Common SEO Problems That Could Be Hurting You

Search Engine Optimization is an important aspect of most business websites. That is why it makes sense to find and eliminate common SEO problems that could be hurting you. As one of the top website development companies in the business we run across these common SEO issues all the time and help clients resolve them for sometimes remarkable differences in their overall optimization.

Interestingly enough, many of these common SEO problems are more technical in nature and actually require a minor amount of time at best to resolve which means this is an area where a little bit of work can go a long way.

Common SEO Problems

• Slow speed – Speed is what you need for the best SEO possible because speed counts to Google. You need to regularly audit your site speed and page loading speed and then look for problems or anomalies.
• Mistake with Robots.txt –There is a common error that can occur in the Robots.txt file, typically during development or redevelopment. One is when the “/” symbol is placed incorrectly. Yes, even the smallest of mistakes in certain key files can have a big impact. This can cause your site to be blocked.
• Site is not indexed – If all of your website’s pages are not indexing then you are shooting yourself in the foot before you start the race. There are a few common reasons this can happen from old versions of the site not redirecting, spam issues or sub domain problems. The easiest way to check if your site is indexed properly is to search Google for ‘site:[yoursitesname.com]’. The response should be your homepage followed by all the other pages you expect to rank. If you don’t see all the pages you want to rank or pages that you don’t want then you have something to look into.
• Broken backlinks – This happens fairly regularly when people move a website or update a site and backlinks from other sites end up broken. By searching your site for 404 errors you can redirect them to current pages.
• Unrevoked NOINDEX command – During the development phase there is a command commonly used in coding called ‘NOINDEX’ which tells Google or other search engines to not index this particular page. This requires looking at the source code of pages as you want ‘INDEX’ and ‘FOLLOW’ in your Meta Name.
• Using Meta Refresh – Meta refresh is a client-side redirect and it is not something that is considered standard by most SEO professionals or Google. Instead 301 redirects should be used. The reason is that search engines might now recognize that type of redirect.
• Oversized pages – Sometimes errors can occur in development or even post-development where pages end up being double, triple or even larger compared to the original intended size. Things like contact information, terms and conditions, or even additional articles can be accidently included on every page or multiple pages for a variety of reasons including people not understanding how to use a particular content management system. What this ends up doing is slowing down load speed because the pages have more to load. It is smart to periodically check the sizes of pages and word counts, then investigating anything that appears abnormal.

The bottom line is that mistakes do happen during website development, redevelopment and updates. This can be the fault of the developer or people that maintain and update the site, but regardless of fault a problem is still a problem. These common SEO problems that could be hurting you are fairly simple to check for and if they are an issue can be fairly easy to correct. With the importance of SEO to many businesses it is probably a wise idea to make sure these common issues are not plaguing your site.

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