On-Site SEO Technical Issues
By 2020, several companies are planning to spend around 79 billion US dollars on SEO. Considering the multiple tasks and technical issues that business owners would encounter in the future, this amount seems just right.
There are possible ways to save more money on SEO, though—that is, diagnose technical issues. Doing so will ultimately avoid the loss of clients and sustain business growth. The first step is to be knowledgeable about these technical matters. Here are four typical on-site SEO technical issues you should keep in mind.
Table of Contents
#1. Speed Issues
Google had first turned a page’s loading time or “speed” as one of the factors that influence Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) ranking in 2010. Since then, most slow loading web pages and designs have been penalized by most search engines. What’s worse, a slow page’s loading time can result in poor user experience and higher site’s operational costs.
What happens when a site is slow? If your server response time is more than three seconds, Google would typically lessen the number of web spiders or crawlers (also referred to as “web robots” or “web crawlers”).
These web crawlers are scripted programs that browse the web in a methodical and automated way. If there are fewer web crawlers sent to your site, fewer pages get indexed in turn.
There are many ways you can do to solve speed issues, as follows:
- Optimize images on your web page
- Get rid of unused plugins
- Avoid redirects
- Fix leverage browser caching
- Enable compression
- Minify resources like HTML, CSS and JS code
Other than that, you can rely on speed tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom Website Speed Test, YSlow, WebPageTest, and other tools.
There’s a tendency that you’d made a wrong approach in your SEO strategy, as well. That happens, though. Like what Robert Arnott once said, “In investing, what is comfortable is rarely profitable.” Put simply, retry again. There is always room for improvement.
If you need help and you’re around Perth, specialists at SEO Perth Experts can carry out an initial full-scale analysis of your SEO landscape. Asking help from experts can aid you in getting the best ROI.
#2. Low Text-to-HTML Ratio
A low text-to-HTML ratio can indicate problems related to codes, hidden texts, excessive Flash, inline styling, or Javascript. When technical issues related to these technical terms occur, they would generally slow down your site.
The solutions for these technical issues can vary from simple to complex. For easy ways out, here are some ways you can do yourself:
- Speed analyzer (e.g., Google’s PageSpeed Insights) to determine speed problems on your website
- Add apt on-page text where needed
- Move inline scripts to split up files
- Remove unnecessary codes
If you don’t know how to deal with these things, especially with programming languages like JavaScript, it’s better for you to call a professional.
#3. Duplicate Content
Don’t worry, this doesn’t only happen to your site. It’s very common that almost 29% of the websites have been duplicating or had duplicated content, according to Raventools. Even Google is now on the action and has been warning web owners of its penalty for duplicate content.
Copied content or plagiarism is the top reason why duplicate content takes place. It’s either your writers are getting lazy, or you’re just into this stuff. However, there are many plagiarism checkers out there that can scan your outputs. It’s best to avoid plagiarizing and be original.
Apart from plagiarism, there are other reasons why duplicate content may take place, like:
- Your site’s products appear on various versions, but of the same URL
- On the main page, printer-only web pages have been repeating content
- On an international site, one content is written or appeared in multiple languages
Each of this issue can be worked out respectively with:
- If your site’s products appear on various versions but of the same URL, employ proper Proper Rel=Canonical tag
- If printer-only web pages have been repeating content on your main page, use the proper configuration
- If one similar content is in different languages in one international site, use proper implementation of hreflang tags
Considering that the Internet is a platform where shared information exists, why is duplicate content a big thing in SEO? It’s because it can confound engine crawlers, not to mention that it can also misinform your target audience. Duplicate contents can also affect your rankings on SERPs.
#4. Broken Links
Speaking of search crawlers, if they and other users think you have high-quality content, that can indicate that your site has both good internal and external links. However, these once-great links can end up becoming broken links over time, which, in turn, alter the quality of your content. This is pretty common if your site has hundreds of pages.
In addition to lower quality content, broken links could also generate poor user experience. Both factors can negatively impact your page’s authority and ranking. It could toss your crawl budget away. If search bots identify several broken links, chances are they would turn to other sites. If this happens, your site’s crucial pages will be un-indexed and un-crawled.
To prevent broken links from happening, run regular audits. There are several tools that you could use these days, such as Google Search Console or Link Explorer. Make sure that once you diagnose the broken links, replace them with the correct links or new pages.
Takeaway
There are more technical issues you could encounter, especially if you’re expecting global audiences. However, all these technical issues can be prevented if you would always keep an eye on them. So, in a nutshell, regular monitoring is the key.
