Most Common Technical SEO Mistakes: How Severe Are They? by Anna Lebedeva #399

Hi, and welcome to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebResults. My name is Matt Bertram, your friendly SEO specialist. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast number, cancel, number 399. That means next one is 400. We're going to have to celebrate. We're going to have to celebrate and do something. Yeah. We'll have to figure out something to do. I don't know. A barbecue. We could do a barbecue. It's cold. Yes. So if you're tuning in from someplace outside of Houston, something absolutely amazing happened in Houston. It was weather-related. It's kind of the opposite of Harvey. Harvey was miserable and horrible and involved precipitation. Today, it also involved precipitation. It was snow. It snowed. I saw some little baby snowmen out there. People built in them. You know, we had about enough snow to build a little baby snowman. So that was fun. Just enough to build a baby snowman. And I'm trying to get my notes up here. So sorry, I should have had these notes up earlier. I got it. I'm ready. You are ready. As always, we have a tip from our previous podcast. And that tip is... Use thank you pages for tracking and additional CTAs. So you want to use your thank you pages when people actually take action on your website. You can actually use that to track goals in Google Analytics. You also want to have additional CTAs. Maybe it's a good opportunity to invite them to like your Facebook page or to shiko you. All of those things are really valuable. Or to do an upsell. Or to do an upsell. It's called a bump. A bump. Subscribe, follow, like, boom. All right. So now let's get to the content for the day. Please remember, we are filming live here in Houston, Texas. And it just snowed today. That's really all we got. It just snowed today. If you like our podcast and you've listened to this podcast before, hopefully you do like our

podcast. Although, Matt, in kind of the opening, mentioned that we've had some reviews that are not favorable. They're the typical reviews they talk about, you know... Chris, you need to be more serious. I need to be more serious. Yes. So I have my pocket flair. I feel like there's not much more seriousness. Yeah, I can't do much better. Yeah. No, you could not be... I'm at the level that I need to be. Yep. I'm hitting the ceiling. The glass ceiling. It's not going any harder. I actually really appreciate Matt participating because we've legitimately had discussions about what direction we're going to go. Do we need to take it more professional? And we want to make it fun and we give great information. So if you don't like the potatoes of the podcast, just fast forward through them. We're cool with that. It's no big deal. If you like this podcast, you're probably interested in SEO tips. We do have an SEO tip or collection of SEO tips. There's five. It's an article that you can get. It's a white paper. Five online marketing mistakes that can tank your business and how to avoid them. You can get that at ewebresults.com slash SEO tip. And we are going to have predictions for 2018. Okay, yes. Coming out soon. Yes. A week or two. We have some exciting interviews that are going to come along. So that's pretty cool. A little teaser about this article. So it's Anna Lebedeva. I think that's right. Lebedeva. I like it. I like it. She wrote this article. It's called The Most Common Technical SEO Mistakes and How Severe Are They? So it's a great, great article. They went into a lot of information. We'll get into that. If you could, if you're in a position to right now, you have an electronic device, go ahead and tweet and even connect on Facebook. What you should tweak is hashtag SEO podcast. Mention number 399. Tag us in it at bestseopodcast at ewebresults and tag Anna Lebedeva at digitalanya. So that's D-I-G-I-T-A-L-A-N-Y-A.

So I heard a joke. Okay. Josh was telling me a joke. Is this an SEO joke? It's an SEO joke. Okay. It's an SEO joke. All right. I will allow it. Yeah. I mean, you probably heard this before, but I hadn't heard it in a while and it was pretty funny. Right. And I definitely want to give him credit. Right. The wife's gone. Yes. It's late. Yeah. Where are you? Where are you? I'm on the podcast. You can see me live. Where is the best place to hide a dead body? Yes. That is an old one and it is a good one. And anywhere other than the first page of Google is a great place. The joke is the second page of Google, right? Yeah. Because nobody goes there. All right. So you've done that. If you've never listened to this podcast before, this is your first time. Howdy and welcome to the podcast. We appreciate you. If you've listened to this podcast before, you know that we run kind of a contest every week and that contest is if we get 10 Shikos. A share, a like, and a follow. Yeah. A Shiko is a share, like, or follow on our digital platforms and we get a review, then we'll actually just wait until the end of the podcast to tell you kind of how to connect with us. But we didn't get it. That did not happen. We didn't get it. So you got to listen. I got the tear tattoo that happens every time we don't get a review. It's pretty sad and painful for me. It's right there under my right eye. It's a little scary when I go home and the kids are like, Daddy, you didn't get a review. It's so sad. Oh, we got feedback. Oh, yeah. We're trying to figure out what it is. So what we will do is tell you how you can Shiko us, right? Again, a Shiko is a share, like, and a follow, and there's a couple places where you can Shiko

us, and I have them here. You can Shiko us at Facebook.com slash... Guess. No, that's the genes. Ah, okay. Facebook.com slash... E-Web Results. Twitter.com slash... E-Web Results. Instagram.com slash... E-Web Results. LinkedIn.com slash company slash... E-Web Results. And we have an interesting one for YouTube. It's actually E-Web Results.com slash... YouTube. YouTube. We'll take you to all of our profiles on those platforms. Go ahead and Shiko us, please. Also, if you would like to leave us a review, we're asking... Please. I'm begging. I'm comfortable begging. Leave us a review on Yelp. Yeah, we... We really appreciate that. By the way, please, nobody tell Yelp that we're asking you to leave a review at Yelp. I believe it's specifically... Yeah, no, did you know that Yelp was recruiting at Texas A&M? I did not? When I was graduating. I did not know that. They were like, we got this thing, and it's like reviews. Yeah. And we hide reviews that are good for some businesses. Yeah, I don't know. We charge $33 a lead. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they're doing well. Please leave us a review on Yelp. We've made it easy to find us. All you need to do is go to ewebresults.com slash... Yelp. If you're a PHP genius or a WordPress guru, we're probably... No, no, no. That's right. We've already found you. No, no. We're looking for... What are we looking for? Badasses. Badasses. We're looking for badasses. If you're a badass marketer that you want to really dive into marketing and deliver excellent results after some really incredible training, give us a call. You can reach us at 713-592-6724, and we'll run you through our process. Yeah. If you would like a free website analysis, I have to be honest. The free part is not comprehensive. It is free. You will get value out of it. We got lots of testimonials about how valuable that is. You can get that by going to ewebresults.com. I was going to do slash, but it's literally just... Is it like there's a little dash in there? Is

there like a little... Is it like... There's no dash. No, there's no dash. It's just ewebresults.com. We'll take you there. There's a blue button at the top. It says free website analysis now. We need a resource page. And we need to get a resource page for that also. All right. So... SEO teaching. I did get a little bit of news. I just thought this was interesting. The FDA gives approval to an EKG device. None of that matters. That attaches to that. None of this matters at all. No? Bitcoin is the only thing that matters. Well, that's the next two things I have. So next, Bitcoin hit 17,000. Yeah. It hit a little bit over 17,000. And we got mining going on in the office. We got Bitcoin mining actually here. And because it snowed here, it's actually cold here in Houston. I mean, relatively. And it warms the sus. And it's a really wonderful heater. Did you know like... It puts off a lot of heat. It's a lot of heat. I was reading some statistics on electricity. I'm like, yeah, Bitcoin mining and supporting the transactions is a lot of electricity. And then the other story is NiceHash got hacked. Oh, yeah. That was... Oh, man. That was... $64 million. Yeah. So NiceHash, they have like a special algorithm. Right. That basically tells you what to mine best. Right. Okay. Makes sense. And so it's pretty cool. Right. And, you know, they didn't get hacked, but the wallets got hacked. Right. So who knows if they're going to still make it, but... I thought it was their one wallet, right? Yeah, well, their one wallet and then you transfer it over. Yeah. So... Yeah, and it's sad, right? So it makes people a little bit nervous. It had zero impact on the price of Bitcoin. Yes. Well, so I got the little... The USBs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We ordered them together. The ledger. Yeah. The ledger. Yeah. They're on order. Get the ledgers. Yeah, because they're offline and if you... We're going to start

taking Bitcoin. Yes. Yeah, we do. We're already paying some people in Bitcoin. Yeah, we are paying people in Bitcoin. All right. So here we get to Anna Lebedeva's article, The Most Common Technical SEO Mistakes and How Severe Are They? So she starts off, she has to disclose, she does work at SEM Rush. By the way, SEM Rush is pretty phenomenal. Love it. Love it. Love it. Awesome stuff. Massively awesome. Really good. What they did is they collected data on 100,000 websites and 450 million pages. That's pretty cool. And then they identified the most common technical SEO mistakes and assigned a severity level to each and every issue. We're going to talk about that. Could I get a graph? Yeah, you will be delivering... Severe, super severe. We're going to get you... Farmful. Yeah. Infographic. There should be an infographic. By the way... There's a lot of infographics, but not on that. Kudos to you, tip of the hat, punch in the face from us. That's a good thing. You wrote an article that had how many... It's got like six... Every image is infographic. I love it. It's phenomenal. Yeah. Really well done. All right. So the most common technical SEO issues and their severity. There are three layers, she says, to SEO. Crawlability and site index, excuse me, structure, on-page SEO, and then technical SEO. There's three. And then Matt is drawing the pyramid. Or even an upside-down one. To indicate the three pieces. Either one. Either one. I did like this. I like how dramatic this is. Each area is like a Pandora's box. Once opened, it releases various evils that you will have to deal with. We're going to talk about those various evils. The first area, crawlability and site structure. Right? So the main crawlability and site structure errors that you should avoid, links and redirects are the first one. Right? And she classifies these as harmful issues. She said, 30% of websites have broken internal links. Pay attention to 4XX errors. The most common is the 404 file not found

error. So you know what they told me in sales? What did they? I don't. Well, there's a loose parallel here. As you know, we give a lot of leeway to parallels on our podcast, right? Well, 90% of the sale has shown up. Just do your stuff right, people. Yeah, do this basic stuff right. Just do the basic stuff. 90% of the sale. And then that gets you on the second page, and then the little extra boost gets you on the first. Yep. Yeah. We can provide that little extra boost. Let's see. She said that there were, of the 404 errors or 4XX errors, about 26.5% had them. She had some other statistics. I thought this one was interesting. 17% had the www domain configured incorrectly. I don't know. Have you ever experienced this where you've like, you could pull up with the, you actually tried to type www and then the domain name, and it didn't pull up? That happened. That's how so many people are like, no, people forget to use www anymore. I've had the reverse happen. Because we're so technical. Right. I've had the reverse happen where the www version works, and the non-www doesn't work. Oh, I've had it the other way. I've actually called the owners, and I'm like, and their response was, oh, not everyone types that. I'm like, well, I just did. Like, not everyone knows that they're not, like, some people, if they type www and it doesn't work, for them, you are, I'm going to quote Mr. Wonderful, you are dead to them. Right? So make sure that's, I think it's a really important one. Dub, dub, dub, dub, dub. That's our new E-Web gang sign. Dub, dub, dub. It takes three people. So, excellent infographic. Like three people. Yeah. Dub, dub. All right. So, that's that one, right? My article's a little back to front. She says, when it comes to site, so the next one is sitemaps and, did I get my article? We're going to just take a little break here. Yeah, here

we go. Just study this. So, the next one, look, it's really tiny at the bottom of the previous page, is sitemap and robot text files. And she says, when it comes to sitemaps and robot text files, most of the sites that they looked at are doing pretty well. This issue, she labels, is quite severe. If spotted, these issues should be resolved first. Wow. Immediately. So, when you're talking about sitemap and your robot text file, right, one of the ones that she mentions is 10 or actually almost 11% actually had the sitemap.xml file, but it had the wrong pages in the sitemap.xml file. So, one of the beauties of WordPress and having kind of a content management system that's taking care of that for you, when you make adjustments to the website, adjustments to the sitemap automatically happen, and that thing that you get pushed out to Google is in good shape. So, that's really, really good. And that was sitemaps and text files. All right. That was area number one. Area number two now is on-page SEO. She says, this area is of utmost importance, especially on your valuable pages. I couldn't agree more. Basically, on-page SEO is about optimizing content and the HTML code of particular pages to improve their rankings. Okay. We got that. We're on the SEO podcast. And here, yeah. Don't have dub content. Yeah. Don't have dub content. So, it's pretty much everything. 65.88% of the sites that they reviewed actually had duplicate content issues. And remember, they visited 100,000 websites, 450 million pages. That's just impressive. The sheer volume of big data. You could do like a Beavis and Butthead and like, that's not that much. So, duplicate content issues. 93% had a low text to HTML ratio. And I can see that, you know, because as an example in WordPress, you know, we use WordPress for our clients. We've written a custom theme slash framework for implementing great SEO on those WordPress sites. And sometimes when you do media, when you're uploading images, you know, we were looking

at a page the other day that all was on it was an image. That would count as a low text to HTML ratio. Yeah. Well, yeah. Thin landing pages, thin websites. Yep. Big issue. Google don't like it. Facebook don't like it. All right. I like it. She actually says that most technical problems from SEO come from the continent. 65% have severe duplicate issues. 93.7% have the low text to HTML ratio. And 73.4% have a low word count. They say at least 250 words. I would agree, 250 words. I would also push that up. Like 250 words, just absolute, absolute, absolute minimum. You want to be starting right around 600, 1200. And if you're in really competitive situations, you know. I'm saying 10,000. The sky's. 6,000. The sky's the limit. Go visit. Pillar content. Go visit Neil Patel for that kind of information. We were actually discussing. Yeah, I love Neil Patel. We were discussing. Well, I mean, his work. I love his work. No, he's great. He's awesome. And we were discussing some pillar content just before this podcast. Next is meta descriptions, right? So 63% of website owners have completely abandoned any effort to create a meta description. And 54% just have duplicates. Matt, why is a meta description so important? I don't know, Chris. You tell me. It's to entice them to click on it. Yeah. And then tell them what they're going to do next? Yeah. Yeah. We really have like two goals. So remember, that meta description shows up on the SERP, the search engine result page. And when you're looking at that meta description, or rather, when your prospects are looking at that meta description, you really want them to understand two things. One, it's worth clicking. Right? So you want something to entice them to click. And then two, what's going to happen when they get there? Because if you can preemptively say, call to schedule an appointment in your meta description, if it works. So we're talking subliminal. Yeah. Subtle stuff that gets them. And so set the

expectation of what's going to happen next in your description. A strong CTA. You're going to be ahead of the game. So, Elastic. Yeah. You could use meta descriptions just like you're doing like a PPC ad. Yes. It works really well. Yeah. Absolutely. And I already got those numbers. So if you want a higher click-through rate for your web page, make sure you pay attention to your meta description. And there is the infographic. Thank you, Ana Lebedeva. Awesome infographics. I'm wondering what a little tool. She made a little tool. She almost made these like throwaway. You got your title tags, your H1 tags, your image alt tags. As you said, more than 60% of websites are missing alt tags for their images and have title tags that are too long. That's true. And or are lacking H1 tags. I did read one article that did a similar study and it found the correlation was not. How much data, though? It was a lot. Okay. Okay. Because I'm telling you. I don't know if it was 100,000 websites. I mean, this is. That's a lot. This is statistically significant. We are beyond statistically significant with this one. All right. So we've covered area one and area two, the most common technical SEO mistakes and how severe are they. Area three is now technical SEO. So she likes to say like SEO, specific areas like SEO, site speed, mobile responsiveness, the macro indicators of website performance are in the technical SEO section. Right. So did you know Amazon did a study and they did a, they revealed that a hundred millisecond of extra load time caused a 1% drop in sales? That's pretty incredible. I know that people just ditch mobile sites if they don't load. Yep. I mean, I know that, but I didn't know. I mean, 1% of like how much do they make is a lot. 1% of a billion. Yeah. Is, is a lot. Uh, so, so you want to make sure you're working on your page speed. More than 20% of websites have

slow page load speeds and they considered this, she considered it, Ana considered it the highest level of severity. The highest level. Very important. Yeah. Site speed. That's one of the biggest things. Next feature she got into was old technology. Right. So we're talking, what are we talking about? Flash. That's the first one. Flash. And iframes, right? The internet never. Iframes are still being used quite a bit. Yeah, they are. They, her point is the internet never stops evolving and, uh, make sure that you're staying up with their current technology. They said that they found, found a 0.38 are using frames, 0.38% of websites, 5.8% still have flash content, uh, and then 9% doc type not declared. So you really need to declare your doc type on your document, uh, I mean on your, on your website. And then we have finally mobile friendliness. Yes. And this is interesting. Everything should be mobile friendly. Yeah. You should design websites mobile first. Yes. Google is going to be indexing mobile first, uh, just around the corner. So you need to be designing mobile first, first, first, like, like, like, like I can tell you when we're building landing pages, we're building out it on desktop and then mobile. And like we were having a conversation today, we really need to design it mobile first and then desktop. Yeah. So, um, what, what was it? The, the stats are pretty low on who doesn't have mobile version. The stat is, but if you find them great client, like 0.8% were missing canonical tags. Her point is if you're implementing AMP pages, you really have to have great, you know, your canonical tag act together. Uh, and then 0.66, their viewport was not configured properly. So, uh, that was good. That was really good. Be aware of the most common technical mistakes and then do goodbye you and punch in the face to you, Anna Lebedeva. I, I thought it was great. Yeah. Yeah. This is good. No, we're, it gives the, it gets the punch in the face.

We almost need like a, a rating. It's a, it's a, it's a dub dub. Oh, a dub dub. A dub dub. We can give it a dub dub. A dub dub. I like the dub dub with the thumbs up. That kind of works. It's a weird W. Hold on. Yeah. It's a weird W. That's kind of cool. It's like, yeah. Dub dub. Thumbs up. I like it. I like it. Hmm. All right. So, um. That's it. That's all folks. That is the podcast. I've got to just, hey, uh, just so you know, um, if you would like this podcast, we ask you to share it with three people. Also to shiko us. Uh, if you're interested. Do something. Yes. And let, like share the value, share the content. Yes. We're going to really work on engaging you as much as you're engaged. Actually, we're going to engage you so you will engage us. Also, if you're looking to grow your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet. The internet. The internet. Call your results for increased revenue in your business. 713-592-6724. If you have a referral. So it's important to, to remind the people who listen to the podcast and who might be interested in engaging us. What do we do here? Like, so clearly we do SEO, right? We do internet marketing. But you know, sometimes when you say internet marketing, people are like, well, do you do websites? Yes. Do you, do you do pay-per-click? Yes. And when we say pay-per-click, do we mean like Google AdWords and Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram and Bing? Yes. Yes. Yeah. We, we, we, we're a full service agency. Yeah. We got everything under the sun. If we don't do it, we'll let you know. Yeah. Um, and there's not much, we, Pinterest, we haven't really done much with. Other than that, we're probably doing it. You know, I made some money on Etsy. Did you? Yeah. I made some money on Etsy. That's cool. Yeah. So now we're, we're also doing Etsy.

Yeah. Etsy. It's a task specifically, uh, for, for Matt right here. All right. Um, please remember we're filmed live here at 5999 West 34th Street, Suite 106, Houston, Texas. Transcript, video, and audio of this podcast are available at our website, ewebresults.com. We are the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. That is because of you. Yes. You, you all. We really do appreciate you. Uh, go ahead and send us an email podcast at ewebresults.com. I was like, I thought I was done. I'm not on stage anymore. I'm off the clock. I'm done. I was like, um, time is off. Now it's beeping. Now it's beeping. So, uh, thank you guys for making us the most popular podcast. Um, we're about to roll into the new year. Uh, we've got, you know, we've obviously made lots of changes, uh, this year and we'll be making even more changes for the better in, uh, 2018. I'm, I'm, I'm pretty excited. I'm pretty excited about it. So, uh, until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye-bye for now.