Technical SEO is a vital cog and important aspect for your website to perform in the organic search.
However, these common mistakes are usually neglected by most website builders or website owners.
We are going to list out some of the most common technical SEO mistakes or issues and their remedy for them.
Technical SEO is mostly concerned with technical issues present on your website that prevent it from ranking higher in the search results.
The most common technical SEO mistakes that website owners tend to make are using the wrong content structure, noindexing tag or is your site crawlable, and broken links.
An SEO development team takes care to make sure that all these issues are solved before launching a new website.
Common Technical SEO Issues
The technical components on your website may be invisible to the average person but make all the difference in terms of SEO rankings.
Title tags, meta descriptions, and semantic keywords or occurrences might not mean much to the average reader, but to search engines, these details speak volumes.
These nonvisible components will become worth their weight in gold once you start ranking higher in the search results.
One of the simple tricks is the URL naming for your page or post. URLs are fundamental not only to your website’s functionality but to your SEO as well.
By ensuring that URLs have complete, relevant keywords, users would be able to take a guess on what to expect from your content.
We had a full guide on how your URL structure should be, and we’ve covered the common mistakes that you should avoid.
This introductory article sets the scene, tackling critical questions around technical SEO issues and explaining how to fix them using best practices.
1. UX Problem
Now let us dive deep into the most commonly seen technical problem for your website: user experience.
This tiny component might not seem that important at first, but it can make or break your listing once people start browsing your page.
After all, as much as you’d like your content to get all the attention, the user experience is what pulls them in.
Keep it simple, use applicable language, and avoid sounding like an advertisement.
These little tricks are what will set you apart from the competition.
We’ve got it covered under the UX SEO here, but take it from me, it is extremely important.
Just make sure you’re always practicing good UX.
2. Title Tag
As much as this may sound obvious, there are some common mistakes that people make when it comes to optimizing page titles.
The most important factor is to make sure that the title contains both your keywords and your brand name.
Relevance is important, but make sure that it’s also readable.
Also, be sure to stay away from using both block and competitive or broad keywords.
We do see there are still website owners who do not set up or write an optimized title tag for each and every post or page.
Make this a good habit and you will eventually notice an increase in website traffic.
We had made a quick tutorial on how you can craft better titles to increase your CTR.
It’s easier for the search engine bot to see the differences and intention for each of your page titles and should be set as a priority when building your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.
Adding relevant keywords to your title tags will help let your audience understand what your page is about.
3. Meta Description
While this is not a ranking factor, it’s an important one.
A good meta description will help draw users in, increase clicks, and give you an opportunity to convince searchers why they should click through to your content.
A short, relevant, and informative meta description helps users understand what your page is about and increases your chances of getting a click.
Though we are noticing that Google is picking and writing these descriptions on their own rather than using what users input for them but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t write it ourselves and just leave it to the search engine.
We know the best of our content and page and how to create enticing descriptions that can draw in the visitors and we should not let that chance slip by because of ignorance.
Use our SERP Snippet Preview Tool to get an overview of how your title, description will look on the search engine result page and if it’s good enough to attract clicks.
4. Use One Version of Either www or Non-www
Google or search engines see these two as separate entities or domains entirely.
Using a mixture of www and non-www pages and posts may confuse the search engines and may look like two different entities. The solution is to use only one version in all your URLs.
This is an easy fix by setting a correct htaccess file.
Use these lines and replace them with your domain URL respectively.
Redirect www to non-www version:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
Redirect from non-www to www version:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
You should be able to find your htaccess file from your hosting provider file manager.
If you’re using a cPanel and you are on a shared host, it will be located in your public_html directory.
Once that’s done, open your htaccess file and paste those lines into it.
5. Migrate to HTTPS Protocol
There’s a solid reason why Google prefers sites with secure connections or certificates.
This can be easily achieved by converting your http URL to https.
This will encrypt all data coming into and going out of your site. This helps prevent hackers from snooping around for information.
Get your certificate with Let’s Encrypt.
Let’s Encrypt is a free Certificate Authority. It provides SSL certificates to websites and runs on a freemium model. You can use their certificate for free.
Check if your certificate authority/SSL is expired or doesn’t match your site using this site at https://comodosslstore.com/ssltools/ssl-checker.php.
Most hosting providers are including the secure HTTPS protocol in their hosting packages so you should be well taken care of by now.
But if you are not, contact your hosting provider or try to implement these free techniques as we mentioned above or by routing your traffic through Cloudflare.
6. Speed, speed, and speed
This can be a rabbit hole easily.
We recommend using https://pagespeed.web.dev/ to test your website’s current core web vitals score but do not be obsessed with the scoring.
Take the score or grade as a reference.
Work on the elements such as LCP, CLS, or FCP instead and your site will gradually improve in terms of loading speed for real-world users.
And that’s the objective.
We can’t stress enough how important it is to work on improving the UX for your visitors, accessibility, content, speed, and site search.
Read on our Google’s Core Web Vitals take and how we segmented each element out and improve them.
7. Fix Your Broken Link
Be it internal or external links, broken links are bad for the user experience.
They take users out of their immersed reading or browsing experience.
One easy way to identify broken links is to do a manual search for each of your pages or post.
Click on the hyperlinks and see if it leads to a 404 error.
If the page doesn’t come up, then you’ve broken a link somewhere on your site. That goes for any images or attachments if possible.
Or you can utilize the functionality of some software such as Screaming Frog.
They will crawl your site for broken links and report to you which pages contain them.
It can be very handy especially when you have a very big website that is over a hundred or thousands of pages.
Why You Need to Deep-dive to Your Site Regularly
One way to identify and fix technical issues on your site is to regularly conduct a deep dive into your technical SEO efforts.
Start with doing a general crawl of your entire site (which you can do using Screaming Frog or other paid tools).
It will allow you to see the pages and posts that you already have, see what kind of errors they are and which ones you need to fix.
Work on fixing the technical SEO issues on your site as soon as you can.
The importance of doing a regular technical site check is that it will show you what pages you need to work on, and in what order.
You can prioritize your tasks depending on how important they are to your SEO results.
You can find out which problems are causing your pages to rank poorly, and fix them using the resource that is at your disposal.
As we always mentioned that SEO is not a guessing game nor it was a quick game.
It’s a long-term investment that should bring long-term results so don’t give up at the first hurdle.
More Technical SEO Advice
As we already covered some of the most basic technical SEO errors in this post, the next thing that you have in mind might be going for some more advanced technical SEO advice such as search intention, entity SEO, keyword optimization, or even content optimization.
Technical SEO can be a very complex subject.
There are so many different aspects to it, and they are not always applicable to your specific site.
That being said, you can use every little tip and trick that you learn to improve your rankings.
JustRank offers a one-time simple technical SEO audit service that will allow you to quickly detect and fix technical errors and combine with our advanced scanning and algorithms calculation to get the best possible results.
Need a second opinion on your technical SEO?
Resources:
- https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/technical-seo
- https://yoast.com/what-is-technical-seo/
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/beginner/seo-starter-guide
