Just imagine you have an art gallery with Rembrandts and Picassos that are kept in a really hard-to-reach basement or barn. It doesn't matter what masterpieces you have in there—if people cannot find them, then the site is as good as a basement. Your client says this:

"I have this brand-new website, but it's not ranking." We've heard that a couple of times. If a website cannot be found by search engines, then that website might as well be used as a data storage facility.

Before proceeding with the common mistakes, remember to get your page speed right. This isn't a small mistake. Google loves when a webpage loads in under 3 seconds. Keep it safe and make all the necessary efforts to keep the loading speed as low as possible.

1. Page Headings - Not Just a Change in Font Sizes

This is perhaps the most common mistake we see. Sometimes we've seen websites with no headings at all—not even the website title had an H1. So, how do you expect Google to rank and recognize your website and content as valuable?

Let's get things straight... nobody knows for sure how Google does the indexing, except maybe some key members at Google headquarters. Yet, we know that meta information is really important, page speed is mega-important, and keywords help—and that everything together makes your website rank.

Yes, you have good meta information, but as you may know already, good meta and targeted keywords are not enough. Google needs more than some fancy metatags, so remember to include headings.

Also, don't forget that your readers need some "benchmarks," some flags to say "Hey! The content you're looking for is HERE!" Nothing draws attention better than an H1 or an image.

The use of header tags is important because they give the crawler the structure of the website and of a certain page. If analyzing two similar websites, one with headings and another without, you will notice that the one with headings tends to be indexed faster.

2. Robots.txt Protocol Missing – Your Website Needs Some Robots

"The robots.txt file must be in the top-level directory of the host, accessible through the appropriate protocol and port number. Generally accepted protocols for robots.txt (and crawling of websites) are 'HTTP' and 'HTTPS'. On HTTP and HTTPS, the robots.txt file is fetched using an HTTP non-conditional GET request." - developers.google.com

Robots.txt, or the infamous robots exclusion protocol, is a standard used by most websites to communicate with web crawlers or robots. It decides which crawlers are allowed to visit a website and what parts of your website should be visited versus which shouldn't be crawled.

Let's imagine Google is a tourist visiting your website. The Robots.txt is a good friend that tells the tourist what neighborhoods NOT to visit, either because those places aren't touristically valuable or they're dangerous.

All websites have pages that should not be crawled for different reasons. While a robots.txt file may not be so important for a smaller website like a blog, for a bigger website, this protocol makes all the difference.

3. Sitemap.xml Not Available – Give Google a Map

First of all, the sitemap is an XML file containing all the URLs existing on the website.

Again, think of it like having a map with the major landmarks of a city, and Google is a tourist. The sitemap is that map. If the tourist has the map, then it will be easier to visit all the locations indicated. Otherwise, if the map is missing, that tourist may not be able to find all the important locations or might get lost.

If implemented correctly, with the sitemap:

• Pages are prioritized for indexing by frequency
• Early indexing of a website is assured
• All pages are submitted to the search engine database even before being submitted to their own database

Drupal offers great modules for both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. The modules generate a list of entities (nodes, taxonomy terms, menu links, etc.) and custom links. You can go with the XML sitemap or the Simple XML sitemap module. Be careful, as sometimes, to upgrade these modules, you will need to uninstall the previous version.

4. Content Not Well Verified and Lack of Metatags

This is a general huge SEO problem, regardless of the CMS. This is like the Gargantua of a website. While we said we'd be talking about small mistakes, this one is so big that it's worth mentioning in all SEO mistakes articles.

Sometimes, people blame the implementation, while often the content is to blame for their poor ranking. Good content makes people read, share, and bookmark your website—which means traffic and ranking.

Don't forget to check if your metatags are working properly. Then also check if the text in your metatags is valuable and contains all the needed keywords.

5. Duplicate Content – Lowers Your Ranking Twice as Fast

Moz.com estimates that almost 29% of web pages contain duplicated content. Duplicate content seems to confuse crawlers and thus lower ranking.

The main problem is that when having duplicated content, the crawler will not be able to know which page to rank and show for a specific query. To avoid confusion, it seems that the crawler excludes both pages or uses specific algorithms to identify the correct one. That process takes a lot of time and increases the indexing time.

This can be fixed quite simply with a 301 redirect and some rel="canonical" attributes to tell search engines that a page is and should be treated as a copy of a URL.

These are just a few of the small mistakes that have a huge impact on your SEO and website. We'll come back with even more SEO mistakes that people make with their websites, but until then, feel free to share the mistakes you've encountered in the comments section below.