Search Engine Optimization is an essential aspect in making sure that websites obtain online visibility and reach the top of the search engine results page. Over the years, search engines like Google have developed and improved their algorithms. This has pushed many SEO experts, website owners, and creative solutions services to publish contents of good quality that attract visitors and create traffic on their website.
However, high-quality content is useless if the website is encountering technical and structural problems. That’s why, it is important to know what these problems are, their causes, and eventually, how to fix them.
Going Mobile
Nowadays, people are relying more on their mobile phones than their laptops and desktops. One of the most common problems in websites is compatibility to the mobile platform. If the website is not optimized for mobile usage, most likely, visitors will just click away and increase your bounce rate.
To fix this, you can use a responsive website design that allows your website to be compatible with any mobile device. This will not only provide a better experience for visitors but also improves secondary search signals that search engines consider for site ranking like the duration and frequency of visits, number of visitors, and bounce rates.
Navigation and Load Time
Visitors click away if the website loads slowly or if the website navigation is not user-friendly. It can be an unpleasant experience when a user cannot jump from one page to another when visiting your website. This increases your bounce rate and can possibly decrease your website visits. This can also lead to landing at the lower ranks of the search engine page results.
To avoid this, you can speed-test your website and check the website navigation. You have to make sure that it loads fast and it is user-friendly. That is, users can move from page to page without having to wait long for it to load or having to take too many clicks to get to where they want to be on your website. You can also follow navigation standards, use labels and lessen the number of items in the navigation, and lastly use the right links.
404 Errors
At some point, your website has been migrated or will be migrated to a different URL. This can cause problems since there is a possibility that the links will not properly connect to the new site, thus visitors see 404 errors or poor redirects.
Fixing this includes locating the 404 errors on your website and have instead 301 redirects from the previous page to the new ones. This fix will make the users and the search engines like Google be directed to the correct and updated pages of your website.
Puzzling URLs
When a new content is added to a website, blog platforms and content management systems have a tendency to create confusing URLs. You may see irrelevant characters in a page’s URL. This may not be very critical however, this can affect the website’s credibility and lower down the site’s ranking in the search engine results page.
Always be attentive to details and make sure that URLs are clean and keywords are included to provide information not just for visitors but for search engines. Remember that the success of your SEO efforts is not only reliant on producing quality content but also on making sure that the common problems mentioned above are addressed and fixed.