Top 5 Common Technical SEO Mistakes. Experts asked the SEO community to analyze the day-to-day technical problems that can adversely affect your site’s search rankings. After all, successful SEO is one-third on-page optimization, one-third off-page optimization that includes backlinks, and a third clean website structure that is free of technical flaws, according to the experts.
Below are some of the top SEO technical issues laid down by the experts.
1) Duplicate Content
The SEO professionals believed that duplicate content is a topic of great technical concern. When understood in a simpler manner, duplicate content means any content almost similar to your site’s content.
Experts suggest that Google’s crawlers must cover a lot of ground. It isn’t possible for Google to consume all the information, especially when one considers that Google must revisit each page again and again to find any modifications or fresh information. Anything that slows Google’s discovery or crawling of the Web must not be considered. Websites that are created casually create web pages from the directories that are usually not configured in a proper manner from an SEO point of view. These sites might create an end number of pages or URLs that consist basically of the same content, over and over.
Other sources of duplicate content include the use of both plain and safer protocol URLs such as HTTP and HTTPS; no expressed preference for a www.domain.com versus domain.com (without the www); blog tags, and syndicated RSS feeds.
Experts said that Duplicate content might also result from common content management system (CMS) functionalities, including sorting parameters. The remedy is for crawling your site, searching for duplications, and applying crawl directives to inform Google of the relative value of multiple URLs. Well-known file such as robots.txt allows you to control how Google’s bots crawl and index your public Web pages, to inform Google of the specified folders and directories that are not worth crawling.
We recommend telling Google which of multiple URLs to prefer for its index by applying the rel=” canonical” link element for pointing out the preferred URL. Canonical tags can help in sorting out duplicate content issues because they inform search engines that one page is a duplicate of another. Foreign sites that target various countries with content in various languages also end up with a lot of duplicate content. In this context, experts suggest using the rel=”alternate” hreflang code within every page for understanding the geolocation of the content in a similar but more targeted language. Using IP detection for understanding the language and default currency for a page is another proven solution.)
Now you will notice many times sites containing www. So a generalized duplicate content problem occurs when one site has either a URL beginning with ‘www’ or a URL that doesn’t contain www. But it is nothing to worry about because there’s an easy way out.
You need to type in your URL with the non-www URL and see if it goes to the www version, then make an opposite attempt. If both ways work without any of them redirecting, then you were not set up in the appropriate manner. In this case, you need to go to your Google Webmaster Tools. Under Settings and then Site Settings. See if you have a specified version. If you aren’t confident, then it is advisable to seek professional help to help you in determining which version to set up and keep using to move forward.)
Similarly, by default, multiple versions of the homepage create a lot of duplicate content problems, and this means any link equity the site receives is spread across the different URLs. This problem can be solved by choosing one URL that you might secretly desire. It is better to stick to that. Other URLs should, in an automated manner, point to the main URL with the help of a 301redirect.
2) Poor Mobile Experience
If the website provides a poor user experience on your smartphone and tablet and takes time to load on mobile devices, visitors will become disinterested, increasing your site’s bounce rate. It’s necessary to ensure your site loads fast because this is important on mobile.
Some firms divert users to separate mobile sites, but while performing this, it might cause problems. Suppose a mobile subdomain such as http://m.domain.com might split your link equity, uplift concerns about diverting traffic from authenticated URLs without informing the user and providing options, and increasing resource consumption and maintenance.
Responsive design is when a website presents in an automated and appropriate manner for both mobile and desktop devices an experience customized to the device. Yet, the content remains the same for all the users. So, it can improve secondary signals that Google takes into account for search rankings that include page visits, time spent on a page, visit duration, and bounce rates.
3) Shallow Link Development
Google’s Penguin updates put sites that engage in questionable link development practices in its crosshairs. Link development allows a business to view significant profits in Web traffic, but it also creates a level of insecurity.
Inconsistent, spam-like, unimportant, or just black-hat backlinks cause your site to make a hit in the rankings. Backlinks nowadays ought to be performed in a natural way, should be diversified and varied, and appear organic. The links you place on your site that link out to authority sites are of pivotal importance and cross-linking between pages is also similarly important in order to aid the Google crawlers to penetrate into your site.
4) Low Navigation Facility
When visitors visit your site, and they find your navigation poorly set up, they won’t be interested to engage in your site.
Poor engagement statistics synced with ‘crawl ability’ problems and other technical issues are all assertive of low dominance.
If people find your site to be of no relevance and not considered useful to the visitors, then it will not get a good rank in the search engines, or rather I would say receive no rank. You need to understand here that search engines are businesses, and their business is to present the most relevant resources to their users.
5) Images That Are Not Frequently Optimized
Experts point out that most of the website designs developed nowadays lay significance on alluring visuals without taking into account how those visuals could adversely impact search rankings.
A lot of people are using pictures with enchanting fonts and vivid colors in order to make the page presentable, but you need to understand that for Google, it is only an image. By the use of, or rather, I would say with a combination of Web fonts, HTML, and CSS, it is possible to restore the attractiveness and achieve good SEO by developing all the text elements within a banner titled as- ‘live text.’’
So now, from the above, I hope you have got a clear idea of the Common Technical SEO Mistakes and various ways to solve those.
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