles are long enough, and H1 tags aren’t used quite often. Although, these factors are not much severe than Duplicate content or Duplicate Meta Descriptions; however, they undoubtedly affect the UX of the website resulting in negative impact on the ranking.
Ground 3: Technical SEO
Technical SEO covers the significant areas of SEO such as page load speed and mobile-friendliness. There should not be any scope of mistake in this component of SEO as the price of this error is incredibly high. However, it seems most of the website owners have worked in these areas, but if you are still facing some issues in these aspects, then you must fix them at once. Here are points of Technical SEO on which your traffic and revenue depend.
Page Speed
Page Speed is the critical Google ranking factors which influence user experience and also affect bounce rate metrics. More than 20 percent of the websites have very slow Page Speed, an issue which gets highest level severity from search engines regarding ranking. There are various factors such as the speed with which server responds, programming complexity of the website, user’s internet speed etc. However, having a site developed on modern technologies can necessarily fix the problem.
Old Technology
It is evident that after sometime Old technology is replaced by modern ones. Therefore, if your website is built using old techniques such iframes and flash content, then it is likely to leave out by search engines. The world of the internet keeps evolving which means many technical aspects will continue to become obsolete. Your job as SEO expert is to be in touch with latest advancements and keep up with all the changes.
Mobile-Friendliness
The odds of finding a website which is not mobile friendly is very less. Most sites are responsive, but some owners have also been using Accelerated Mobile Pages also known as AMP. It has been discovered that most of the website owners forget to put a canonical tag on AMP pages. This is a high severity issue resulting in more bad than good.
Conclusion
The significance of Technical SEO can’t be overrated. However, you are not supposed to direct all your energy and time on every single issue that occurs on your web pages. It is one of the best practices to be aware of common technical SEO mistakes so that you could avoid them in future or fix them right away if they are affecting your website’s ranking.
We are SEO services provider in Delhi. If you want help to audit your website for Technical SEO mistakes, then get in touch with us.
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