Technical SEO Issues And Solving Them

It’s normal to make Technical SEO mistakes with your website.

Even experts make mistakes.

So, in this post we will learn:

• Where people potential go wrong with Technical SEO
• How to fix these mistakes

Because fixing these solutions could help grow your organic traffic.

Let’s dive right in.

Technical SEO Importance

Technical SEO is done when building your website.

It involves things like:

• One H1 on each page
• Main pages linking to and from the main navigation
• Alt attributes on all images
• Clean URLs with no dynamic characters
• Fast page load times

These are simple but often overlooked Technical SEO details.

For example, making certain technical changes can boost your organic traffic growth but only if ongoing effort is made. 

You can start by looking at everything you’ve done so far.

Then ask questions about your strategy:

• Are changes being made once and forgotten?
• Are technical efforts ongoing?
• What makes your best content successful?

Now audit your website to find:

• Potential problems
• Growth opportunities

Technical SEO Problems And Solutions

Broken Links, Redirects & 404 Pages

Visiting a URL that doesn’t exist on a website should redirect you to a 404 page.

This tells Google, the page doesn’t exist so don’t crawl it.

But if Google crawls URLs meant to have 404 redirects, it wastes time that could be spent crawling important pages.

For example, if pages mean to be 404 pages don’t have 404 server responses and instead have 200 responses.

This tells Google to crawl and index the pages that don’t have content.

Another issue is a lot of links could be pointing to these incorrect URLs.

As a result, passing PageRank to that page instead of directing it to the correct URL or a relevant page.

What to do

Start by removing 301 redirects pointing to these pages.

So, if incorrect URLs don’t have 301 redirects to the right page, it goes to a 404 and tells Google not to index it.

Next, remove the pages causing the issue so it goes to a 404 page and isn’t treated as a page on your website.

Then, set up 301 redirects for incorrect URLs with backlinks so they point to relevant or correct URLs.

Why?

Google will index less pages and Googlebot will crawl important pages more frequently, not large volumes of URLs less frequently.

And, all the PageRank goes to the content you want to rank and the new links give it a boost.

Blog Pagination

One thing that affects blog content websites is pagination.

Meaning the way pages are linked in blogs.

When Google crawls websites to find content, it follows links on webpages until it finds the page it’s looking for.

And when a Googlebot, or other search bots, follow a link, it goes one level deeper in a website’s architecture.

Going deeper means search engines see the web page as less authoritative and less likely to be crawled.

Sometimes, pages deep in the architecture aren’t crawled at all. 

What to do

Design the blog’s pagination navigation that helps Google crawl multiple pages at a time.

This will bring your blog posts higher in the website architecture.

Why?

Even republishing old content on your blog can push it higher in the architecture and boost rankings.

And bringing your blog posts higher in the website architecture will give it a ranking boost.

It’s simple and small change but adds a lot of value.

Blog Schema Markup

Not using Schema.org markup on your blog’s content means Google can’t understand elements of your web pages.

Schema.org markup helps search engines understand the type of content on your webpages.

What to do

Start by marking up the code of your blog posts to tell Google:

• It’s a blog post
• The blog post’s featured image
• The date and time it was published
• The article’s headline
• The article’s body content
• The article’s category
• Who it’s published by
• The name of the post’s author
• The author’s page URL
• The author image
• The article’s brief description

Check this using Google’s structured markup tool by:

• Clicking on Fetch URL
• Enter a URL for one of your blog posts
• Then click Fetch and Validate

This shows all the data in the BlogPosting dropdown.

Why?

This helps Google understand your content and how to display it.

Also helping customise search result snippets and results in Google’s Knowledge Graph.

Custom H1 & Topic Intros on Pages

Some individual topic pages aren’t different or unique from each other.

This makes it difficult convincing Google why to rank these pages in the search engines.

What to do

Instead of each blog topic pages having a generic page heading that doesn’t explain what it’s about.

Use a custom H1 relevant to the topic and short custom descriptions for the topic.

If you can, add a topics page to improve the blog’s architecture.

Why?

Don’t make each blog topic page the same, instead give them unique content to help rank in the search engines.

HREFLANG Tags

HREFLANG tags tell Google about a page’s alternative versions in different countries/languages.

For example, these tags can be used to tell Google about a Spanish alternative to your homepage.

Similar to canonical tags that show a page’s duplicate version.

But helping Google index local content in local search engines easily.

What to do

HREFLANG tags can be all over the place and implemented incorrectly.

This doesn’t help international SEO efforts.

Set these tags up for all core pages with country-specific variations like product pages, homepage, etc.

Why?

This helps create a link between your website’s main site page and your international domains.

Making your website more trustworthy and improving search engines’ crawlability.

Language Meta Tags

Language meta tags are similar to HREFLANG tags, meaning they tell search engines the language of your content.

These tags tell search engines which country’s search engine to index your web pages on.

And Bing uses a lot of language meta tags. 

What to do

If you’ve never had any language meta tags on any of your websites or international sites.

Now is the time to set up language meta tags on each page, where it’s needed.

Why?

Doing this might not give you a lot of traffic but it helps search engines better crawl, index, and rank local content.

XML Sitemap

On your website, you will have content used to mainly generate leads, like ebooks, templates, webinars, etc.

And this content needs to rank well in the search engines.

But you don’t have a XML sitemap set up for these domains?

What to do

Audit these pages and create an XML sitemap for this content and submit it to Google.

Why?

Doing this helps Google find new content that you’ve published, to get it ranking quicker.

Conclusion

I’ll keep it simple.

Don’t overlook technical SEO.

Now it’s over to you.

What technical SEO issues have you had?

How have you managed to solve them?

Did this post help? If so, how?

Let me know in the comment section below.