5 Technical Issues That Could Be Damaging Your Website

Regardless of the shape or size of your business, you must have a website to match. This will act as a 24/7 storefront for your company, allowing customers to purchase your products no matter the date or time. Even brick and mortar stores need this online presence, so customers can find and contact them. However, simply having a site isn’t enough - You need an effective one. If you want to increase website traffic, here are five technical issues that you must fix.  

Posting The Same Content

Defined as content within a domain that is appreciably similar or completely matches other content, duplicate content is an incredibly common SEO issue. Although there isn’t necessarily a penalty for this mistake, it’s not one that you can simply ignore. This is because unique content tends to rank much higher in search engines, as it is seen as more valuable. The solution to this issue is, thankfully, incredibly simple. All you need to do is avoid duplicate content at all costs.

Use An Outdated Sitemap

Search engines love a sitemap. This is because they help them to understand the structure of your website, as well as discover links for crawling. The trouble is, as a site matures, many changes might be introduced. Some websites even undergo and complete restructuring. This would leave your sitemap outdated and irrelevant, which could harm your ranking. To avoid this, you could create a new sitemap or use a sitemap generator that updates as changes are made.

Overlooking The Robots.txt File

When a site is under renovation or going through website migration, webmasters tend to prevent the site from being indexed. They do this by making modifications to the robots.txt file, preventing search engines from crawling the incomplete website. Once the renovations have been completed and the website is ready, the changes to that file must be reversed. If you fail to do this, then you’ll stop the new site from being indexed so that you won’t show up in search results.

Stuffing Content With Keywords

Keyword stuffing is a practice where you stuff a piece of content with target keywords. The intention of this is to rank higher in search results for that keyword. Unfortunately, search engines tend to identify pages with unusually high numbers of keywords as spammy. Because of this, they prevent those web pages from ranking in results. Although there are no hard and fast rules regarding keyword stuffing, you should keep numbers low so that content sounds natural.

Neglecting The Mobile Users

Although the internet used to only be accessible through clunky desktop computers, nowadays you can get online with even the smallest of devices. In fact, most people search the web using phones and tablets, instead of larger devices. If your website offers a poor experience for those using mobile technology, therefore your site’s bounce rate is going to spike. You must make sure that your website is optimized for devices of all sizes or you’ll risk alienating certain users.

To increase your website traffic and ranking, make sure that you avoid the technical issues listed above.