Can you stand upright without the backbone? No, you can’t. In fact, nobody can do it. Well, the technical SEO holds the same importance for your website as the backbone does for your body.
Without optimizing your website technically, you cannot achieve your web traffic objective.
Everything will fall apart.
In today’s post, I’m going to discuss six technical SEO mistakes that can reduce traffic to your website if you don’t fix them quickly.
Let’s explore them:
1- Not Optimizing Meta Tags
Meta tag tells search engines what the content is about.
In other words, meta tag is a snippet that explains what a web page is about.
Source: Business2Community screenshot taken by the author
Meta tags don’t appear on the page’s content but in the page code.
Optimizing meta tags can help improve your search ranking.
Here are four major types of meta tags that you must optimize:
1- Meta Keywords Attributes- Use the most relevant keyword for meta tag
2- Title Tags- Use keyword in the beginning of a title
3- Meta Description Attributes- Write persuasive descriptions including important keywords/key phrases
4- Meta Robots Attributes- Tell search engines what they should do with the page (Index/nonindex, follow/nofollow)
Follow the best meta tag optimization practices to boost your technical SEO.
2- Not Optimizing Your Website Speed
In today’s fast-paced world, when human attention span has become shorter than goldfish, web surfers don’t have the patience for slower pages.
Following is how load-time corresponds to bounce rate, according to Google’s research:
Image Source: Google
So it becomes imperative that you should optimize your site speed.
And it is official that speed is a ranking factor now.
Here are some tips to optimize your site speed:
- Optimize your images
- Enable browser caching
- Enable compression
- Optimize your CSS
- Keep your script below the fold
By optimizing the speed of your website, you will decrease the bounce rate, thereby improving the traffic to your website.
3- Not Having a Mobile-friendly Website
According to Statista, 51.2% of webpage views worldwide were from mobile devices excluding tablets as of April 2018.
My friend, mobile searches are more than desktop searches. What’s more, Google has started Mobile First Indexing, meaning the mobile version of content will be prioritized by the search engine giant.
Not having a mobile-friendly website is one the biggest mistakes, businesses make today.
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Here are some useful tips on optimizing your content for mobile devices:
- Use responsive web design
- As a mobile screen is smaller, 700-1000 words content is enough
- Avoid using flash videos
- Use accelerated mobile pages (AMPs)
- Optimize typography, CTAs, and touch buttons
- Limit the use of intrusive interstitials
Optimizing for mobile devices is an important part of technical SEO, so you should not ignore it.
4- Not Doing Link Analysis Regularly
I don’t have to tell you that you should not build bad, low-quality links. Doing so can do more harm than any good.
Google has become super smart in detecting any behavior that manipulates links to your site.
So it is imperative that you should follow Google’s guidelines for Link Scheme and avoid:
- Buying or selling links
- Excessive link exchange
- Large-scale keyword rich guest posting
- Low-quality directory and bookmark site links
Also, you should thoroughly analyze your links from time to time to disavow bad links. This should be a part of your technical SEO strategy.
5- Not Making Correct Redirects
Have you recently migrated your website from HTTP to HTTPS ? Or you have redirected some URLs on your website?
You should make sure that all the redirects are properly done.
Faulty redirects not only affect traffic but also affect your website SEO severely.
6- Not Using Canonical Tags
Does your website have similar content on different URLs?
Do you syndicate your content a lot on other websites?
If yes, then you must not forget to add canonical tags in your content, or else your website might suffer because of the duplicate content issue.
A canonical tag is a good way to consolidate duplicate URLs.
It can solve the following problems:
- To tell search engines to consider different URLs of your website with the same content as one
- To help you manage syndicated content
- To help search engines not to spend time on duplicate pages
Duplicate homepages are very common as people can link to your home pages in many ways. So you should proactively canonicalize your home page.
Final thoughts,
Technical SEO is an important part of your website optimization. The above six mistakes can decrease traffic to your website.
So you should fix them quickly and run technical SEO audit from time to time to optimize your website technically perfect.
What about you? Do you want to share any technical SEO mistake that, if not fixed, can reduce search traffic to a website? Please leave it in the comment section. I’d love to know about it.