Basic SEO Mistakes and Their Impact on Organic Traffic to Your Website

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Krzysztof Maslowski

10 February 2015 (updated November 12, 2025)

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When creating websites, even the best graphic designers and webmasters make a number of basic mistakes that prevent websites from being properly indexed by web crawlers and prevent them from appearing in high search engine rankings. These pages, while beautiful, don't even appear when the company's name is entered in Google. Today, we'll discuss the most common errors we encounter when optimizing our clients' websites.

Blocking robot access in metatags The most common setting is the meta tag [syntax type=”html”] on the home page [/syntax]which causes the subpage to be completely unindexed. This error is easily fixed by changing the entry to [syntax type=”html”] [/syntax]Google robots can then both save the page and follow the links on it.
No www to no www redirection For Google address www.moja-strona.pl and moja-strona.pl are separate subpages. Failure to redirect results in duplicate content and automatically lowers the site's rating. The easiest way to set up the appropriate redirect is to write simple instructions in the .htaccess file [syntax type=”html”] RewriteRule On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.moja-domena.pl$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://moja-domena.pl/ [R=301,L] [/syntax]
Same meta tags The lack of unique title and description meta tags is a major mistake. Remember, meta tags are meant to describe the content of a specific subpage, and not all subpages are about the same thing.
Copies of content The uniqueness of the texts on the website significantly influences positioningRemember that copying content from other sites is easily detected by Googlebots and can even result in a complete ban from the search engine. Therefore, it's worth investing some time or outsourcing the work to copywriters when creating content for your website.
Over-Placing Keywords A common mistake among those just starting to optimize their websites is to place keywords "everywhere possible." As a result, instead of improving their rankings, the website may be filtered and blocked from ranking for that keyword in Google for months.
No friendly links These days, not using mod rewrite automatically lowers a page's search engine rankings. Every newly created website should have friendly links set up. SEO-friendly URLs, meaning those without parameters or session tags (in the form [label style=”red”]/about-us.html[/label], [label style=”red”]contact.html[/label]instead of complicated ones like [label style=”red”]/index.php?id=4&item=57&session=2374[/label]), have a better chance of being quickly and fully indexed by search engines.
No version adapted to mobile devices The number of users accessing the internet on smartphones and tablets is growing significantly year over year. To accommodate these users, Google is implementing changes to its algorithms, which will undoubtedly negatively impact the ratings of websites that don't display properly on mobile devices in the coming months. Therefore, when designing a website, it's essential to use responsive design, meaning it automatically adjusts its resolution to suit the display of a mobile phone or tablet.

All of the above errors can be easily corrected yourself already at the stage of building the website, and eliminating them will allow you to achieve high rankings and increase traffic to the website.