Sometimes small mistakes keep happening, because of which you keep on incurring losses. If the credit card bill was paid delayed for a day, then the Cibil Score went into the pit. The good thing is that the bankers keep calling you, so you do everything correctly. But what about the SEO of your website, the misconceptions that are happening there will continue to happen. In this blog, we will list 20 mistakes you may be knowingly or unknowingly making in your SEO campaign, which may harm your website because google does not call you for these mistakes like bankers or your SEO company.
What are the common SEO mistakes to be avoided?
In the blog, we look at the 20 worst SEO mistakes. Here we are making a list of content marketers’ most common SEO mistakes and looking for their solution in 2023.
Mistake 1: Poor use of the Robots.txt file
The Robots.txt file is an important file followed by both Google and Bing. Using Robots.txt, you can prevent search engines from crawling a specific file or folder. You can also tell the address of your sitemap file. If you need to learn more about this file, applying the wrong rule in any file can also drown your website’s traffic and reduce website SEO ranking. That’s why there is a need to use only the proper rules inside this file. What are the things to be kept in mind while setup robots.txt? How to fix this file correctly? We have talked about this in detail in this post.
Mistake 2: Wrong Setup of sitemap.xml
Sitemap.xml, which is an important file. The site and its sitemap are submitted to the Google search console, and it keeps telling Google that this URL is in the website, so it is helpful to index it. But where does the problem come when new URLs are not automatically added to this sitemap of your website, or do you need to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console? We have covered all the common issues of sitemaps in detail in this article.
Mistake 3: Poor use of alt attribute text
Alt text is the text used with images that tells blind and disabled users about the image ideas. Earlier search engines used to understand this text and image. But today, both Google and Bing have technologies that can understand the content of the picture. There is a photo of a horse eating grass in your painting by a famous artist, both of which can be understood by the search engine, but still, it uses alt text for confirmation. Search engine systems compare the alt text to their image analysis to see if their information is correct or not, and when you help the search engine by using valid alt text, they give you a good SEO rank and traffic. But when you fill this with the keyword, you get nothing. How should alt text be appropriately used? This article has covered everything in detail on how to write good alt text for the image tag and optimize it.
Canonical tags solve the issue of duplicate content on your website and give you the power to index and rank the correct pages. But canonical tags are not giving instructions, and It is not that whatever garbage tag you put, Google will accept them. That’s why both understanding and implementing canonical tags are critical. We have detailed posts above Canonical tags. I have explained the theory in a fun way and so enjoyed it.
Mistake 5: Pages not accessible without javascript
JavaScript and Google’s relationship is like Tom and Jerry’s. They don’t even make each other and can’t live without each other. If your website is based on JavaScript or heavily uses JavaScript, you should see if your website is loading without JavaScript. And how do you do that? You can disable JavaScript manually in Chrome browser, but that process is too long. Alternatively, You can install the chrome extension. Its name is a web developer and after installing it, open any website you want to test. Click on the Web-Developer extension icon from your browser’s toolbar, and then click on Disable JavaScript. Refresh the page, and now you will see your website. Now, if your website is not loading correctly, the text is disappearing, Images are disappearing, or any critical information is missing, it is a problem for you. It would be best to meet your web developer and tell them that the website should open properly, even after JavaScript is disabled on a standard browser. A little tweaking in the website redesign saves lots of SEO faults.
Mistake 6: Indexing every page
This is the typical new bee mistake. Every page of your website does not need to be indexed. There is no need to index your privacy page or the page like terms and conditions, refund policy etc., even if these pages don’t index, and it will work. These pages should be outside of the sitemap. It would be best if you only tried to index essential pages with value. Now archive pages with search pages, tag pages of your site and many unplanned categories to protect your website’s index bloated and reduce the website’s health. In this, only those pages are included with a value that is helpful for the audience and useful for you in digital content production.
Mistake 7: Poor redirection setup
Redirection of your website pages should be minimum. It will increase the website’s click depth and slow site speed. Suppose a page of your website https://sample.com/page1, and you give a link to this page from the home page on https://www.sample.com/page1, but you need to use WWW everywhere on the website. This WWW page will be redirected to a non-www page for many users. But in the backend, the user is getting redirected from one URL to another without any reason. Every URL can be accessed in four ways. Therefore, at the time of internal links, you have to pay attention to which URL patterns you are using and then use the same URL pattern everywhere, so there are no useless directions.
Mistake 8: Spelling and grammar errors
It seems like a small thing, but if your website has spelling and grammar errors, then the average audience and the search engine will have problems understanding your content. It may be misinterpreted, and the meaning will be disastrous. The search engine needs to understand your content to be ranked appropriately and indexed correctly. Therefore, pay attention to spelling and grammar in whatever content you publish on your pages. Check it out thoroughly. In the SEO community, misspellings can be seen as a low-quality signal and may harm your site.
Mistake 9: Poor ratio of valid and excluded pages
Go to Google Search Console’s coverage report and see how many of your pages are correct and how many are excluded. If your excluded URLs are more than valid ones, then there is a problem with your website’s structure and content. There can be many reasons for excluded URLs. Discovered, currently not indexed crawled, now not indexed canonical issue may be soft 404 issue and so on. You will have to identify all these issues and solve them individually. We have a whole report on google search console that can help you understand these issues. And apart from this, there are dedicated posts on Canonical and Discover that are currently not indexed, crawled, now not indexed, soft 404 and fix all these issues for SEO cannibalization.
Mistake 10: Outdated content
Is there content older than a year on your website? If it is Evergreen-type content, then it is a different matter. Otherwise, see how you can refresh and add new updates to this content. It can add further information and correct the page’s value because google also gives importance to freshness.
Mistake 11: Creating content without a plan
In any website, pages and content are planned with a proper strategy around the keywords you want to rank. If your website still needs to have this strategic plan and you are just writing a blog post. You must post the article that is being written to get its benefit. Otherwise, it has no use. Do a proper keyword search, create a content calendar, create content with an adequate plan and only then proceed without misspelt keywords.
Mistake 12: Publishing content without a plan
It linked with the previous point, and a question is often asked: Should we submit the sitemap after publishing our content repeatedly? This problem mainly occurs in Google Search Console when you publish content at an unplanned time. Whether a blog post or an article, it should be fixed on which day and time to publish. If you are going to do seven posts in a week, then wait to do seven posts in three days. Do not do seven posts in two days, but do one post in seven days and that too at the same time so that the Google bot can understand your pattern and crawl it accordingly.
Mistake 13: Wrong internal link strategy
Internal links are powerful and form the structure of your website. It tells the search engines which pages are essential and which page rank you get from the external links and distributes them properly among all the pages. We have a dedicated article about making the right strategy for internal links.
Mistake 14: Poor use of schema data
A few years ago, when letters were sent, many people used to write at the bottom of it, “Written a little and understood a lot“. Schema Data is also a similar element. In this, you can tell Google in very few words. It can give a lot of information about your site. Schema data works to explain the content of your website to search engines in accessible language and can also get your site a place in rich snippets. There are many types of schema data, and then every kind of schema data has its requirements. But don’t worry. We have a lot of videos on schema data. What are Schema data? How many types are there? How are they made? Where is it installed on the website, and how is it installed? We have answered so many questions in different individual videos. You have to see and implement the limit.
Mistake 15: Poor browser compatibility
There is a line in Indian Tulsidas ji’s couplet that needs to know in which form Narayan can be found. This Means God can meet you in any form at any place. The user can also come from any browser on top of your website. You may be a Chrome devotee, a Firefox revolutionary or an Opera dude. But if someone visiting your website is using another browser, what would you say? You have not refused, have you? Test your website in as many browsers as possible so that if your website creates some issues on a particular browser, you can catch and fix those SEO website errors.
Mistake 16: Poor use of the hreflang tag
Hreflang tag helps the search engine to understand the language and target region of your page and its content. Suppose your website has text in different languages and contents in other languages. So, this tag becomes very important. Based on the hreflang tag of your page, Google will be able to understand which language and region people should be shown on this page of yours. We covered this tag in another post on international SEO. Everyone can see and understand by looking at it.
Mistake 17: Broken links
Broken links need to be updated. With time, you keep updating the content on your website. Keep publishing fresh content. Old content keeps getting removed, and new content keeps replacing it. It is very usual and reasonable. Still, the problem occurs when your old pages have backlinks with external or internal links are found. It is not corrected, due to which the benefit of these backlinks stops, and you start getting 404 errors on your website. To avoid such a situation, you should analyze the broken links on your website. So that whatever pages are linked from outside, you redirect those URLs to new URLs, and you have taken the internal links you created so that you can correct them automatically and link with good pages, which boosts the ranking.
Mistake 18: Incorrect keyword research
Keyword research is an essential step. This is the step of the SEO Campaign which will decide that you will get traffic to your website from the SEO Campaign. How much business will it convert and give you? How much revenue will you generate? There will be so many benefits. The process of Keyword research is long and has many steps and factors. Here are the detailed steps for finding the perfect keyword.
Mistake 19: No keyword intent research
Search keyword intent can be divided into three categories; Navigational, Informational and Commercial. If a website address is searched by searching a keyword, it will be called navigational. If the user uses it for searching the information, it will be called information; and if the keyword focuses on buying a product or a service, it will be called commercial. What do you want to achieve with your SEO campaign? If you are doing keyword research in the old style, you might not focus on something other than keyword intent. Keyword intent research is critical because only after that can it be known what kind of traffic you will get when your website ranks. If you are searching for keywords properly in a modern way, then intent research is also a part of your process. But if you are following the outdated method, stop once and focus on your keyword intent. You should include them in your research as well.
Mistake 20: No data analysis
Whatever results do you get in SEO activities, which pages are performing better? Which pages are working poorly? It is essential to know the reasons for both. Its correction will be possible when you analyze your data, whether you work on a client’s website or your website. It is essential to analyze the data at the right time, at the proper interval, once a month, once a week, and act on it. If any mistake happens, let it be; if anything happens well, implement it on all pages. Google has its tool google analytics which helps you in this analysis. We’ll share a detailed post on GA4 very soon.
All these 20 points must be checked on your site and told honestly. How many of these mistakes have you been making till now been ignored? You will know these points, but sometimes those actively involved in a project need to remember all these things, so check these points.