Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines. SEO may involve editing the content, HTML and associated coding to both increase rankings and improve user experience.
However, there are several technical SEO issues that can hurt your website rankings due to which you may not be able to get the desired results even after putting in so much work on your website’s content. In this article, we will discuss various technical SEO issues that affect your website negatively and how you can fix them:
Duplicate Content
According to Asia Media Studio, a digital marketing agency in Bangkok, duplicate content is when the same piece of information appears on more than one page. This can be in the form of text or images, and it’s important to avoid it because search engines don’t know which piece of content they should prioritize.
If you have duplicate content, you can remove it by adding new content that better reflects your site. If this isn’t possible (for example, if you have multiple versions of an article in different languages), use a canonical tag so that only one version gets indexed.
Broken Links
Broken links are a huge problem. If you have any of these types of broken links on your site, it will hurt the overall website ranking:
- Links to pages that are no longer available or have moved
- Links to pages that have been deleted
- Links to pages that have been renamed
- Links to pages that are no longer accessible due to password protection or similar technologies (such as file path security)
In addition, if you use redirects for URL shortening services like Bitly, those links will be considered broken for search engines unless they’re 301 redirects.
Crawl Errors
Crawl errors are a type of technical SEO issue that’s not always easy to detect. They can cause your site to be penalized by search engines and negatively affect your rankings, but the issues that cause crawl errors aren’t always obvious. For example, if you see an error message in Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools that says “Fetching URL: [URL] failed due to time out” then this means there has been an issue with crawling your website and Googlebot was unable to reach it within the allotted amount of time.
Other common crawl errors include duplicate content across different URLs on your website (e.g., https://www.example-company-name/products/) or internal links pointing somewhere unexpected (e.g., https://www.example-company-name/#!). If either of those occurs on your site then Googlebot won’t be able to find all its content without making additional requests for each individual page or link it encounters along its journey through your site’s architecture—and these requests cost valuable bandwidth and processing power from both sides (Google’s server farm vs yours).
Lack Of Responsive Design
For example, let’s say you have a content page about your company’s history. On this page, you link to other pages of your website that mention notable milestones in the company’s past. But when someone clicks on one of those links from their phone or tablet and they get redirected to an error message saying: “We’re sorry! The page you requested is currently unavailable.”
That means that your website isn’t responsive.
If you’re responsible for managing your site, then it’s important that you know how to test for this issue so that it doesn’t affect search rankings and cause frustration among visitors — especially if they’re using mobile devices. To ensure that all user experiences are high quality throughout every device and platform (desktop/laptop computers; mobile phones/tablets; etc.), It is recommended to test every URL of every web page as well as any external links found on those pages before making changes to them in order to identify potential problems with responsiveness design which would affect rankings if not corrected immediately before publishing new content updates.
HTTP Error Codes
HTTP error codes are one of the most important parts of your website’s performance. In fact, they can be more important than how fast your website loads. HTTP error codes are errors that occur while a user is trying to access a web page or other resource on your site. These errors include things like 404s, 500s and 503s.
HTTP responses are sent back to the browser by the server when it receives an HTTP request from a client (a computer or mobile device). If there were no errors while processing this request, the server responds with a 200 OK status code and some content in its response body (e.g., an HTML document).
Incorrect Sitemap Submission
It is also important to check that you have submitted your sitemap to the right place. If you are using Google Search Console, your sitemap will likely be submitted automatically when it is generated. However, if you are using another method of submission or have set up an auto-submission tool (like one of the ones I listed above), then it’s important that you make sure that the file is being submitted correctly with all of its proper content.
You can verify this by checking for errors in Google Webmaster Tools as well as looking at whether or not any 404 errors were returned when checking on your site in Google Search Console. Also, take a look at what type of content encoding was used (UTF-8 should be used for most sites) and whether or not there were any other issues with how things were submitted and/or uploaded into those tools.
Missing Alt Texts For Images
Having alt text for your images is important for SEO, but it’s also an accessibility issue. This is because screen readers use alt text to describe images to visually impaired users. It helps people who can’t see them, and it helps search engines determine what an image is about so that they can show relevant results when someone searches for a specific photo or graphic. If you don’t have any alt text, search engines won’t know what the image shows and won’t be able to display related images in search results either.
Conclusion
In the end, it’s all about having a strong online presence and providing a clear value proposition. The last thing you want is to be penalized by Google because they feel like your website isn’t useful to visitors.
Get to Know the Author
Chatwalee Pingkasan is a full-time creative content writer. Digital marketing, lifestyle travel writing, and the practice of self-care are currently her main interests. Follow her on LinkedIn.
