Optimizing a website involves more than just keywords, linking strategies, and meta tags. An often-overlooked but critical aspect for SEO success is identifying the technical problems that often keep sites from performing to their full potential.
Solving technical SEO issues may seem like a job for programmers, web developers and other assorted tech wizards. But if you’re a site owner, you should be aware of them and how to fix them. Here are a few of the most common SEO problems and what you can do about them:
Duplicate URLs
If your site is like most, each page has several different URLs pointing to it. Why does this matter? Duplicate URLs can negatively affect your traffic and search engine rank. For example, if one page of content has three separate URLs associated with it, the search engines will count this one page as three separate pages. This, in turn, divides all links going to the page, which dilutes the SEO power of that page.
How to solve: URL canonicalization, or normalization, is the process of removing duplicate URLs. Site crawl tools, such as Google's Googlebot, usually reveal the duplicates, after which you can redirect the page to point to the correct URL. These tools will also identify any internal links that point to the duplicate URL, allowing you to edit those as well.
Outdated Sitemaps
Search engines use sitemaps to determine which pages on your site are important. They aren’t the only source of information, but they do matter to the web bots crawling your site. Old or outdated sitemap URLs aren’t doing you any favors. If you haven’t updated them recently, you should do so.
How to solve: Perform a sitemap audit to uncover any issues. Have your developers add URLs for all new pages and fix or remove broken links. Then, consider automating future updates to your sitemap.
Too Many Product Pages/URLs
While designing a site to have one page per product (with each page optimized around the appropriate keywords) is generally a good thing, having too many URLs associated with a product is not. For example, if you offer a product that comes in different sizes, colors or styles, having a separate URL for each variation can dilute the SEO value of your main product page.
How to solve: Combine all variations into one page URL, so that page can better rank for the keyword around which it’s optimized.
Stacked Redirects
Page redirects are often a necessity. But having too many redirects per page is a sure way to lose valuable link juice. A page that redirects through several different pages drags down your site and makes it difficult for the search engines to index your pages. Sometimes, it can even result in the final page losing 100% of its potential link value.
How to solve: Stacked redirects aren’t always easy to detect. It's important to check your page headers manually and remove any stacked redirects to increase your ranking and speed up your site’s performance.
SEO technical problems can really drag your site down. Take a look at these common issues and find out which ones you need to address. These are quick fixes that can make a big difference!
