6 SEO Mistakes To Avoid (with solutions) - HilyftDigtal

SEO is the best way of being found on search engines. In 2019, SEO is still relevant and it’s not going off anything soon. A lot of people have been doing SEO for their website but only a few are doing it right, many have been making mistakes and errors in their bid to optimize their website.

 There are many mistakes you probably have been making that you want to avoid making because they are not going to help your SEO efforts. 

Here are seven SEO mistakes to avoid when optimizing your website together with their solutions. So we are not just telling you the mistakes you’ve been making but we also proffer solutions to them.

1    1.    Slow loading website

Slow loading websites are annoying and doesn’t help your website at all in terms of its SEO. Google too does not like slow websites and this is the first SEO mistake to avoid. Research shows that about 40% of people leave a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load. 

The ideal loading time of websites is between 0 - 5 seconds. There are many website speed test tools to check whether your website loads in time or not. You can check that here in this post

A lot of these tools give you suggestions on how to make your website faster by doing certain things in your website. A lot of these suggestions bore down to reducing redirects, serving scaled images, optimizing images, minify JavaScript and html, etc.

A slow loading website reduces your conversion rate because your site visitors will exit your site when it takes long to load. It also increases your bounce rate which does not help your rankings in  search engines.

Read also: 14 top website speed test tools

2    2.    Little or no internal linking

Poor internal linking is not really good for SEO, a lot of people write contents without linking to their other contents were necessary.  Internal linking helps your contents to get crawled faster. It aids search engine bots to discover new pages in your website by following these links. 

Internal linking also passes link juice from top pages to other pages to help them get ranked on SERPs, it can also help drive traffic to other pages not receiving much traffic. You may not know, but internal linking is a powerful on page SEO technique. So you should try to link to at least one other page in your website from a page.

3    3.    Having broken links

Like they always say, broken links are a waste of link power. Google uses links to discover new pages in your website.

Make sure you check your site for broken links; too many broken links can have a negative effect on your site. If you don’t deal with them, they can sabotage your SEO efforts.

Broken links also affects our site’s user experience; you don’t want to have your visitors getting a 404 error page whenever they click a link on your page.

How to fix broken links

There are different tools you can use to find broken links on your website like the ones listed below:

1. Brokenlinkcheck.com

2. Deadlinkchecker.com

3. Drlinkcheck.com

5. Error404.atomseo.com

6. Screaming frog broken link check

7. Check my links (a chrome browser add-on)

So how do you fix broken links? Here are three ways you can fix broken links:

·         Check for spellings. Make sure the URL of the page you are linking to is spelled correctly. There might be an error in writing the URL of the page.

·         If a third party page (that is, a link to a page in another website) to which you link to is no longer available, make sure you remove the link from your page and replace it with another resource on another website.

·         If you move a page, create a 301 redirect in order to send your visitors to the new location of the page within your site.

4    4.    Not optimizing for mobile

Google also now rank your website based on its mobile responsiveness. There is an increasing number in the amount of mobile and smartphones, therefore there is a need to make sure that your website is optimized for mobile usage and if it loads properly. 

Not optimizing for mobile could make you lose a significant number of web visitors because smartphones can be easily carried about making it easier for people to access the web. Hence, Google’s insistence on the mobile responsiveness of websites.

How to optimize your site for mobile

1.    The best way to optimize your site for mobile use is to make sure that you use a theme that is mobile responsive when building your site on a content delivery system.

2.    Do not use flash to build your site. Android and ios devices do not support flash. Flash also makes your site slow.

3.    Add the viewport Meta tag. It enables browsers to resize the width of the page to the screen size of the device that the user is browsing from.

4.    Use readable font size. A font of about 14px should be ok, although you should test how they look on mobile and make some adjustments if deem fit.

How to test if your site is mobile responsive

Here, I will be listing 4 tools you can use to test and see if your site is mobile responsive.

1.    Screenfly

2.    Google mobile friendly test

3.    Responsinator

4.    Cross browser testing

5    5.    Not having a sitemap

A sitemap is a very important part of a website. There are two types of sitemaps; html and xml sitemaps. 

HTML sitemaps are sitemaps that help your website visitors find pages in your website. XML sitemaps on the other hand make it easy for search engine bots to find and crawl your pages. 

There is no need for html sitemap if your website can be easily navigated by users. The focus here is on xml sitemap because of its importance to SEO. So whether your site is new or has a lot of pages or is not structured well, you need an xml sitemap.

How to add an xml sitemap to your website

1.    First, you have to create a sitemap. There are many sites that can do this for you. Examples of these sites include:

·         xml-sitemaps.com

·         web-site-map.com

·         xmlsitemapgenerator.org

·         xsitemap.com

2.    The second step is to make sure the sitemap is verified with search engines. To verify your sitemap with Google, you can use Google search console. Make sure your sitemap is uploaded correctly before you verify it. If you use wordpress, you can add the wordpress SEO by Yoast and enable the xml sitemap functionality. You can then submit your sitemap to Google through Google search console.

6    6.    Lack of Keyword-focused content

A lot of people just get an idea for content and then immediately without any keyword research commence writing on the idea, upload it to their website and then wait to appear on the first page of Google. Sorry to burst your bubbles, ranking on the first page doesn’t work like that. This is not a good practice for SEO.

 Although you can rank by just writing naturally, the chance is significantly increased when you write contents based on researched keywords.

 Whenever you get an idea for content, your next step should be to perform a keyword research in order to select the best words and phrases to use when writing. This way, you have a chance of your content being shown to web users based on relevant keywords.

Your Turn

Now that you’ve known major SEO mistakes and how to avoid or solve them, it’s now your turn to take action and make sure you don’t make this mistakes and if you’ve been making them, you need to start correcting them right away. Make sure your website is user friendly. This will greatly boost your SEO score and then you have more chance of ranking in Google.

I love to hear from you if you have any questions on this. If you find this article helpful, share it with your friends. Sharing is caring.