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The List of SEO Mistakes You Should Avoid!

SEO is a subtle preparation. A single deviation can have a severe impact on the position of your web pages! 

 

By ignorance or by clumsiness, you constellate your SEO strategy with many errors. Some are tiny and others are major; some have only a limited impact, others can seriously affect the positioning of your web pages. And sometimes a tiny oversight can have serious consequences, even lead to the exclusion of your site from search engine results. Make Sitechecker SEO audit and learn how to spot these 3 frequent SEO errors to better eradicate them!

 

 

SEO error # 1: you have not modified your robots.txt file

 

The cities have their signposts, the websites have their robots.txt file. Magic, this tells search engine robots which files and pages on your website they are supposed to crawl, and which are prohibited from circulation.

 

The SEO error here is not optimizing this file, that is, leaving it as is. By default, it allows robots to visit all pages of your website. And that’s a very bad idea.

 

For a site of ten or twenty pages, this is not decisive. Robots do their job quickly. Now imagine that your site is 10,000 pages: robots may be computer programs, but they still have limits. And they like to be cuddled. If you let them crawl all of your pages and files, they might come back to you less often and marry other sites. The ideal is therefore to configure your robots.txt to exclude everything that does not interest robots (temporary directories, pages under construction, etc.). And avoid reproducing SEO errors of this type!

 

SEO error # 2: you created lots of duplicate content (even without doing it on purpose)

 

There are two types of duplicate content: voluntary copying of content and the willingness to copy and paste. Consequently, there are therefore two common SEO errors in this area:

 

You must write a description of your company and post it on several supports: the home page of the website, professional social profiles, job boards, etc. The problem is, it takes time to write the same thing over and over. To earn it, you knowingly duplicated the home page to display it everywhere. And in doing so, you are trying to scam its robots!

 

You ask your collaborators to write content to publish on your professional blog. And you realize, after a while, that your site has been downgraded. Because some of your collaborators said that it was better to pick up pieces of content here and there rather than bother to make original.

 

The effect is the same in both cases: Google favors the oldest and / or highest-ranking content. You are therefore unlikely to pay dearly for this SEO error.

 

SEO error # 3: You Ask Search Engines Not To Index Your Website

 

It is a simple SEO fault, made possible by a point of detail of your CMS (content management system), which however can have major consequences on your natural referencing… Because this option, if it is activated, has for effect of making your website say: “No thanks, robot friends, I don't want to be indexed so as not to appear in the search engine results! ". In WordPress, for example, you will find it in the "Settings" tab of the dashboard, then "Reading". 

 

So, yes, it is specified that "some search engines may decide to index it anyway". But frankly, are you really interested in taking this risk?

 

Fortunately, this is also one of the easiest SEO mistakes to fix if there is a problem. If by pure chance or for lack of having read your Settings page sufficiently, you have checked the wrong box, you only need to uncheck it. That simple. And believe me: you will NEVER do it again.