8 Warning Signs Your Website Is Not SEO-friendly

Website optimization is a set of ways and measures to bring the цуиsite to the leading positions in SERP. Most users use Google to find answers to their questions. The query entered is analyzed by the search engine, giving pages with answers as close to the context as possible. But if your website isn’t SEO friendly, it unlikely will be at the top of SERP.

I have gathered 8 warning signs your website isn’t SEO friendly that doesn’t allow you to rank high.

Non-optimized images

Images and photos are an essential part of the website content. There are a lot of websites where images are not optimized according to SEO. By and large, many website owners meaningfully ignore this.

Although alt and title attributes are not a mandatory part of the tag img, their presence is perceived positively by search engines. If you are not lazy and correctly spelled attribute alt, you can get more traffic from searches for images.

It is also necessary to optimize images. If you do not optimize the size of images, the page will weigh too much, reducing the loading speed.

So, your website can`t be considered SEO-friendly if images are not optimized and have no alt and title.

Errors in adaptive layout

Today mobile traffic outperforms desktop. Mistakes in the layout for tablets and smartphones (and even more the complete lack of adaptive layout) will significantly reduce the effectiveness of the SEO promotion.

When the website is displayed correctly on one resolution and not on the other, you lose potential customers who came to you. Today, all websites from top search results are perfectly displayed and load quickly on mobile devices.

So, your website can’t be considered SEO-friendly if it has errors in adaptive layout.

Using 302 redirects instead of 301

Redirect 302, unlike 301, does not pass link weight to the new URL. Besides, for search robots, 302 redirects will mean that the page was moved temporarily, and the robot will continue to index it (301 says that the page “moved” forever). With 301, you will only redirect traffic without any benefit to SEO optimization.

If you manually configure redirects for pages in the “.htaccess” file and make a list of pages you want to redirect traffic from in Excel, don’t forget that you can’t write “redirect 301” in one cell and then just stretch it down. If you do that, Excel will change the data to “redirect 302”, “redirect 303”, “redirect 304” etc.

So, your website can`t be considered SEO-friendly if you use 301 redirects instead of 302 redirects.

Errors in the robots.txt file

Sometimes a website needs to be audited, especially if the SEO specialist was careless when compiling the robots.txt file and made mistakes. I am talking about technical grammar due to violations of which there are errors in indexing rules, etc.

Experts may often make mistakes in words. For example, they may write Dissalow instead of Disallow:

Another common error occurs in CMSs. During development, the website was closed from indexing. When the website should be launched, programmers simply choose the “starter set” of rules for closing administrative pages in the CMS interface.

They did not remove “Disallow: /” and thought that search engines indexed the website. But because they forgot to remove the “Disallow: /” directive, the site was not indexed.

So, your website can`t be considered SEO-friendly if it has errors in the robots.txt file.

Content unreadability

On the web, there is a lot of content about text readability and how it affects the website's ranking. In brief, the readability of content does not directly affect positions in search.

Still, it does affect behavioral characteristics — total time on the page, depth of scrolling, refusals, and social media shares. Thus, by improving your content's readability, you improve those pages' ranking.

Do an audit of your existing pages, reoptimize your content, and additionally do some internal SEO optimization. Add H1, H2, and H3 headers where there are none. Make your text diverse with pictures, videos, and GIFs. Add meta descriptions and hyperlinks to other articles. Make sure that the articles fully disclose particular topics.

So, your website can`t be considered SEO-friendly if the content has bad readability.

The sitemap file is not updated

The script has stopped writing new pages to the file. This happens quite often, and the more complex the application architecture, the more often this happens. This is not a big problem if there is not added one page, but if there are hundreds, then there will be problems with the indexing of hundreds of these pages.

Pay attention to the “lastmod” file attribute. If it is not updated, but the page is updated — a search robot may not raise the page in search results. It may refer to the “lastmod” attribute and decide that the page has not changed.

So, your website can’t be considered SEO-friendly if the sitemap is not updated.

An abundance of links in the footer of the website

Search engines are fine with such links on websites related to Internet marketing services or website development. For such niches, it is normal when partners link to them. This has a positive effect on promotion.

In other cases, many links from footers to your website are suspicious.

To avoid sanctions, close links from footers with the “nofollow” attribute and do not place anchors with keywords.

So, your website can`t be considered SEO-friendly if there are too many links in the website footer.

Lack of long reads (long articles)

Search engines like long (over 2000 words), unique, informative articles. Users actively share long reads on their social networks. All this increases the authority of your domain. If an article with 400 words does not reach the top of search results — write more.

Answer all the possible user questions, describe the process of solving the user’s problem step by step, and add links to other pages of your website.

So, your website can`t be considered SEO-friendly if there are no long reads in the blog.

But I can help you with writing long reads. I am a content marketer with 5 years of experience in blog article writing. I specialize in IT, crypto, and marketing niches. Over 50 clients from the whole world cooperated with me and enjoy the results. Among them are Plerdy, Free TON, EXMO, Sapien Wallet, Awesomic. You can easily DM me on any social network.

I also recommend you to read: