NutzBoltz is a data-driven growth agency, one of the services we provide our customers is SEO. We encounter multiple technical SEO mistakes weekly when working on our SEO projects. In this article, we’d like to share five of the most common technical SEO mistakes we encounter weekly. Make sure to read the article's end for a special offer!
The hierarchy of headings in an HTML document is as follows: h6 is the lowest level heading, h1 - the highest priority one, while all other headings have intermediary importance - the lower the number, the higher the importance. Thus, h2 headings could be viewed as the main sections of the article, lower level headings - as hierarchically organized subsections, while the h1 tag - as the title of the article. Headings are styled accordingly so that users visually determine their relative importance - the h1 tag is typically formatted using the biggest font size.
Duplicate h1 headings don’t come with penalties. But identical headings on pages with different content imply that the headings don’t uniquely describe the specific content on each page.
Well-written meta descriptions are simply vital for your site given that they briefly announce the content that the visitor is expected to find here. For potential visitors, it is a chance to check whether the content of the page is of relevance. One way is by checking whether the keywords used by them to query the web appear in this short extract (keywords typically appear in bold).
Given all these, a meta description is an important focus area in SEO. One could achieve a high ranking page by investing massive effort in optimizing the site but if the meta-description looks unintelligible, unprofessional, or irrelevant, it will prevent users from accessing the page, which would impact the traffic.
If a meta description is completely lacking, search engines would auto-complete it, however, this is hit-and-miss, with the latter occurring more often. As part of this process, search engines might just pick the first 160 characters from your page - this could be the navigation menu or other irrelevant text. Consequently, you will lose control over what potential visitors see while browsing their query results. Given how much competition there is for user attention, this is simply unaffordable.
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Google Search Documentation says that a good user experience is a ranking factor. And when it comes to user experience, speed matters. A consumer study shows that the stress response to delays in mobile speed are similar to that of watching a horror movie or solving a mathematical problem, and greater than waiting in a checkout line at a retail store.
As a site begins to load, there's a period of time where users wait for content to appear. Until this happens, there's no user experience to speak of. This lack of an experience is fleeting on fast connections. On slower connections, however, users are forced to wait. Users may experience more problems as page resources slowly trickle in.
Google's SEO Starter Guide contains a recommendation to avoid having duplicate or near-duplicate versions of your content across your site.
While most duplicate content problems are related to the same content on different pages, having duplicate content within the same page is also a problem because it doesn't add value to the user. Remember how the table of content of any book looks like. Have you ever seen the same headlines there? No. Apply the same logic to headings on your page.
Internal links help users and search engines to navigate through the website. Internal links point the search engine to important pages within your website while giving them weight. If the page does not refer to other pages of your website, it does not provide any links to other pages, thus ignoring the accumulated weight.