The most common SEO technical problems that could affect your ranking

Year by year, the companies and businesses that want to make a stand in the online market invest a lot of money on SEO services. Moreover, if we talk about an oversaturated market, the prices grow directly proportional to how difficult is to overcome the competition. That’s why your investment should always reflect the tasks an SEO agency has when it has to confront with a very competitional market. Also, there are a lot of SEO technical problems that require the entire attention just because their existence could affect your ranking.

Here are the most common SEO technical problems and how you can solve them.

The page speed

Your site’s rank in SERP (search engine results pages) depends on the speed your web pages load. The faster your site loads, the better the user experience will be. If your server doesn’t respond within 2 seconds, your site will suffer. Starting this year, Google is going to penalize every site that has a poor page speed, which means their ranking will be affected.

The solution to this problem is pretty simple – we recommend you Google PageSpeed Insights. This tool tracks and analyzes your site’s performances both for desktop and mobile version. The best part is that you are going to receive alerts with the pages that are not well optimized. Also, this platform will explain to you how you can solve the problems.

The ratio between the HTML codes and your text

Let’s say you have a webpage where you have included a text. If the amount of HTML codes you used is overwhelming compared to your text, it’s high time you asked yourself a question. This ratio could emphasize some SEO technical problems:

• A poor page speed that is caused by an excessive HTML codes usage
• Hidden messages that will upset the search engines.
• Too many Javascripts and flashes.

Javascript is a wonderful programming language, but if you don’t know how to use it, it may affect your website. In order to solve this SEO technical problem, try to add some on-page texts where is necessary, move the inline sprits in separated folders and remove the codes that are not so necessary.

Broken links

When you have a website with a lot of pages, it’s not such a big problem if there are one or two broken links. But if you have hundreds of this kind of links, you have to take action against this SEO technical problem as soon as possible. Here is how this kind of problem could affect your website:

• The users’ perception of your website will be damaged.
• When the searching robots find too many broken links on a certain website they ignore it and pay attention to other web pages, which means they don’t explore and index them.
• Your site’s authority is also affected.

All you have to do is to enter Google Search Console and access the "Crawl Errors” option which you can find into "Crawl” category. This way, you will find which pages return the 404 error. All these errors must be done as fast as you can, so they can’t confuse your visitors and make them leave your page. This could be a temporary reaction, but many of them won’t come back to your website.

Duplicate content

Today, there are so many websites that have duplicate content. Among them, there are a lot of dropshipping websites that use the information and the pictures they find in data feeds without changing anything. Make sure your website doesn’t have such a big error, because it affects your rank on certain keywords. Google will see that all those texts are not written by you and he won’t take them into consideration.

Use tools like Siteliner and Copyscape to analyze the content on your website and make sure everything you find there is unique. In case there are more links that present the same content and there is no chance to avoid this, you should use canonical tags. For example, this is a very useful advice for the e-commerce websites. In this case, it is highly possible to find the same products on many web pages. Any robot that will find this code will understand which is the main page and what are the pages that contain the same content. This is the HTML code you have to use:

Broken images and no Alt Tags

There are so many images out there that are not optimized, but there is one bigger problem: the presence of broken images and the absence of Alt tags is a SEO technical problem that should be solved as soon as possible. Alts tags are HTML attributes that describe an image. When a certain image on your website can’t load, alt tags describe both the content and the function of this image. More than this, alt tags strengthen your keywords strategy which means the searching engines will understand easier the information on your website.

All you have to do is to add the image in your HTML code and offer it an alt tag.

Duplicated meta titles:

The most common problems regarding meta titles are:

• Duplicated meta titles
• Too long or too short meta titles
• The absence of the meta titles

According to the newest Google standards, meta titles should have 70 characters. It’s very important to make sure you don’t exceed this limit because every single extra character won’t be shown in the results pages. Also, you should use all the 70 characters and make a very appealing message that could bring you more and more visitors. If you are in doubts and don’t know how to write a meta title, follow a standard recipe:

The first keyword | The second keyword | The name of the brand

Also, make sure your meta titles are unique! Read our previous article The importance of using meta tags in SEO and find out more about the importance of using meta tags.

URLs

Another very important SEO technical problem is the structure of the links. A 1-2-17-279805 link is not relevant for the search engines. Neither it contains keywords, nor it offers to Google any clue about your web page. Your links shouldn't have more than 100 characters. Also, you have to separate the words through a hyphen and use a single domain and subdomain.

Poor mobile version

One of the most important SEO technical problems is the quality of the mobile version. That’s because we live in 2018, and Google will soon implement a new algorithm: Mobile-first index. This means he will prioritize the indexation of the mobile version. In other words, your site will rank better if you have a good mobile version. Anyway, there are so many websites whose mobile version is not optimized yet and the user experience is really bad right now. Keep in mind that most of the users use the mobile more often than the laptop. And this is not the case of the social media. In 2018, people buy a lot of things using their smartphones.