7 SEO Mistakes That Can Hurt Your SEO Ranking

Quick Summary: What can be more disappointing when you find out that your site ranking is draining day by day. Rank dropping means less traffic, less visibility, and eventually low revenue. Search the reasons behind the downgrade of the site & resolve them quickly to scale again.

Fighting to keep pace with the ever-changing SEO and avoid making technical issues to continue to cling to the same ranking position has become inevitable.

You may already be aware of the problems with your website but maintaining consistently good health of your website even during the ever-changing worldwide SEO can be challenging.

Serpstat indexed around 175 million pages of different companies in 2017 and found around 300 million errors in them through their site audit tool. 

Similarly, Semrush audited thousands and millions of sites and could figure out many mistakes within each website. And under these mistakes, 27 were critical that couldn’t be completed at once. 

However, auditing the issues in itself is a time-consuming effort, yet helps in eliminating those issues. Here among the million issues, we shall share a few yet the most important issues. Resolving them will give you real-time quick results. 

7 Most Unavoidable Errors To Resolve To Enhance SEO Ranking

Google keeps on throwing updates regarding website rankings regularly. Since the search engine does not explicitly announce the updates, thus you may have missed it. Core updates are never bad for your site, it is just a natural change that might indicate that something is wrong with your website. 

How do you get to know about it? You will have to keep a keen eye on the Webmaster blogs and check whether there have been any new updates released by Google

What can you do about it? You can work on your website as per the core update dictates. This will help improve your user experience and hold on to the rank. You can also subscribe to the blogs in the SEO industry to receive detailed information about the SEO or Search Engine Rankings.

This is the basic step that every Professional SEO Service provider or SEO expert follows. Let’s understand those 7 Areas where good change can bring great results.

1. Indexation

There could be various reasons behind the inaccessibility of your website by Google to index it and ultimately rank it.

  • Duplicate Content

One of the common reasons for any website that restricts it from ranking. Content appearing on more than one webpages makes it hard for the search engines to understand which page to consider and show users in SERP.

This also affects the visibility of the page, as well as the equity too, is suffered. In order to resolve the issue, you can look up to canonical tags for the page to index.

  • No-Indexing

No-index tag means, you do not want Google or any other search engine to scroll down the page. However, it is not an SEO issue unless you are working on the page. But, when the work is done and left the page unindexed, it might never get in the eyes of the user. 

  • iFrame 

iframes lower the website loading speed so if the info is hosted inside the iframe search engine won’t ignore them. However, many Professional SEO Service experts do not consider it as it has become an outdated element, still, if you consider this aspect to rank, you must avoid using them.

  • Flash Elements

Another outdated element is the flash element, which is capable of slowing down the site’s ranking and affecting loading speed negatively.

Other elements apart from flash elements are pages hidden in Robot.txt. This isn’t an error till the time you are working on it. 

  • Low Word Count

Google says that your content’s minimum word count should be 300. Increasing the word count or elaborating the content will help Google understand the page, which will help you rank higher.

2. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

AMP was meant to enhance the loading speed of sites on mobile devices. The common errors the SEO experts can make are –

  • AMP Error

A common error where AMP has not been used at all. Only 0.02% of the issues have occurred regarding this error. 

  • Deprecated Elements

The error to indicate the outdated tag in the AMP document. Thus it is vital to check the relevancy of the element in regular intervals. 

  • CSS Stylesheet errors

When the CSS Stylesheet is indexed as a usual page. This error occurs when the Stylesheet does not comply with the AMP rules.

  • JavaScript Code Error

Similar to CSS StyleSheet, complying error of JavaScript with AMP rules.

3. Headings and Meta Tags

Headings and Meta Tags

  • Missing or Multiple H1 headings

Remember, you can only have one H1 and every web page must contain H1 to make the page unique.

  • Improper Headings

A correct Heading for the content description is vital. So, make sure the heading is relevant to it.

  • The title is too short or too long

The best SEO practice for an optimum title description must wrap under 11 words, which is 65 characters inclusive of spaces.

And as for description, it should be 100-320 characters (which was later increased by Google).

  • Missing or Duplicate Titles

The title description is the main fragment that includes the keywords and explains about the page. Thus it makes it easy for Google to understand. 

Duplicate titles may affect your ranking negatively. And when your description is missing, Google picks text from your content, which makes the relevancy of the content in reference to the title more difficult.

4. Links & Redirects

  • Stuffed External Links 

Linking quality sites to your site is a great idea, but stuffing too many external linking can negatively impact your site.

  • Redirecting Pages

You must not want to redirect your site’s links to the landing page. 

5. Loading Speed

Did you know even the smallest delay can reduce your traffic and then your revenue? Thus, it is important to have check over the speedy performance of the page. 

The reasons for inconvenience can be:

  • Browser Caching

Caching affects the loading speed significantly. The site creates content for every user visit which can make the site slow.

  • Server Response Time 

You can look for suggestions from Google.

  • Enabling Compression

Compressing reduces the number of bytes sent over the network.

6. Hreflang Attribute

  • Conflicts with Page Source Code 

Hreflang is an important attribute for pages to rank. There can be conflicted Hreflang URLs of different kinds that can be fixed through code.

  • Invalid Hreflang Values

To avoid this issue, the correct language, as well as country code, must be mentioned. Divide the language and country codes with a hyphen and put the country code before the language code to avoid issues.

7. HTTPs Certification & Server Parameters

  • Mixed Content

Here mixed content refers to the content in both HTTP and HTTPs sites. Since HTTP is an insecure site thus can be prone to cyber-attacks easily.

  • Insecure Page Links

Remove or fix all the links that direct from the HTTP pages to HTTPS pages. 

  • Insecure Password

An insecure HTTP page cannot protect confidential passwords to valuable information, so remove them from that page.

  • Use HSTS Technology

Brower recommends and requests the website with HTTP to use HTTPS because the user will only be able to see HTTPS pages. So you must use HSTS technology and use the latest version of TLS 1.2.

  • Common Name Mismatch

The most common error that occurs with the SSL certification is the difference in address bar and registration names. You may have given a different name for registration and a completely different name displayed on the address bar.  

  • An HTTP Status Code

404 Status Code 

You may have direct links to the pages that return 4 times greater than the status code, which is a common yet serious issue overlooked. This problem can magnify your crawl budget of broken pages.

Server Status Code

The code that denotes the failure of a server performing user requests is 500-509. This clears the fact, in order to rank, your site must be full of pages. For which you can take the help of the right SEO tools and get rid of errors and fix issues right away.

In the Nutshell –

These were just a few errors or common mistakes that can easily drop down the rank of your blooming website. Thus to not overlook even the tiniest aspect of your website’s SEO, you must have a dedicated team to proffer right and Professional SEO Services. So that the efforts of reaching the target audience by ranking on the SERP of search engines do not go in vain. 

 

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