When you get into the optimization of your website to rank in the Search Engine Result Page, here comes Technical SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and the common technical SEO issues you should consider while optimizing your website. Because SEO is the important key factor that helps in the organic traffic of the website.
In this post, we have discussed the most common Technical SEO issues that will help you while writing a blog or post and optimizing it better ranking on the search engine result page.
what is Technical SEO
In simple, Technical SEO is the process of improving your website to help search engines effectively crawl, understand and display your site for particular queries on the search engine result page.
The technical SEO issues discussed here
- Improper Robots.txt file
- Noindex meta tag
- Not secured HTTPS site
- Duplicate content
- Slow page loading time
- Title and indexing
- Incorrect language declaration
- Missing of xml sitemaps
- No image Alt tags
- Mobile usability optimization
- Broken links
- Rel canonical
1. Improper Robots.txt file
The robots.txt file should be included in your main directory, if is not well-formatted on your website, it will create a great impact on your site ranking.
How to identify
We can find the robots.txt file of a website by typing our website URL with the end term “/robots.txt” in the search engine address bar. If it is not implemented properly the “user-agent: * Disallow: /” will appear in the robots.txt file.
How to fix
The robots.txt file can be rectified by properly implementing an “Allow” and “Disallow” function in the file.
Inform the issue to the web developer and clarify “user-agent: * Disallow: /” is used intentionally or implemented with a proper disallow function.
2. Noindex meta tag
The noindex meta robot tag tells the search engines bots, which pages should be indexed and which don’t. If the noindex tag is accidentally set up in your main pages, your website will not rank or receive organic traffic. This is one of the most common issues in technical SEO.
How to identify
We can identify the “noindex” meta tag of any website by right-clicking anywhere on the required page and clicking on “view page source”. A new window will open, in the top part of the page, we can find the meta tags.
For example, (<meta name=”robots” content=”NOINDEX”,NOFOLLOW>).
How to fix
If you found the “noindex, nofollow” tag in the site source code, you should check with the web developer if it’s used intentionally, if not it should be replaced by implementing “index”, follow tag in the same tag.
Some of the sensitive information, e-commerce websites, and in many cases the noindex tag will be used for a reason.
Avoid using the noindex tag on your valuable pages.
3. Not secured HTTPS site
If your website is not secured with HTTPS then definitely you will lose your visitors to the website and it will increase the bounce rate of the website.
How to identify
When you type the domain name of your website in the search engine, you will find a closed padlock in the address bar, it indicates your website is secured with HTTPS.
If it’s HTTP will appear with a not secure alert in the address bar then your website is not secured. In this case, immediate action should be taken to address it. It is the basic technical SEO issue to look after.
How to fix
You need to buy an SSL certificate from authority and configure your hosting with it, it will change your website from HTTP to HTTPS.
You can use 301 redirects from HTTP to HTTPS for your website.
4. Duplicate content
The duplicate content will confuse the search engines that which version of the page to rank for the user queries. It will create trouble to the search engines where to link the metrics (trust, authority, etc.) to which page.
Duplicate content issues arise most commonly in e-commerce sites.
How to identify
The duplicate content can be identified by the Google search console’s index coverage report. There are also tools to identify the duplicate content such as Copyscape, Duplichecker, and so on.
How to fix
It can be fixed by adding a canonical tag to the webpage, this will help search engines find which is your preferred URL. We can exclude the incorrect URL in the robots.txt.
We can set up 301 redirects from a duplicate page to the original page.
5. Slow page speed loading time
When it comes to the user experience if your website is taking time to load for a specific query of the user, then you lose the visitors to your page. The site speed will affect the crawl budget also.
How to identify
You can use Google PageSpeed Insights(PSI) to get a page speed report of your web pages. There are also various tools available to get the page speed report such as GTmetrix, Dotcom-Monitor, etc.
How to fix
The most common ways to increase the page loading speed are by using compressed images, checking server response timing, getting a good hosting service, using caching layer, optimizing your site code, and using a Content Delivery System in your website.
6. Title and indexing
The title tag of your webpage is the one that will display in SERP for the searchers query. If you type your domain name in the search engine and your website does not appear on the search engine result page then you have an issue with indexation.
How to identify
The first thing to do is type the expression “site: your domain.com” to see if your expected URLs are appearing in the SERP. You can use the Google search console’s index coverage report to follow up on errors.
How to fix
If your site isn’t indexed you can begin by adding your site URLs to google. Make sure your robots.txt file is not blocking your site that you need to be indexed, check your important pages that do not have a noindex meta tag.
Make sure your updated site has been redirected from your old version of the site.
7. Incorrect language declaration
If your website is targeting a global audience, has the same content in different languages or different contents in the same language. If the hreflang tag is misconfigured then probably you won’t be able to get traffic for your site locally.
The hreflang tells search bots which page should be displayed to the user based on their geographical location.
How to identify
It needs a detailed audit to find the issue, the Hreflang tag errors can be found and rectified by conducting an hreflang audit for your web pages. It can be done using the tools available in the market such as screaming frog SEO spider, Hreflang checker.
The hreflang will look as, <https://seoforserp.com/ hreflang=”en-au” />
How to fix
The technical audit report will be handy for rectifying this technical SEO issue. The source code should be verified. When you do corrections in your web pages or create any redirect ensure that the code is updated to all linking pages.
8. Missing of XML sitemaps
XML sitemaps assist search engine bots in effectively crawling and indexing the content of your website. The sitemap is an XML file that lists the URL for a site. If your website’s sitemap is not submitted to google then your ranking factor will be affected.
How to identify
By entering your domain name in google with the suffix “/sitemap.xml” you will be able to find the sitemap of your website.
How to fix
If your website doesn’t have a sitemap you can create one on your own or you can do it easily using the xml generating tool.
If you are using the WordPress site the plugin named Yoast can generate an XML sitemap for your site. The sitemap is helpful for all websites likely the new websites with few external links to it, mainly for really large websites, websites with large archives, and websites that use rich media content.
9. No image Alt tags
The inconsistent use of Alt tags is one of the technical issues in SEO. The Alt tags define what is the image is about to search engine crawlers and it will help bots in indexing the page. Broken images and no alt tags for your images will affect the traffic of your website in image searches.
How to identify
By conducting an SEO site audit for your website, the report will give you information about missing and broken images alt tags.
How to fix
If you are using WordPress, it will tell you to add an Alt tag for the images you are uploading to your website.
If you are using the other content management system you will have this option as likely, if you are not able to find it you can get help from your website developer to add the proper Alt tags for the images. You can run a frequent site audit to monitor your image content.
10. Mobile usability optimization
Google made a switch to mobile-first indexing, which means how your site looks and loads on any mobile device. Nearly 60 percent of searches are done on mobile devices, If you don’t optimize your website to mobile usability then probably you will lose traffic for your site.
How to identify
We can use google’s mobile-friendly test tool to check whether our site is mobile-friendly. The google search console’s mobile usability report should be verified for the errors.
How to fix
By using the Google search console’s mobile usability report you can fix the issues. If you have a mobile site then you need to check whether your site has been updated with all metadata, add structured data to your mobile pages and make sure the URLs are updated to mobile URLs.
11. Broken links
The broken links or dead links are which is no longer exist or can’t accessible by the visitor of your webpage. It will affect your website search results.
How to identify
The best way to identify a broken link is to run a site audit. We can use the google search console to identify the internal broken links and google analytics can report on both internal and external broken links.
There are also third-party tools such as Ahrefs and Screaming Frog which will give you a detailed report on broken links.
How to fix
There are two ways to rectify the internal link issue, by replacing the broken or dead links with the live links, removing links.
The external dead links can be solved by reaching out to the website which links to the page and requesting a fix, recreating and replacing the content on the broken page or you can use 301 direct to link it to the new page or a relevant page.
12. Rel canonical
The canonical issue arises most commonly in websites that contain more than a single URL that has similar or identical content. This occurs mainly in e-commerce sites and google crawlers will take these as duplicate pages and exclude them from crawling.
How to identify
The canonical technical SEO issue can be found by simply typing your website’s possible URLs in the search engine address bar and if all of them are not redirecting it to the preferred URL then, you need to rectify the canonical issue. The Ahrefs and screaming frog tool will give you reports on the list of your website URLs.
How to fix
You can inform the web developer to view the source code and rectify it by adding the “Rel= canonical” link in the HTTP header or in the head of the page main page which you need to rank for searchers queries.
Salient piont
Taking into consideration the above technical SEO issues while creating or optimizing the post and blogs for any website that are willing to give their best response for the user’s query will certainly fill the place in the Search Engine Result Page.