With 2017 just finishing, it is a great time to review the past year and look at what went well and, more importantly, what went wrong for people. After all, if you do not fail, it is hard to learn to succeed. Search engine optimization is paramount to the success and health of a website. Even in 2017, there are still mistakes being made by website owners about how to conduct the best SEO for their website. To learn from such mistakes, here are five common SEO mistakes of 2017.

 

#1 Lack of https://

Over the past year or so, Google has made it very clear that websites with https:// (an SSL certificate which produces an encryption connection from web users to websites) will rank higher than those without it, as well as stating in the web browser that the website is ‘not secure’.

 

 

#2 Slow Loading Website

The faster your website is, the quicker it will load for web users reducing the time deficit they have to wait patiently for it to load. When this happens, they are less likely to exit the page, since it has loaded. Google makes note of this, helping to improve your SEO.

A slow loading website will tend to have a high exit and bounce rate, giving Google the ammunition to rank the website lower on their search engine.

 

 

#3 Not Using SEO Meta Data

The meta data is the data that appears on the search engine results page. The title that you read for a result is known as the ‘meta title’ whilst the description is known as the ‘meta description’.

If you do not specify what you want the meta data to be, then Google will automatically determine what it should be. The title will be made the same as your article’s title whilst the meta description is chosen automatically.

This does not help SEO, since you can have a better title and description filled with more keywords etc. to target the right traffic better.

 

 

#4 Lack of Mobile Friendly Website

For the first time in Google’s history, they are moving their indexing from websites on desktop to mobile. This alone should make clear just how critical a mobile friendly website is to getting good SEO and high ranking organically. Without a mobile friendly website, you are going to severely struggle to rank even on the second or third page of search engines.

 

 

#5 No Optimization of URL

With most website creation platforms, such as Blogger or WordPress, they will automatically create a URL that is the same as the title of your website. However, the problem is that this can contain words such as ‘the’, ‘a’ etc. which all add to making a long URL, which is not good for SEO.

For this reason, make sure the URL of your articles are optimized and adapted to be short and contain all the keywords you need to explain your article in a few words.