Understanding Some Technical SEO Mistakes that Are Severe Enough to Hamper Your Site’s Growth & Credibility

You must regard technical SEO as the skeleton of your website. Anything that would be growing on its bones would be impacted by how they are shaped. However, it is quite difficult and challenging to determine precisely where to start in terms of technical SEO and prioritize what technical SEO mistakes to be resolved first.

In the early days of the Internet, websites were just clumsily written HTML code put out for anyone to see and read. A lot has changed since then, and it takes a lot more for a new website to gain visibility. One of the major pillars of online marketing is search engine optimization- efforts made by content creators and website owners to make their sites more attractive to search engine ranking algorithms, thus attempting to be ranked higher to attract more traffic. Over the years, several good SEO habits have been identified and are used by marketers across the cyberspace. That said, it is still an inexact science and any small mistake at any point could cause issues for your entire operation and everything you have achieved before it.

According to https://searchengineland.com, almost everything we know about search engine crawlers and rankers is purely academic and based on ideal scenarios. In truth, the nature, objectives, and operating procedures of these crawlers are extremely varied, far from infallible, and quite prone to misidentify the value of your content if they come across certain issues that they deem more serious than others. These could stem from seemingly innocuous mistakes or omissions on your end sometime early in the process, and finding this root cause can be difficult later on. Here are some things you should never do when you are early in the process of site creation and SEO, so they do not come back to haunt you later.

Mistake: Not Having HTTPS

Securing your site using HTTPS is vital, and very close to being an absolute necessity in the modern web. HTTPS allows for connections to be encrypted securely in transit, in a way that their integrity is maintained and neither the user data sent to your server nor the response fetched from the server and seen by them can be intercepted or tampered with in a meaningful way by any malicious third party. Once you purchase and install an SSL certificate from a recognized Certificate Authority on your server, your site will be deemed secure and allow connections over HTTPS. We know for a fact that Google prefers to rank HTTPS sites better than plain HTTP ones, and also prominently displays “Not Secure” or “Secure” in the Chrome browser alongside your site URL, which will further cause alarm among visitors and cause a large chunk of them to bounce off your site. Get in touch with a reputed Atomic Design digital agency for seeking professional assistance and perfect solutions.

Mistake: Not Having the Site Indexed Properly

If your website doesn’t come up at all when you search for your brand name on Google, it could mean that you have not indexed your pages yet. Unindexed pages do not exist for web crawlers, and cannot be scoured and listed by them. An easy way to check how many pages of yours have been indexed is to use the search term “site: sitename.com” where sitename.com is your website.

Ways to Mend It

· Suppose your website is not at all indexed, you could start simply by incorporating your URL into Google.

· Suppose your site is indexed, however, there seem to be several more results as compared to your expectations, you need to examine meticulously for site-hacking spam or some of the site’s old versions that would be indexed instead of suitable redirects in place for pointing to your updated website.

· Suppose your site has already been indexed, however, you are seeing a lot less as compared to your expectations, you must go ahead and consider auditing the indexed content and then compare that against the specific pages you wish to rank. In case you are confused as to why the specific content is failing to rank, consider checking Google’s Webmaster Guidelines for ensuring that your site’s specific content is compliant to those set guidelines.

· In the event, the results are quite unexpected and much different from what you were thinking, do verification to rule out the possibility of your pages being blocked by the robots.txt file. Consider verifying if you have implemented by mistake, a NOINDEX Meta Tag. 

Mistake: You Are Having Duplicate Content Issues

If statistics were to be believed 65.88% of the websites are having serious duplicate content issues. However, in certain cases, you simply cannot avoid having some duplicate content, however, it is best to consider incorporating a rel=” canonical” tag into all your secondary pages. 

It is a good idea, however, to avoid overusing the page concealment powers since unique content is supposed to be much better as compared to well-optimized duplicate content. In the words of an SEO expert, duplicate content is supposed to be the ‘mind-killer’. Duplicate content leads to organic search traffic destruction. Google has a valid reason for penalizing duplicate content. It is supposed to be an indication of plagiarism. Moreover, Google is lacking in the knowledge of what to prioritize and give more importance when two blog posts or pages sharing identical content. 

All you need to do is to ensure that every post and every page of the website are having original and unique content. Sadly, if you fail to implement one https accurately, you could be ending up with two versions of the same page- one https and one HTTP, each one of them competing for practically the same spot in search results.         

Mistake: Slow Site Loading Speed                                                                                           

You could come up with the most content-rich and visually striking website in the whole world but in the case, your site’s loading speed is more than three seconds, around 40 percent of the users would be bouncing off and your traffic would be diverted to your able competitors.  

A really slow loading time would be hurting your SEO endeavors in multiple ways: 

· Directly since page speed seems to be a major mobile ranking factor.

· Indirectly as users would be bouncing off.

Ways to boost the overall site speed:

• Consider scaling and compressing images.
• Opt for Installing the effective W3 Total Cache Plug-in.
• Consider replacing plugins that are responsible for slowing down your website.

Conclusion

Keep the above technical SEO mistakes in mind. When you come across such technical SEO issues, keep your cool and try the tricks discussed above.