Common Technical SEO Issues
Besides the obvious benefits of SEO, website errors can hurt your ranking and user experience. Some common problems include broken links, duplicate content, and slow page load. Below are the most common technical SEO issues and best practices. To fix them, first, check your website for broken links and other errors. Alternate tags, structured data, and alt text are all essential elements of good SEO. While you’re at it, add these best practices to your website.
Structured data
If you’ve ever tried to optimize a web page or blog using SEO techniques, you’ve likely come across the term “structured data”. What is structured information and how does it help you? Basically, structured data organizes your content by category and topic. It also helps search engines understand your content more easily since structured data is automatically formatted into HTML code. It helps crawlers fetch the data that they need to optimize a page.
If your website is not structured properly, you may want to take the time to implement structured data on your page. The use of structured data will help search engines better understand your content and present it more efficiently in the SERP. Searchers will be able to easily determine which options are most relevant to their queries. This is a common technical SEO issue that many webmasters neglect. Here are some common mistakes that can affect your site’s SEO.
Alternative tags
If you are looking to increase your search engine rankings, you need to include images on your website. Images help to increase the SEO value of your page and provide additional ranking opportunities for your website on Google’s Image Search. Title tags are HTML elements that specify the title of the web page. They help search engine bots understand what the page is about and are essential for clickability in Google search results. It’s also important to include the right keywords in your title tag to increase its chances of ranking well.
Using the alt tag will make your site accessible to those with visual impairments, and it will also give you more room for text content on your website. This will increase your search engine rankings. As a general rule, it’s always best to link to an image if you want it to appear in search results. You can use the link to go to another page. However, you should avoid using the same keyword over again, since this will give you an Over-optimization penalty.
Duplicate content
If your site contains duplicate content, you are facing serious SEO problems. On average, about 25% of the web contains duplicate content. This could be on the same domain or multiple URLs. When this happens, Google will deindex your site if it finds a large number of similar-looking pages on your site. Fortunately, there are several ways to prevent duplicate content and increase your SEO performance.
To avoid this problem, make sure that your URLs do not link to duplicate content. You can test this by loading your page with and without a trailing slash. Depending on your website, you may need to try loading each version of the URL to ensure that there are no issues. If you are unsure, you can use 301 redirects to fix any problems. Moreover, you should also avoid creating duplicate content on subdomains. Search engines consider subdomains as separate sites, which means that their content doesn’t directly contribute to the root domain.
Slow page loading
Page speed is a critical component of the overall user experience, and Google is taking note of this issue. In fact, Google is set to release an update that will include metrics such as page speed in its algorithm. However, as of today, there are no official details. In the meantime, you can check your site’s speed with a tool like seoClarity’s Page Speed, which can be pulled monthly or bi-weekly. This tool will identify any issues that might be slowing down your website and recommend the best way to fix them.
In addition to negatively impacting your SEO, it affects the user experience as well. Google looks at your page’s speed when evaluating your site’s rankings. If your site takes a long time to load, visitors will click away quickly. In addition, slow-loading pages increase bounce rates, which affect your search engine results. So how can you overcome this problem? Listed below are some tips to improve your page’s speed.
XML sitemap with incorrect canonical URLs
An XML sitemap with incorrect canonical URLs misleads search engines by pointing to other URLs on your site. Search engine robots may index duplicated pages because of these URLs. Make sure to tag the preferred URL so that search engines know where to find it. Otherwise, you may encounter duplicated pages with the WWW. This situation is particularly serious if you have multiple versions of your website.
A sitemap is not complete without canonical URLs. They should point to URLs you want to be indexed. If you have URLs that are not desired by search engines, they should be removed from the sitemap. This will avoid confusion in the future and will make troubleshooting much easier. To fix duplicated URLs in your sitemap, use a tool such as Google Search Console or BrightEdge’s ContentIQ.
Using Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a great resource for webmasters, as it helps keep your website in the search results and troubleshoots problems that can threaten your rankings. Using Google Search Console is a great way to optimize your website and track indexing status while keeping all of this important information on a single dashboard. Although you’re not required to use Search Console in order to appear in search results, it can be useful for improving your website’s ranking in the long term.
Once you’ve set up Google Search Console, you’ll get access to detailed information about your website’s backlinks and domains. The links tab will reveal which domains link to your content the most. The Hyperlinks tab will display links from all internal and external websites. The backlinks you have are one of the most important factors in determining your ranking in Google. Using Google Search Console can help you track backlinks, a major factor in your website’s ranking.
