Feb 8 | Categories: SEO

Four Common SEO Issues (and How to Fix Them)

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You’ve heard of search engine optimization (SEO). You want to improve the search rankings of your website. Where do you begin?

One of the first things you need to do is fix technical errors on your website: If search engine spiders can’t crawl your website, your pages aren’t indexed, and you could get penalized. Some of the most common problems have to do with speed, un-optimized pages, broken links, and mobile friendliness.

Four Common SEO Issues

When it comes to optimizing your website for search engines, you will run across several technical issues—and as the landscape of the Internet evolves, so will SEO. It can be overwhelming at first, so look at these four issues to get started.

Make Website Speed a Priority

Speed is a big factor in Google’s ranking algorithm. The longer it takes your web pages to load, the more you are hurting your website’s rankings. And it makes sense: Faster websites lead to a better experience for your users.

To improve the speed of your website, use SEO tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights to find out how your website is performing and see instructions for how to solve any problems you have.

Fix Broken Links

Broken links make both users and search engine crawlers alike divert to other websites. The solution? Fix broken links.

Internal links that lead to 404 errors should be 301 redirected, and broken external links should be removed or updated.

Build with Mobile-Friendliness in Mind

Search engines have started ranking websites based on their mobile versions, so it’s important that your website is mobile-friendly.

Tools such as Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test audit your website and suggest ways to make it more mobile-friendly—such as having readable typeface and buttons that users can browse comfortably on mobile devices. Additionally, a focus on responsive design can help guide your development team’s design choices.

Optimize Your Images

Images bring you traffic from search engines and image-based social networks, so if your images are optimized, you’re more likely to get traffic. Make sure that the images on your website have alt tags (HTML attributes that describe the image in text form) and that none of them are broken.

To Put It Simply: Build a Good Website

The biggest part of creating a website that works well for users and ranks high on search engine results pages? Building a website that works. Nothing else matters if technical and on-page issues stop users and web crawlers alike from accessing your website.

By solving these four problems, continuing to develop SEO best practices, and fixing technical issues as they arise, you put your website and business on the path to more digital traffic.