The Most Common SEO Mistakes and Their Fixes [Video]

The 26 most common SEO mistakes fall into four groups: page titles, meta descriptions, URLs and site usability. The items in this article can change over time, but I am confident you will see positive results once you apply them to your site.

Page title mistakes

The three most common page title (title element) mistakes are:

1. Do not choose titles that have nothing to do with your page content. Avoid meaningless titles such as "Untitled" or "page title".

2. Do not use the same page title across all, or most, of the pages on your site.

3. Do not use long titles that fail to catch attention or help the reader. Do not stuff unnecessary keywords into the title.

Fixing title mistakes

Three rules fix page title mistakes:

• Choose titles that describe the page content accurately.
• Every page should have its own unique title so Google can tell your pages apart.
• Titles should be both short and informative. If yours is too long, Google shows only part of it in the search result.

Update (October 2026): Google does not build the title in the search result from the title element alone. According to Google's title link documentation, other sources include the main visual title, heading elements such as h1 and the text of links pointing to the page.

Meta description mistakes

The four most common meta description mistakes are:

4. Do not write a meta description that is unrelated to the page or that promises something different.

5. Do not use generic lines such as "you can visit our site" or "information about Rize".

6. Do not stuff your meta descriptions with keywords.

7. Do not copy the whole page and paste it into the meta description.

Fixing meta description mistakes

Two rules fix meta description mistakes:

• Write descriptions that inform visitors and make them want to click.
• Using a different description on every page helps both users and Google.

Update (October 2026): Google creates the snippet in the search result primarily from the page content. It uses the meta description when that describes the page more accurately than the content does (Google's snippet documentation).

URL mistakes

The four most common URL structure mistakes are:

8. Do not build long URLs carrying unnecessary ID values.

9. Do not choose generic URLs such as "page10.html".

10. Do not repeat keywords inside your URLs.

11. Do not nest many directories that have nothing to do with the content.

Fixing URL mistakes

Three rules fix URL mistakes:

• Build URLs from words that match your site's content.
• Use a URL structure that expresses the content fully and shows visitors where they are on the site.
• Try to use the URL structure to signal the type of content.

Site usability mistakes

The 15 mistakes that lower site usability concern navigation, the sitemap page, the 404 page, content, links and images:

12. Do not build convoluted navigation links.

13. Do not split content into too many fragments.

14. Do not list every page one under another on your sitemap page without grouping them by topic.

15. Prevent pages that return a 404 from being indexed by Google.

16. Do not greet visitors with bare error messages such as "Not found" or "404 Not Found".

17. Do not give your 404 page a design different from the rest of the site.

18. Do not add piles of unnecessary keywords aimed at Google that will only annoy visitors.

19. Do not add hidden text that visitors cannot see but Google can.

20. Do not write content as long sentences or as paragraphs cut too short.

21. Do not format your outbound links exactly like your body text.

22. Do not use anchor text written for search engines and stuffed with keywords.

23. Do not add pointless links that will not help visitors navigate.

24. Do not use generic file names such as "image.gif" or "10.jpg" for your images.

25. Do not use long image file names, and do not cram multiple keywords into the alt text.

26. Do not spam every site in your industry with link requests.

How to improve site usability

Six steps improve site usability:

• Make it as easy as possible for visitors to get from your home page to the content they came for.
• If your site has thousands of pages, build a simple sitemap page listing links to the most important ones.
• On a 404, tell the visitor plainly that the page could not be found. A custom 404 page improves the experience.
• Design the site around your visitors' needs while keeping it comfortably accessible to Google, and the results will follow.
• Visitors should be able to tell linked text apart from normal text.
• Do not think of links only as outbound ones. Internal links make it easier for both your visitors and Google to move around the site.

What are technical SEO mistakes?

Technical SEO mistakes are configuration errors, outside the 26 items above, that break how Google crawls or indexes a page. The table below lists five of them with the fix from Google's documentation.

Google's noindex documentation explains why a page blocked by robots.txt never shows Google its noindex rule. PageSpeed Insights reports a page's mobile and desktop performance with both lab data and real-user data. My guide to crawl budget optimization covers how Googlebot spends its crawling resources on large sites.

What are the common content mistakes?

The common content mistakes are pages that add no value for the searcher or that break Google's spam policies. Google says pages that violate those policies may rank lower or not appear in results at all. A manual action, what SEOs call a Google penalty, comes from a Google reviewer who has found that a site does not comply with the spam policies. The list below covers four content mistakes.

• Keyword stuffing. Items 6, 18 and 22 above are forms of it. The Search Console Manual Actions report names it "Hidden text and/or keyword stuffing".
• Thin content. Thin affiliate pages and content copied from other sites can lead to the "Thin content with little or no added value" manual action.
• Scaled content abuse. Google treats producing many pages mainly to manipulate rankings, not to help users, as spam, no matter how the content is created.
• Targeting the wrong keywords. A page that misses the information or format its query asks for does not help the searcher, for a broad term or a long-tail keyword alike. My article on reading search intent shows how to match a page to a query.

Google describes its disavow links tool as an advanced feature that can harm a site's performance in Search when used incorrectly. Most sites never need it, because Google can assess which links to trust on its own.

What is SEO and how is SEO work actually done? The SEO guide covers all of it.