The competition to maintain the positioning of a site or web page within search engines is an ongoing effort in terms of SEO. However, no one is exempt from making a mistake when trying to optimize their web pages or sites or omit any aspect vital that you can undo all progress. Since search engines are still key to generating traffic, as well as SEO actions, which, according to Brightedge Research, may be responsible for up to 53 percent of the traffic that websites receive, this time We will highlight what are currently the main mistakes that are made with SEO so that you can avoid or correct them.
In order to learn about the leading SEO mistakes currently affecting the sites, we share the data highlighted by an analysis carried out by SEMRush to more than 319 million websites from various niche markets, such as Health, sports travel, and science:
- 4xx errors
Errors with the 4xx code (such as the well-known 404) syndicate that a page is broken and cannot be accessed. It can also be applied to functional pages when something is blocking them and prevents them from being crawled by search engines.
- Pages not crawled
This SEO error occurs when a page cannot be viewed for 2 reasons; the first is that the website response time exceeded the 5-second limit, and the second is that the server denied access to the page.
- Broken internal links
As its name explains, these are links that lead to pages that are not working; this causes damage to the user experience as well as SEO.
- Broken external links
In a similar sense to the previous one, these links are those that take users to sites or other pages that do not exist. This sends a negative signal to the search engines, and consequently, SEO is also affected.
- Broken internal images
This SEO error arises when an image file simply no longer exists, or there was an error in placing its URL, whether it is missing a goal or any other aspect has been changed.
- Duplicate title tags and meta descriptions
This SEO error occurs when 2 or more pages have the same title and descriptions, making it difficult for search engines to determine relevance adequately and, therefore, positioning on results pages.
- Missing H1 tags
As you know, H1 tags help search engines determine the subject of the content; if they are not found on the page, there will be gaps that Google or other search engines will not be able to understand about your website.
- Missing meta descriptions
Meta descriptions, when written well, help Google understand the relevance and motivate users to click pages when they appear in the results section. If this attribute is missing, SEO efforts may be affected, and the CTR will fall.
- Missing alternate attributes
Alternate attributes provide search engines, and visually impaired people, with descriptions of the images in the content. Without these attributes, relevance can be lost, and engagement can suffer the consequences as well.
- Duplicate H1 and title tags
This SEO error occurs when the H1 tags, as well as the title tags, are the same on any other page, a page with this can be over-optimized, and this means that you may miss opportunities to rank with relevant keywords.
- Duplicate content
This error, considered as the most significant in the content section, is generated when the pages on the website have the same URL or copy; however, it is an aspect of SEO that can be repaired by adding using the 301 redirects.
- Links leading to HTTP pages on an HTTPS site
As highlighted by SEMRush, links to old HTTP pages can cause an insecure dialogue between users and a server, so be sure to check that all links are up to date.
- Underscored URLs
Different search engines can misinterpret underscores and incorrectly document site indexing. The ideal for this aspect of SEO is to use hyphens instead.
- Attributes of “nofollow” in outgoing internal links
The internal links that contain the nofollow attribute block any link equity potential that flows through the website of the brand or company.
- Incorrect pages found in the sitemap.xml
Every sitemap.xml should avoid having broken pages. Check for any redirects and if there are non-canonical pages. Also, make sure they return a 200 status code.
- Not having a sitemap.xml specified in the robots.txt file
As highlighted by the SEMRush platform, without a sitemap.xml in the site’s robots.txt file, search engines will not be able to understand the website structure fully.
- Short or long title tags
When it comes to SEO, title tags with more than 60 characters should be avoided as they are cut off from search engine results pages. On the other hand, those below 60 characters represent a missed opportunity to improve page optimization.
- Hreflang attribute conflicts
Multilingual sites can confuse search engines if the “hreflang” attribute conflicts with the source code of any page.
- Problems with incorrect herflang links
In relation to the previous SEO bug, also broken hreflang links can create indexing problems if relative URLs are used instead of full URLs.
- Low word count
Finally, pages can be affected if the tools that analyze them detect that there is a lack of content. If you have pages with little substance, it will be best to review them and make sure they are as informative as possible.
