Common Mistakes Made by Website Owners in Technical SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s unpaid results—often referred to as “natural,” “organic,” or “earned” results. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the practice of ensuring that websites are accessible by crawlers and indexers such as Googlebot so that they can be found more easily in search engine rankings. This can include things like making sure the URLs are crawlable and that robots don’t index certain areas of your site.
This blog post will teach you how to identify the common mistakes made by website owners when it comes to technical SEO and how to fix them for better rankings.
Read to know more: What is technical seo
The importance of search engine optimization
Great SEO is a must if your business wants to grow. The challenge is that many small business owners don’t have the time, skills, or expertise necessary to handle everything that comes with a solid SEO strategy. From keyword research to content evaluation, from page optimization to internal linking, it’s easy for companies to end up with a generic web presence that doesn’t inspire engagement or drive conversions.
Technical SEO Mistakes
One of the most common mistakes made by website owners in technical SEO is not using a sitemap. If you have more than one page, it’s important that your site is set up to use a sitemap. This will allow crawlers and indexers to know where your site is and find it easier. Make sure that your sitemap includes all the pages on your site.
Another common mistake is having duplicate content. This can include text, images, or links to other sites on social media or within the same article. Duplicate content will have negative effects on your search engine rankings because it’s seen as spammy to search engines.
The last common mistake many website owners make is not enabling robots tags. A robot tag tells crawles how to index certain parts of your page so they don’t index things like forms or login information that shouldn’t be indexed for security purposes.
Don’t let these mistakes happen to you! To learn more about what you should do when it comes to technical SEO click here!
404 Errors
One of the most common mistakes made by website owners is a 404 error. This error occurs when a web page cannot be found and the HTTP response code is 404. When this error occurs, visitors will often land on a blank webpage or they’ll get a message that says “page not found” or something similar. The good news? There are many ways to fix this problem.
It’s important that you immediately go to your site’s server settings and update your document root directory so it points to the correct documents. If you don’t know how to do this, contact your hosting company for help. You may also need to make sure your host doesn’t use mod_security which can block URLs with certain characters in them like parentheses, brackets, and slashes. Additionally, you should check if there is any malware or adware on your site that could be causing problems with 404 errors.
If you’ve tried everything but still think it might be something else, reach out to Google Webmaster Tools and they’ll be able to give you some more possible solutions.
Related Content: Google ranking factors
Website Redirects
One mistake that many website owners often make is using a 301 redirect to forward an entire website from one domain to another. A 301 redirect tells search engines and other web crawlers that the site has permanently moved to a new domain and will not be found at the old domain. For instance, if you changed your domain from www.example.com to www.example2.com, you could create a 301 redirect so that all incoming links would take visitors to the new URL automatically.
Unfortunately, this strategy can have some adverse effects on rankings, especially if the page being redirected was previously considered high-quality content or had inbound links pointing back to it. If you choose this route, it’s important to remove any code or tags that might tell Googlebot where the original page is located before setting up the redirect in your htaccess file or server settings. However, this may not be enough; you may also want change any URLs on your site that contain its old domain name so they reflect the new domain name as well—including images and videos with embedded meta-refresh tags (the HTML tag for refreshing a page).
Non-crawlable URLs
One of the most common mistakes that website owners make is non-crawlable URLs.
Why are URLs so important? The URL, or Uniform Resource Locator, is a web address to any web page on the internet. Basically, each URL links straight to a specific webpage on a server. When you create a new page of content, you need to choose which URL to assign it to. You’ll want to assign it to a URL that best matches the content of the page. This can mean that you have one page with two different URLs, but they share similar content:
- www.domainsite.com/page1
- www.domainsite.com/page2
The main mistake that website owners make with URLs is that they use numbers in place of words for their web addresses instead of using dashes and words instead: www.domainsite.com/page1 becomes www.domainsite.com/1-page and www.domainsite.com/2-pages becomes www.domainsite/2-pages (or something like this). What this does is make it impossible for search engines like Googlebot to understand what pages are what when they crawl your site because they’re looking for words in place of numbers and therefore cannot tell which URLs are which (and in turn rank your site appropriately). In order for Googlebot to be able to crawl your site correctly, you’ll want to change “the number” at the end
How to fix technical SEO mistakes
Now that you know the common mistakes made by website owners in technical SEO, here are some ways to fix them:
- Make sure your URLs are crawlable
- Avoid duplicate content. If you have a lot of pages with similar content, make sure they’re all accessible to the crawlers and indexers
- Ensure your site is mobile friendly. Google has announced that they will be penalizing sites that aren’t mobile friendly
- Create a sitemap for easier navigation
Conclusion
Technical SEO is the foundation of any successful website. It’s important to know the basics of all aspects of SEO, but without a strong technical foundation and adherence to best practices, it’s going to be difficult to achieve your desired rankings.
There are many common mistakes that website owners make in technical SEO. One of the most common mistakes is not having a valid SSL certificate. This is a crucial part of your technical SEO, because you want to establish trust with your customers. If you don’t have a valid SSL certificate, then not only will your customers lose trust in your website and company, but Google will also penalize you for not having one.
Another common mistake is not setting up redirects on your website. Redirects are important in technical SEO because they help search engines avoid duplicate content (something that is frowned upon and can get you penalized by Google).
To avoid these mistakes and more, it’s important that you have a knowledgeable and skilled team of professionals working on your website. If you don’t have access to a team like this, then there are many online tools that can help you with these tasks, or you could hire someone to do it for you.
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