Have you ever wondered what the most common issues with your website’s SEO might be? Or have you ever experienced some of these issues yourself? If you have, then you’re probably well aware of how frustrating issues with your website’s SEO can be.
Even if you’ve been a successful digital marketer for many years and have a good understanding of how search engines work and how to optimize your website for SEO, there’s always a chance that you might encounter something that you’re not aware of.
This article will help you learn how to diagnose and fix the most common issues that can negatively impact your website’s SEO. Keep reading to learn more.
What Is SEO?
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of improving the online visibility of a website to web search engine robots through the use of online tactics and strategies. Basically, it’s the process of getting more traffic to your site by ensuring that your site is as search-engine-friendly as possible.
Search engines use various algorithms to find relevant results for any given search query, and your site’s SEO will play a large part in whether or not people actually end up clicking through and visiting your site from the search results.
As you can imagine, this is incredibly important to any business that wants to drive more traffic to their site and increase their online sales. It’s especially essential for e-commerce businesses that want to increase their revenue and earn more profit from every single customer who ends up visiting their site from a search engine.
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How to Fix SEO Issues
Fixing basic SEO issues can be accomplished by anyone who understands what needs to be done. However, if you’re new to SEO or want to make sure that you’re addressing any potential issues effectively, then you’ll want to follow these steps:
– Go through your site and make sure that it follows all of the search engine guidelines.
– Update your site’s content regularly to keep it fresh and interesting for your readers.
– Make sure that your site’s architecture works smoothly and that all of the links are functioning properly.
– Optimize your site for each of the major search engines that you want to target.
– Submit your site to all of the major search engine directories that you can find.
– If you own an e-commerce site, make sure that you’re using the right shopping cart software and that it integrates with the right payment gateways.
Status Code Error: Index Coverage report
A status code error occurs when a website’s server sends an HTTP status code to the browser to let it know whether or not the request was successful.
The W3C determines the status code specs. A page’s HTTP header contains status codes to tell the browser whether it succeeded or failed.
404 Error Code:
A 404 page not found error message is returned to a web browser when a page requested from a website is not currently available on the server or not found. This happens when a file is removed or if the hyperlink contains an error.
To fix this, The easiest and simplest method to fix your 404 error code is to redirect the page to another one. You can accomplish this by using a 301 redirect.
500 Internal Server Error:
When a server generates a 500 Internal Server Error message, it means that something has gone wrong on the server, but the server cannot say specifically what the problem is.
It’s crucial that you address the issue quickly, as this will both scare away visitors and potentially cause Google to lower your ranking.
To fix it, the first thing is to check if your server still up and running? If not, contact your hosting provider as soon as possible. But, if it is an internal error the next thing is to view the log files to see the collection of the messages contained in the file.
Seeing how the log file is created when the website is reloaded and produces HTTP error 500 codes can help you locate the problem quickly.
Consider whether there have been any recent changes. Plugins that are incorrectly programmed or incompatible are frequently responsible for error messages.
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Mobile Experience Issues
The mobile experience, also known as mobile user experience, is the impression an end user gets from using a mobile device to access your website. It has more to do with customers’ perceptions of every mobile interaction they have with a brand.
How to fix it:
*Optimize your mobile-friendly website for speed
*Use images cautiously
*Reduce forms to fields that are absolutely necessary
*Keep typography clear and concise
*Provide a direct route to the call-to-action for users
Compress long URLs into less than 70 characters
Studies have shown that URLs with fewer characters are more likely to appear in the SERPs. URLs that are concise, to the point, and specific enough to improve clicks are favourable.
Instead of trying to make the URL as long as possible, we suggest you ask yourself, “Can I make the URL shorter while still being as descriptive as possible?” If the answer is yes, then you should shorten the URL.
Broken Link Management
It can be challenging to maintain a site that has lots of broken links on it. Search engines tend to penalize sites with lots of broken links, as it makes it look as if the site doesn’t exist at all and therefore isn’t relevant to the given search query.
To avoid getting penalized by search engine bots, you’ll want to work with your web developer to make sure that they remove all of the broken links from your site.
As well, you’ll need to make sure that you don’t have any links on your site that point to pages that are missing, as this can be just as bad for your SEO as having broken links.
Inconsistent Schema Markup
According to the search engine experts at Moz, the most common type of SEO issue that businesses experience is inconsistent schema markup.
This means that you might have some parts of your site that are properly formatted and other parts that aren’t. This problem is usually caused by either not enough or too much human intervention in your workflow.
Inconsistent schema markup can be a sign of inefficiency in your organization and should be fixed as soon as possible.
How to fix it, check whether there have been any recent changes. Plugins that are incorrectly programmed or incompatible are frequently responsible for error messages. Ask if your schema markup is out of sync with changes on your website? To what degree? When the changes occur.
Duplicate Content and Articles
Duplicate content and articles on your site are two of the most common SEO issues that you can encounter. Duplicate content is when you have two or more pages on your site that include the same text.
Search engines will typically penalize you if they see this kind of content on your site, as it can confuse people who might click through to pages that aren’t meant to be there.
You should try to make sure that you have no more than 10% of your site’s total pages that are displaying duplicate content. You should also make sure that all of your site’s articles are unique and don’t include any copy that’s the same as another page on your site.
Hanging Header Tags
A hanging header tag is when you have a header tag on your site’s header that’s positioned too low. This can negatively impact your site’s overall SEO, as it can make it look as if the header isn’t important to the rest of your site.
To fix this problem, you’ll want to make sure that the header tags on your site’s header are properly positioned. If you’re still not sure where they are, then you can use a site like InspectApedia to make sure that your header tags are properly positioned.
Conclusion
Getting the most out of your SEO strategy is all about making sure that you have a clear understanding of what needs to be done and that you’re doing it effectively. In this article, we’ve outlined some of the most common issues that you can encounter on your site and provided suggestions on how to fix them.
It’s important to keep in mind that each website is unique and will have different kinds of issues on it, so these tips might not apply to your site. If you want to make sure that you don’t encounter any of these issues on your site, then you’ll want to make sure that you follow these steps:
– Make sure that you’re following all of the search engine guidelines for your site.
– Update your site’s content regularly to keep it fresh and interesting for your readers.
– Make sure that your site’s architecture works smoothly and that all of the links are functioning properly.
– Optimize your site for each of the major search engines that you want to target.
– Submit your site to all of the major search engine directories that you can find. With these steps, you can make sure that your site gets the most out of its SEO strategy and drives lots of traffic to your site.
