Let’s talk about various common technical SEO problems, issues and learn how to resolve them. Such issues are often raised by various website auditing tools so you don’t need to manually look for those SEO errors. Instead, use auditing tools for that. Let’s jump right in.
Broken Links
Broken links are those links that no longer exist. In those cases, the server returns a 404 error indicating that the page you are looking for cannot be found. To resolve SEO errors, remove all links on your website which are broken. These links affect our website’s SEO performance in terms of crawlability and user experience.
Page Not Crawlable
When search engine bots fail to load or crawl your web page then we say that the page is not crawlable. This happens when a page takes too much time to load for a search crawler.
If a page is not crawled then it won’t be ranked. To resolve this SEO problem, you need to identify non-crawlable pages and contact your hosting provider.
Robots.txt Format Errors
In this case, your robots file is poorly formatted. A poorly formatted and misconfigured robots.txt can cause search engines not to rank your web pages. To check if your robots.txt is correctly configured or not, go to Google’s Robots.txt Tester tool. After checking, correct the format as per the error raised by the tester.
Incorrect Pages In Sitemap
Your sitemap should contain the URLs in which you want to be ranked. It may happen sometimes that there are some URLs in the sitemap which are broken or duplicated and in this case you need to remove those pages from the sitemap.
A good sitemap can improve your crawlability and indexability so make sure to review your sitemap carefully and don’t include incorrect URLs. This is one of the common technical SEO problems that does not get much attention.
Viewport Tag Missing
A viewport tag is an HTML tag that makes your website scale on mobile devices properly. We have already talked about mobile friendliness and how much that is important for ranking.
A missing viewport will cause your website to load incorrectly on the mobile screen. Therefore, every page of your website should contain a viewport tag and include one if you find it missing somewhere.
Missing Canonical Tag
A canonical tag is an HTML tag that indicates the original version of the page.
Ideally, every page of your website should contain a canonical tag pointing to itself so that there is no case of duplicacy.
Non Secure Website
This SEO error is raised when your web page is on HTTP protocol, especially when there are forms on HTTP web page. A secured site is preferred and is in fact Google’s ranking factor.
So make sure you are using the HTTPS version of the website and all pages follow HTTPS protocol.
Missing Redirect From http To https
If some user is going to the HTTP version of your website then is he properly being redirected to HTTPS version? If not then it is a problem.
You don’t want your users to be the HTTP version of your website. So make sure your website is properly redirected from HTTP version to HTTPS version.
Invalid Structured Data
Although we will be talking about structured Data in advanced SEO guides, here you need to know that it is something which is used by search engine bots to make sense of what the web page is actually about.
It is a piece of code that you put on your website and there is some error in that code then structured data becomes invalid. You need to make sure that there is no invalid structured data on your website. How to do that? We will talk about it in an advanced guide.
Low Speed Pages
As you have already learnt that page speed is an important ranking factor and pages with low speed may fail to rank among top search engine results. So, keep regularly checking the page speed of all of your web pages and make sure there is none with extremely low speed. You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to do that. This is also one of the most common technical SEO problems.
Images With Missing Alt Attributes
You have already learnt that to optimise images, you need to add alt attributes to them. Your website may have lots of images on it so make sure that there is none with missing alt attributes.
Unminified and Uncompressed JavaScript and CSS Files
Javascript and CSS files give functionality and design to the website. But sometimes, their size might be so huge that they may make the website heavy and affect your page speed score. So you need to make sure that you reduce their size by minimising and compressing them. If you face such an issue then you need to talk to your developer about this.
Mixed Content
Mixed content error is raised when your HTTPS web pages contain links to HTTP pages. The solution is to replace all HTTP links of your website with HTTPS ones and make sure they are not mixed anywhere.
Links With No Anchor Text
Anchor texts provide meaning and context to the URL, it tells crawlers what the link is about and where it leads to. You need to make sure that you have proper anchor texts for all the links and none has missing anchor text.
These were some of the errors you need to watch out for. There are more errors that you may face and any good auditing tool will raise that.
Now that you covered the basics of SEO,, it is time to know how you know if your SEO campaign is progressing and more importantly how you would evaluate your SEO campaign. To know that, let’s move over to the next guide.
Search Engine Code Team is comprised of SEO experts and strategists having more than 20 years of combined experience. We keep testing and delivering knowledge of SEO for the community of SEO.
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