Marketing your website can be tough, especially if you're not a professional web designer.
First, you have to get your website optimized around the right keywords,
then you have to get other websites to link back to you, and finally, you have to make sure your
website doesn't have any errors that could stop it from getting found and crawled by search engines.
Hi, I’m Marina, and I share simple tutorials for non-techie entrepreneurs
as a non-techie entrepreneur. The last part of the process is known as technical SEO,
and although there are many problems you can face with a website,
in this video we'll go over the most common website issues and how to troubleshoot them.
Technical SEO Explained
For your website to be indexed in a search engine database,
your website needs to be found and crawled by a search engine spider or bot.
These bots then go through your website and analyze and store the information.
If a website can't be crawled, that page or website can' be added into the database. If this
happens, your website won't show up when someone searches for the product or service you sell.
Website Issue #1 - No SSL Installed
Have you ever come across a website that displays the warning of not being secure?
This is what happens when the website doesn't have something called an SSL certificate installed.
A website can rank without one of these certificates,
but it can be at a disadvantage if other websites in your niche have one installed.
Having an SSL certificate also gives the user more trust in your website,
and having the not being secure message disappear is worth the installation costs alone.
Most hosting providers will install an SSL certificate for free
or for a small charge. If your website doesn't have one (check for the padlock
sign in the URL bar) contact your host and they'll be able to help you install one.
Website Issue #2 - Website Crawl Issues
Each website is allocated a "crawl budget". What this means is that a website will be allocated
a time for the bots to crawl before it stops and comes back at another date.
Your crawl budget is determined by the size of your website.
Bigger websites have bigger crawl budgets.
The reason why your crawl budget is important is because if you have pages
on your website that produce errors, then you're wasting this budget. The
most common errors that you're likely to come across are 404 errors and 301 errors.
A 404 error is when a page you once had no longer exists on your website,
and you're linking to it from another page on your website. This error can also be caused
when an external website links to your website and that page no longer exists.
Depending on how the error is being caused will depend on how you troubleshoot the issue,
but generally, if your website is linking to a dead page you can remove the link to it. If
another website which you have no control of is linking to it, you can do a 301 redirect.
A 301 redirect points from your dead page to a new page on your website. I'll show
you exactly how to add 301 redirects in Wix in my next video, so stay tuned for that.
Website Issue #3 - Duplicate Content
Duplicate content often occurs when people build landing pages for their services and only change
up a few of their keywords. For example, imagine you sold cleaning services in Ottawa and Quebec.
If you had two pages on your website targeting cleaning services in both locations
and kept the content the same but changed the location keywords,
that would lead to duplicate content issues.
If you have pages on your website like this, you'll need to rewrite the content
to make sure your website doesn't get penalized for duplicate content issues.
You should also make sure to fix any duplication in the title
and meta descriptions because this can throw up other errors which will need to be fixed.
Website Issue #4 - Orphan Pages
Orphan pages are pages that don't have any internal links pointing at them.
The reason why search engines don't like them is because they're often used by spammers
to capture traffic which may not have anything to do with the website.
Orphan pages make your website less trustworthy and waste your crawl budget.
To troubleshoot the orphan page error you have two options: either delete the page,
or, if the page is important, you can link to it from other pages on your website.
You can add these pages to your header, footer or blog.
The more you link to a page, the more important it is in the eyes of Google.
Website Issue #5 - Thin Website Content
Websites with more content tend to rank better on search engines.
For this reason alone, you should be looking to create the best content possible for your readers.
Thin content can get your website punished in search and, if your website has pages and pages
of content with word counts less than 500 words, your website could be punished too.
You once again have two options with thin content: either you can add to it or delete it from your
website if the post has no value. Writing up more content for your blog can take time,
so one easy fix is to look at some of the posts on your website
to see if they can be combined. This adds to the word count, improves the user experience,
and gets rid of any thin content issues that you may be penalized for.
Website Issue #6 - Non-Responsive Websites
In this day and age, websites should work on a variety of devices.
Failing to do so can create a bad user experience for your visitors
and the major search engines, such as Google, can punish you for this.
To see if your website has any mobile issues you can test it by using your phone,
tablet, laptop and desktop. If the website doesn't display correctly on any of these devices,
you'll need to troubleshoot any issues you see.
If your website is very old and doesn't work at all on different mobile devices, then you should
really think about getting a new website made. If you want to learn more about the first steps
you need to take to design a website, in a way that makes sense for a total beginner,
check out my FREE Epic Website Challenge, which I linked to in the description box below.
If you enjoyed this video, subscribe and hit the bell for new videos every week
on how to navigate the tech side of online business with ease. For more, check out these
two videos for additional website creation tips and tricks, and I'll see you in the next one.