SEO or Search engine optimization is important for anysuccessful blogging campaign. Without proper SEO, getting organic traffic from major search engines like Google can get difficult. And since search engine traffic is free and highly targeted, no blogger should miss out on it. However, if you look around you will find that there are many bloggers that tend to make SEO mistakes that cost them in the long run. In the following article we look into a few common mistakes that you should avoid as a blogger if you’re looking out to get ranked high on the search engine result pages…
1. Purchasing links:
You must never buy links or pay for links. You might get a short-term boost if you buy links, but it is a huge risk for your website. Google search engine will flag all the paid links and eventually your site will be penalized and banned. It is best if you follow comment linking manually, this way your blog will grow steadily and the result will always be fruitful.
2. Posting Poor Content:
You must avoid posting poor content, because if you do so, you will lose your blog audiences and your page ranking will drop too. So ensure that every post you publish is of good quality, relevant to your blog niche and unique. Before your publish content double check it for any spelling or grammar errors, review your links and make sure they are placed at the right point.
3. Chasing PageRank:
Don’t get me wrong, PageRank is important for any website’s success. The higher the PageRank you have, the better you rank in search engines, and the more visitors you’ll get. However, it’s definitely not the only metric that’ll help you improve your blog’s success. Furthermore, Google has mentioned previously that PageRank is just one of two hundred (wow!) indicators used to crawl and rank a website. Instead, you should focus on your analytics, ROI, and relevancy as recommended by Google itself.
4. Duplicate Content:
Google wants your blog to bring value to the table. If you’re going to create duplicate content on your blog with only little variation just for the purpose of populating your site then it’s not a good practice. For instance, ‘understanding section 529 college savings plans’ and ‘knowing section 529 college savings plans’ are pretty similar topics – so even if you create a totally different page or post for both these keywords, it will still put you at risk of getting a search engine penalty. The Big G has an advanced algorithm that can easily catch you playing with topics/keywords that are identical.
So what’s the solution? Taking our above 529 plans example, what you can do is penetrate this topic and go into the details in order to find subtopics that you can work with. The deeper you go, the better it is. This will help you in strengthening each of your blog post and also give you the needed edge over the competition.
5. Keyword Overuse:
Keywords are important for post and they are an important SEO strategy. However, over stuffing keyword is dangerous. It is one of the most common SEO mistakes. It is unethical and affects your page rankings badly. If you overstuff the keywords, the text makes little sense to the reader and you will lose them. Therefore, write good quality content and let the keywords flow in.
6. Ignoring RSS Feed optimizations:
This is another SEO mistake that is overlooked many times. Bloggers don’t see the need to optimize RSS feeds. This shouldn’t be the case because web visitors check RSS feeds to subscribe or read interesting pages. The concept of RSS optimization should extent to tags. You should input enough keywords in your RSS feed to ensure that the feed stands out. For instance, you can a descriptive title with some keywords. Ignoring your RSS feed might cost you that number one SEO spot.
7. Irregular Posting:
The idea of blogging is to keep your customers returning. When you blog once in a month or two or whenever you like, you will lose your audience and ultimately your blog will lose its ranking. To avoid this mistake you must keep posting regularly the right kind of material with consistent effort. Keep publishing fresh new content and drive traffic to your site. After all, consistency is the key.
8. Not using Social Media:
Social media should be integrated into your SEO effort because they are useful in bringing links to your site. If you do not use social networking sites for SEO then you will lose a lot of traffic. Hence, you need to optimize the content and properties of various social platforms and maintain regular activity like tweeting, updating status etc. so that search engines detect your blog and improve your rank.
9. Back link obsession:
Back links are important SEO strategies; however, back link obsession is a huge mistake. Back links alone are not a big SEO plan. You must focus on building a good site with useful and shareable content. If you do that, you will get back links naturally.
10. Imbalance between content and design:
Obsessing over content and sacrificing the looks of your site is a huge mistake; in the same way, sacrificing content for design is wrong too. So, you need to maintain a healthy balance between content and design. Your blog needs to have good content and design too.
11. Doing SEO wrongly:
Many people optimize their sites in a wrong way. For example concerning link building, many bloggers link only to their website’s front page, instead links should be built to all the posts and bloggers should stay up to date with the SEO knowledge.
12. Leaving Title Tags Automated:
The title tag is undeniably one of the most important aspects when it comes to search engine rankings. Beginner bloggers usually write a post with a long title that describes the topic in too many words. First, you want to keep the title rather short, (not more than 60 characters) but more importantly, you should aim your focus at optimizing the title tags.
For example, if you write a post titled ‘What Is A Niche Blog And How Do I Create It?’ your title tag should be more targeted towards a keyword, perhaps something like ‘What Is A Niche Blog?’ with ‘a niche blog’ being a possible keyword. You would surely want to check the popularity of the respective keyword with a keyword tool such as Google Adwords before optimizing for it. Consider changing it and you may enjoy a better placement in the search engines and as a result, more visitors.
13. Improper tag usage:
Tags are intrinsic to your efforts, so you have to ensure that your tags are relevant to your product and services your blog offers. For this you have to research for keywords that are frequently searched and include the most important terms in those fields.
14. Maintaining multiple sites:
Managing multiple sites is not a good idea. It is better to invest in one good site, so that your audience visits one location rather than juggling between multiple sites. This will divert more traffic to one main site and page ranking will improve too.
15. Sacrificing Looks For Content:
While many bloggers depend on content to grow their blog, there are some who had become obsessed with the design of their blog. Don’t get me wrong, if you don’t have an appealing design, some visitors won’t be attracted to your website. However, using too many graphics or images will overcrowd your page and slow it down.
I see many sites using Flash and sacrificing page speed for motion and sounds. Definitely an attractive setting, but not a worthy enough tradeoff. This will also prevent search engine bots from being able to crawl your pages at a desirable faster rate.
16. Forgetting the ALT tag:
Though Google does not emphasize on the ALT tags, other search engines like Yahoo, Bing etc. does. A picture if not optimized for a keyword remains only an image file. Therefore, you have to optimize it and for this, you have to use the ALT tag when you insert an image in your post and give the file, which describes your image, a keyword.
17. Using Free Hosting Blogs:
Blog services that offer free hosting such as Blogger, TypePad, and many others, can offer a decent platform and an excellent value. However, they are not flexible enough to be able to install the Plugins, themes, and other extensions you truly desire for superior SEO results.
All it will take is to register your own domain, and to purchase an inexpensive hosting plan. If you do enough shopping around, you shouldn’t spend more than $50 for both for the year. It’s worth a few bucks per month to have total control over your website. The power of independence can reap great rewards when your blogging operation grows.
18. Indexing too much:
This is another SEO mistake many bloggers overlook. Many blogger assume that indexing a page is healthy for SEO purposes regardless of the times you do it. This isn’t the case. You don’t need to index every single page of your blog. Some pages don’t need indexing especially if they don’t contain a lot of content. For instance, you do not need to index printer friendly pages or pages with large photos. You can use sites like query operator to help you discover the pages that don’t need indexing. Indexing should be done adequately for it to be effective.
19. Lack of keyword focus:
Many bloggers lack keyword focus. This is a very common mistake overlooked by very many bloggers. Many bloggers don’t select keywords effectively. Having descriptive tags and category pages is great however you must maintain consistency when selecting keywords that you frequently use throughout your blog. You must practice keyword focus when doing keyword optimization otherwise your keywords won’t be of any good.
20. Utilising generic anchor text:
This is another very common SEO mistake many bloggers overlook. You should avoid using words such as “here” in your blog as anchor text. Using such words will make you miss out SEO potential because such words are generic. Instead you should use text that links to keywords. For effective search engine optimization.
Conclusion
I see additional SEO mistakes regularly, such as the use of generic descriptions for posts, not updating the sitemap, broken 404 pages, and grammatical errors in various site contents. Most of all, I see posts that lack organization and simply contain too much text without separation of any sort, such as spacing or headings. That’s simply unattractive to your valued readers. It takes away from the overall experience, and the quality of your website will take a beating. These SEO mistakes may seem basic to some but shouldn’t be overlooked or ignored. Better yet, consider evaluating your blog right away to ensure that your overall SEO is in check.
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