To give your website a good ranking on SERPs, you will have mastered the key aspects of on-page SEO. You know how to find appropriate keywords and have an editorial calendar for your posts. You have learned how to write amazing blog posts and your posts are accompanied by appropriate media for added user appeal.
Even with all these efforts, the organic traffic to your website still has not improved. It could be that your posts are not properly structured. Perhaps, you need to be more aggressive with your social media marketing efforts. All these issues could make a difference to your online marketing campaign but they will hardly improve your ranking on search engines.
Technical SEO
The real issue here could be technical SEO mistakes that should be addressed immediately. Technical SEO makes up the features that make a website index-able, crawl-able, and easy to understand by search engines.
Google and other search engines don’t read websites the way people normally do. They read the code beneath the website content and if your website has not been set to the appropriate standards, your website’s visibility on SERPs will suffer. In this post, we highlight some technical SEO mistakes that people often make that end up giving their websites a poor ranking on search engines.
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1. Your website is not secure.
Websites need an SSL extension for then to be secure. SSL stands for “secure sockets layer” and this extension is used to secure the traffic between the servers and browsers. You can tell that a website has implemented SSL by looking at the website description. If the URL reads “https:”, then that website is secure. If it just reads “http:” that one is not secure.
Google uses website security as a signal when ranking websites and the lack of an SSL certificate could be the reason your website is not on the first page of the search engine results pages. To solve this issue, you will need to acquire an SSL certificate from providers such as Comodo, Symantec, and Rapid SSL.
2. Duplicate content
Google views duplicate content as a sign of plagiarism and it penalizes websites with duplicate content by de-indexing them. Google has some powerful bots that roam websites in search of matching content. When it comes across any, it initiates SEO penalties with de-indexing being the main one.
To save your website from this tragedy, always make sure that you don’t have duplicate or plagiarized content on your webpages. Purpose to create original content and this will make sure you are not de-indexed by search engines. Use plagiarism checking tools to see if your content is original before you publish the same on your website.
3. It takes too long for your website to load
It is not just your prospects who care about your website’s load up speed, search engines do as well. Research shows that 40% of online users are like to leave a website when it takes more than 3 seconds to load and if there is a high bounce rate of your website, your ranking on search engines will be affected as well.
To ensure optimum online user experience, search engines favour websites that load up quickly. The minute a user clicks back after visiting your website and then proceeds to another website on the SERPs, Google counts this against you and your ranking will suffer as a result. To make sure this doesn’t happen, keep your pages lean and avoid heavy content like videos that increase page load time.
4. Your website is not optimized for mobile devices
More than 50% of internet traffic in the world comes from mobile devices. This means that people will be using their phones to access your website and if your website is not mobile-friendly, then the bounce rate will be high and this will count against your on SERPs.
Some issues to consider in this regard include touch elements being too close such that there is a lot of confusion when clicking through links. Fonts should also not be too small so as to make it easy for mobile users to read the content on your web pages.
5. Lack of internal and external links
Internal and external links are other aspects of technical SEO that you need to be aware of. Such links add credibility to your web pages and this will result in a higher ranking on SERPs. Internal links will help you merge content that are of a similar topic and this will help you retain the attention of your readers for a little longer.
External links, on the other hand, point back to your website and other than generating traffic for your website, they help build credibility in your website. To achieve this, you need to develop authoritative content for other websites to refer to when creating and publishing their content.
6. Poor Meta tags
Meta descriptions preview the content that you have on your web pages. Prospects read through these descriptions before clicking on a link and as such, you need to make sure that the description is catchy so as to capture their attention. You also need to include the relevant keywords in the meta description so as to make it easy for search engines to rank you. Most people forget to include keywords in their meta descriptions and this results in a poor ranking on SERPs.
Conclusion
Your website’s ranking on SERPs will depend on your implementation of SEO strategies. Most developers ignore the technical aspects of SEO when creating and publishing content for their websites and this results in poor rankings on SERPs. This post highlights the mistakes that you should avoid if you desire a higher ranking on search engines and more visibility for your website.