Table of Contents
These days your website needs to be optimized for search engines more than ever before. With technical SEO being a key element to your site’s rankings on search engines, there are a few other problems that can get in the way. In this blog, I will cover 10 common technical SEO problems harming your site’s performance, and actually more importantly, how to fix them.
1. Lack of HTTPS Security
When it comes to SEO security is non-negotiable. Chrome marks all HTTP sites as ‘Not Secure’ and may scare your visitors away from visiting your website at all. Furthermore, Google’s rankings now include HTTPS as a signal. Your site may suffer indirectly, but if it doesn’t have this feature, it could directly affect your search rankings.
Solution: Go to the certificate authority where you get an SSL certificate. After installing, your website’s url will be changed from “http” to “https” to maintain security and better user trust. SSL certificates are the most hosted services, and most hosting services give you certificates or, better yet, SSL certificates with high quality plans.
2. Incorrect Indexing
If Google can’t index your site or pages, then they don’t exist. The problem of search engines not being able to find your content as well as users not being able to access it is known as ‘not being indexed properly’. The indexation issue can be as dramatic as that entire sections of your website are not indexed or as simple as not knowing how some pages are blocked.
Solution: To check if your website is indexed enter ‘site
Unless I clicked this, the answer to my question wouldn’t be revealed.
.com” in Google. If you don’t get the results you want then submit your website URL in Google Search Console. Always run audits of how all critical pages are being indexed.
3. Missing or Inaccurate XML Sitemaps
An XML sitemap informs search engines how content evolves in your site. Google might not be able to efficiently crawl your site if you have an out of date or don’t have an XML sitemap so you may not be as visible.
Solution: Tools that you could use are Yoast SEO for WordPress or your sitemap generator, and simply create or update your XML sitemap. After that, send it to Google Search Console and it will help you with proper crawling and indexing of your website.
4. In Correct or Missing Robots.txt File
The Robots.txt file tells robots (that’s right, all the search engine bots) what parts of your site they can crawl and index. Correct or absent robots.txt can lead search engines to not index important pages or vice versa, index pages you don’t want.
Solution: To check if your robots.txt file is working, type in your website URL and at the end add “/robots.txt” in your browser. If you see things that need to be done, talk to a developer about fixing or regenerating files for best crawling.
5. Meta Robots NOINDEX Tag Errors
Noindex and Nofollow are meta robots tags that can allow you to block your website pages from being crawled or indexed. While these tags are great to have on your site when you’re building it, you don’t want to keep them while the site is live. Otherwise search engines may disregard important pages.
Solution: Search within your browser’s “View source” feature for meta robots tags. If there are NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW tags in key pages, remove them or replace them with INDEX, FOLLOW to let indexing.
6. Slow Page Speed
Page speed is a ranking factor. In technical terms, if your site loads too slowly people will just leave, which is bad for your SEO performance. If a page takes more than 2 to 3 seconds to load because something is slow, your user experience suffers and it’ll also affect your ranking in search as well.
Solution: Google Pagespeed Insights can help you browse through and discover why your web pages are loading slowly. Optimize images, allowing browser caching and minify CSS and JavaScript files are among the common fixes. One easy way to also boost speed, is to compress large images and files.
7. Multiple Versions of the Homepage
It is very common to find many of these versions in the home page of many websites, such as when having or not “www,” http, or https etc. and search engines and users are really confused. If you’re lucky and it can be split link equity, that is good because it will split link equity and reduce your website’s overall authority.
Solution: Of course, consolidate every version of your website to one canonical one with the help of 301 redirects. Make sure both “www” and “non-www” as well as HTTP and HTTPS to a single URL structure.
8. Incorrect Use of rel=canonical
By using the rel canonical tag, you help prevent duplicate content Google is faced with when the content is similar or duplicate. But if it’s misused, it can lead to confusion and have a negative effect on your SEO ranking.
Solution: Auditing your use of the canonical tag is common especially when managing an e-commerce or content heavy site. You should not have misconfigured canonical tags, so you can check in tools like Screaming Frog to ensure your canonical tags are correct to Google’s guidelines.
9. Content Duplication
Duplicate content is any content located at more than one URL. It confuses search engines and leaves search engines guessing as to which version to show in search results, resulting in lower rankings.
Solution: Use of tools such as Copyscape or SiteLiner will help you to identify duplicate content. After you’ve detected the issue, consolidate duplicate pages by using 301 redirects or placing a canonical tag on the copy. This can be avoided another way by checking for content originality in product descriptions or blog posts.
10. Missing Alt Tags for Images
SEO, image alt tags are important for SEO because they write descriptions, which are readable to search engine bots that will help your content be visible in search engine image results. Lost opportunities to rank in image searches are represented by missing alt tags.
Solution: You should try and find some alt tags being used somewhere. Ahrefs or SEMrush will help you find missing alt text for the images on a site. Throw in 2 keywords in the alt text for image and overall SEO gain.
Conclusion
Technical SEO issues are often difficult to identify but have big consequences for your website’s visibility and performance. These ten common problems HTTPS security, bad indexing, XML sitemaps, and many others when tackled can greatly improve your site’s SEO health. But by conducting regular audits, working with SEO experts, sometimes with the assistance of an SEO consultant, you are probably improving your rankings, traffic and the user experience which is always an advantage for you.
So, SEO takes time and patience; remember that once you begin, it’s important to remain on top of changes in the right practices. To get the best way to create, audit, and optimize your website for they’s best reach, reach out to our team of experts. Contact us today!
