Most Common Technical SEO Mistakes
Use a SSL
SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and is now an essential addition to all website hosting and technical SEO. Since 2014 Google has favoured websites that have SSL certficate (https://) installed. Make sure your website has it in place.
Broken Redirects
Broken redirects are redirects that generate errors (such as 404s) or are pointing to the wrong place. This normally happens when a business redesigns or does maintenance on their website. The old Urls still hold authority and it is essential that these are now pointed to the new Urls. If this task is not carried out, there is a good chance of a drop in rankings and traffic.
Broken links
Broken links are not only bad for the user experience on a website but also for SEO. They send signals to search engines that the website is low quality and therefore outranked by competing websites.
Reasons for broken links can be changed URLs, deleted content or spelling mistakes. Check for broken links regularly is good technical SEO practice.
Bad Spam signals
Not so common nowadays but there are still websites that have hidden links in their content. These are seen by search engines as spam and can have a very negative affect on their technical SEO performance. Remove all instances of hidden links and content on your site.
Site Speed
Google has indicated that site speed is one of the signals used by their algorithms to rank websites on their searches. There are a number of reasons why a website could be slow from server performance and image sizes to messy code and database issues. You can check your site speed using free tool, GT Metrix.
Is your site fully responsive
Nearly 60% of Google searches are now from mobile devices and it is still quite common for websites not to be fully responsive. These websites are massively missing out and are also now being punished by Google in the rankings. Mobile friendly sites are a lot more successful online, so if your website is not fully responsive now is the time for a redesign.
Duplicate Content on the site
Duplicate content is all content that appears on a website on more than one occasion or on a completely different Url. For many cases this is accidental, such as your site being available on both HTTP and HTTPS or www and non-www, but it is worth checking on a regular basis to check. Copy Scape is an online tool that will get you started.
No Sitemap
A XML sitemap tells Google and other search engines the content and structure of your website and makes it easier to index. It is important to add this to your site and is often forgotten.
Not Indexing your site to search engines
In a rush to get their website live many businesses forget to index their site with the search engines. Google Search Console is the most commonly used but it is also important to include the other search engines.
