8 common SEO mistakes when creating a website

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Whether you are creating a website for your company, agency, portal or your personal blog, the goal is certainly for the site you create to be seen and visited by users on the Internet. In addition to a large number of other sources, Google is a place from which you can get a really large number of visits. That is why many people's goal is to rank well on Google.

This is why search engine optimization (SEO) is so important. However, errors can often occur during website development, which can occur as a result of code implementation or design solutions that are not in line with Google's SEO guidelines .

That's why you should do your research before you decide who to hire to work on your new website. If you want to be sure that the site will be created in accordance with SEO standards, you can always hire experts who will monitor the site creation process from an optimization perspective.

If, however, you want to dedicate yourself to SEO whatsapp new zealand optimization, you've come to the right place. Below, we've presented eight common mistakes that can be made when creating a website, and which can later negatively affect the site's position in search results.

The most common SEO mistakes in web design
1. The site is accessible to search engines during the development phase
When creating a website, a rented server is often used on which a new version of the website is created (most often within the Test folder). On the other hand, a website can also be created on a local server (localhost ) , but then the website owner will not have access to every change that occurs during the development phase.

In both cases, it is very important to prohibit Google from indexing the site while it is in the development process.

This is very important so that Google and other search engines do not include the site in their database prematurely, which would subsequently make the process of good site positioning more difficult.

The problem can also occur when the test version, after the site is completed, is copied to the live version, which is available at the actual address (e.g. www.mysite.com ). This creates two identical sites and Google will index both. This leads to the creation of duplicate content, which is against Google's guidelines and rules.

2. Google is prohibited from indexing a site after its development is complete.
Once the website creation process is complete, the process of releasing the site and allowing users to access it via the URL follows. Also, Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines send their robots ( crawlers ) to visit the site to index it and include links in their database.

However, it happens that people forget to remove the noindex and nofollow tags from the HTML code. In other words, they forget to allow the site to be indexed (within WordPress or some other CMS, there is an option to “Prohibit robots from visiting the site”).

If you forget to remove the aforementioned tags, your site can be available to users for months without being seen by Google and other search engines, thereby losing visibility and the ability for users and potential clients to find your site.

3. The home page has multiple versions
Whether the site is created on a CMS platform ( Content Management System, CMS ) or it is a unique site, i.e. not based on WordPress , Drupal , PrestaShop , or other platforms, it is important to ensure that only one version of the site is loaded.

So, leaving the option for the home page to be available on, say, www.mysite.com, www.mysite.com/index.php and www.mysite.com/index.html versions is something that must be avoided precisely to avoid duplicate content. In other words, only one version of the home page can be available.

4. Non-existent 404 error page
When you try to access a page that does not exist on the site, you get a message that the page is not available (a so-called 404 error page).

When you build a website on a CMS platform, in most cases this page is automatically created within the system and you don't have to think about it. However, if the website is created as part of a separate system, or designed from scratch using HTML and CSS coding or, alternatively, PHP, JavaScript or other technology, it can happen that you forget to create this page.

In practice, this means that if a page does not exist on the site, the site loads this 404 page. However, if the site does not have a 404 page, then duplicate content will occur again. The non-existence of this page means that by entering any character or set of characters within the URL structure, we always get the same page.

For example, without a 404 page, the content on www.mysite.com and www.mysite.com/blablablabla or www.mysite.com/lalalalaaaaa would be virtually identical. From Google's perspective, this would mean that there could be an infinite number of versions of the same page. This would be creating duplicate content, which is against Google's guidelines.

5. Lack of 301 redirection
If you changed the URL structure or individual permalinks when creating your site, don't be fooled into thinking that Google won't notice that you've made changes. In some cases, and especially with CMS platforms, information about such a change will remain in the database. Therefore, to prevent Google from pointing to links that are not available, if you change the link structure or links to individual pages, always create a 301 redirect and connect the old link to the new one.

6. Site pages have the same title or description
Each page of the site must have a unique title and a unique description. Creating a function within the site that allows you to independently and automatically pull parameters from a location, and creating a series of pages that have the same description and title is a mistake that can cost the site good rankings. It is better to leave these parameters empty than to duplicate content.

7. Publishing a website with lorem ipsum content
Lorem ipsum is generic text designed to replace original content so that the website creation process doesn't suffer from a lack of creativity or time. However, if the content isn't fully created, don't publish the site.

Launching a website with lorem ipsum text is very dangerous for several reasons. First, site visitors will not be able to discern the purpose of the site and may therefore reject any possibility of interacting with it. And that certainly will not reflect well on web analytics .

On the other hand, Google and other search engines will not evaluate such a site, such websites will receive a penalty and it will take a long time for the site to recover from that situation, even after appropriate changes and the introduction of relevant content.

Therefore, it is better to leave the site inaccessible to search engines until the entire content is entered or replaced, than to leave the site for indexing and create a problem.

And one more thing, although the use of generic text is a common case, keep in mind that best practice shows that the person in charge of the content on the website should be involved in the creation from the very beginning, and not join in at the end just to "write some, any text".

8. Source code not validated
Since the very beginning of the internet and websites, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has defined standards in the web industry. If we want Google and other search engine robots to easily navigate our site, and not lose points for poor coding, it is important to validate the code for each page of the site and correct any errors in the source code . This will allow search engine robots to easily navigate through the code, but also to position your site better in search.