15 SEO Mistakes Nearly Every Website Makes
These fifteen findings keep coming up in test reports, none of which are hard to fix and most of them cost less than half an hour.
- 1The same title on many pages – “Start page” or the company name on each subpage. Google cannot keep the pages apart and finds itself a text.
- 2No meta description – Google And then you put together a snippet of the page, often in the middle of a sentence, and that doesn't affect the ranking, it does affect the click-through rate.
- 3Several H1 or none at all – The main headline says what the page is about: if it is missing or there are several, this signal is missing.
- 4Images without alternative text – Screen readers read it out, search engines evaluate it. In purely decorative images, an empty alt attribute belongs - not none at all.
- 5Page under www and without www accessible – For search engines, that's two websites competing for the same rankings. A redirect solves it.
- 6No Canonical – As soon as parameters are attached to addresses – campaigns, filters, sorting – any number of versions of the same page is created.
- 7Images much larger than displayed – A photo with a width of 4000 pixels in a 600 pixel wide frame transmits about forty times the necessary data.
- 8No HTTPS or mixed content – An encrypted page that downloads images or scripts unencrypted shows a warning in the browser.
- 9Internal links on forwardings – Each detour costs loading time. In your own navigation, no link should first run over a 301.
- 10Missing or wrong robots.txt – A disallow that is too broad accidentally blocks half the website from the index.
- 11No sitemap or an obsolete – Leaving addresses that have already delivered 404 in the sitemap is worse than no sitemap at all.
- 12Thin content – Pages with three sets rarely rank. Either expand or merge with a stronger page.
- 13No legal notice or incomplete – In Germany, mandatory according to § 5 DDG – and a trust signal that search engines also evaluate.
- 14Google Fonts of Google Loaded – The IP address of your visitors flows to Google, without consent. The Munich Regional Court has awarded damages for this.
- 15No structured data – Without structured data, Google sees that information is on the page, but cannot reliably identify it as opening hours or a price.
Suitable tools
Further in SEO
- What is a Sitemap? – A list of your addresses for search engines – what it is good for and what belongs in it.
- Create title and meta description correctly – The two lines that decide the click – with the lengths that matter.
- SEO for Local Businesses – If your customers come from the area, different things count than with an online shop.