34 SEO Mistakes To Avoid In Blogging

34 SEO Mistakes To Avoid When Building Successful Blogs

If you are building a blog and putting in your time and efforts you will certainly want your blog to enjoy good visibility. There is no point having a blog that does not enjoy good visibility. Whether it is for improving your brand’s online visibility or it is for making money, you can achieve your blogging goals only when your blog enjoys good visibility. SEO plays a very important role in giving your blog the visibility that it deserves. Sadly, most of the blogs that we see today are not optimized effectively. Many blogs overlook SEO mistakes or too careless about the SEO issues of their blog which is potentially costing them their visibility. Here are some of the SEO blunders that bloggers make, you may not find super advance stuff here but the silliest and the simplest mistakes are the most common ones and you could be making one or more of these mistakes.

1. Not making any SEO efforts

Yes, not taking any SEO efforts could be one of the biggest mistakes that you can make. You cannot think of building a successful brand without SEO today because there are millions of blogs that share the same interest as yours trying to grab the top ten positions in Google and the other search engines.

2. Not paying attention to Google’s latest algorithmic updates

Even if you are not an SEO expert, it is important to keep yourself up to date with the latest Google algorithmic updates. If you are not aware of the latest Google’s updates, cannot be sure whether your SEO service provider is doing the right thing or not. If you are going to optimize your blog yourself, then it is imperative what the internet’s top search engine is expecting of you.

3. Confusing SEO efforts for link building

There is a world of difference between SEO and link building to be confusing one for the other. Link building is just one of the aspects of SEO where as SEO covers a much larger area.

4. Search engine crawlability

You will have to make sure that your blog is fully crawlable and that the search engine bots are capable of parsing through all the blog posts and all the pages. Do not tamper with the robots.txt file that can potentially block the search engine bots from crawling your pages fully.

5. Not having any long term SEO plans

The competition level online is very intense. If at all SEO is going to help your blog get better visibility, you will need to have long term plans for your SEO efforts. Taking random efforts to rank your website will not help you achieve your SEO goals despite spending a lot of money.

6. Not including the right keywords in the page content

Keywords help the search engines understand your blog’s content. Depending on how effectively you make use of your keywords in the blog posts will tell how well search engines can understand your posts and how they rank your blog posts.

7. URL optimization – Custom Permalinks

Are your URLs search engine friendly? Pay attention to the URL structure. Try to avoid all kinds of special characters in the URLs. Make use of the custom permalinks feature to structure your URLs.

8. Keywords stuffing

We did mention that you need to make use of top keywords in your blog posts but it does not mean that you should stuff keywords in your blog posts. Keyword stuffing will only get the negative attention from the search engines and it will hamper your blog’s success rate.

9. Missing topic focus

In one of the earlier posts we had listed hundreds of themes onwhich you can blog.

Adhering to a single topic is very important. If your blog should miss that topic focus then you are likely to confuse the search engines. Google will not know what is your area of focus and to which keywords your blog should be listed. This will put your blog to a great disadvantage. So do not try to be all over the show. If you have multiple interests then you can start multiple blogs provided you can do justice to those blogs as well in terms of providing regular content updates.

10. Not including keywords in the blog titles

Your titles should be catchy but at the same time, your blog titles should also include the top keywords as much as possible. Create meaningful titles that have top keywords in the title.

11. Blocking the comments section

Not allowing the users to comment on your blog posts will be to make a big mistake. Blocking the comments section will be totally miss the point of blogging. Blogging is actually a discussion platform where your readers to should be able to share their views and opinions on the topics on which you are blogging. You can moderate the blog comments to keep a watch on what is featured in your blog.

12. Not being creative with the content posted

If at all you want your blog to be successful, you need to come up with useful and creative content. You might think what is SEO about creativity. The key or the basis of good SEO is about good content. If your content is creatively written, it will get more visitors and your content will be shared more frequently online which will benefit your blog in manifold ways.

13. Posting redundant or rehashed content

If you are going to post duplicate content in your blog then it gives no reason for the internet users to come to your blog as they can find the same information elsewhere. If the information found in your blog could be found elsewhere already then it gives no reason for the search engines to promote your website in the top listings. So make sure that the blog posts share the latest content and original information.

14. Keeping the posts too short

Do not keep your blog posts too short. It does not mean that your content should be lengthy just for the sake of words count but it should also add substantial value to your audience that is reading your posts.

15. Not linking the posts within the blog even when it is possible

Whenever there is a relevant article or post within your blog try to link to the post. It will serve as cross referencing easier and your visitors will be able to find related information on the topic faster. This has a great SEO value too.

16. Getting links to your blog from link farms

Never even dream of obtaining back links from link farms or link directories because such activities will damage your blog’s reputation beyond limits.

17. Unoptimized titles for blog posts

On the one hand your blog titles should have the apt keywords and at the same time it should be meaningful most importantly the blog titles cannot be too long. Ideal length of the title is 60 characters or less.

18. Sacrificing content for design

Visual appeal plays a very important role in making a blog successful but you cannot sacrifice content just for the sake of design. Content should be given priority and then comes the design factors. Striking a balance should not be too difficult as long as you approach a reliable web design company to customize your blog template.

19. No alt attribute for your images

When you include images in your blog posts, it is important to have alt attribute to the images. The original purpose of the alt attribute is that in case your images should fail to load for some reason such as slow internet connection, the alt attribute will be displayed so that the readers will now what should have been there in the image. This has significant SEO impact too when you make meaningful alt attributes with appropriate keywords. Search engines like Google are looking for clues in various important parts of your website including your images to get a better understanding of your blog’s content. The more clues you give the search engines the better it is for your blog.

20. Linking to blogs or websites that are not relevant to your blog topic

If you are linking your blog to another blog, website or web page you should first ask in what way is this link adding value to my readers. The readers to have come to your blog for a very specific reason of reading about the topic of their interest and it is in no way correct to force links that are not of their interest. Search engines are totally against such gimmicks and as a result your blog’s quality score will go down. Your ranking will be affected badly. Before you link to another resource double check its usefulness. Your blogs integrity should not be affected in any way.

21. Not posting regularly

Any blog that aspires to be successful should be updated regularly. Sporadic updates and random posts will take your blog no where. Even the little efforts you are making will be of total waste. In case you do not have the time to populate your blog regularly, you can either invite guest bloggers or hire a blog writer to take care of your writing needs.

22. Improper grammar, punctuation and spelling mistake

Search engines like Google rate websites and give quality score. Not only your blogs are under great competition but even the search engines have to face competition. Only search engines that deliver top quality results will be able to survive the competition. It is not enough that Google delivers just accurate matches but it is also equally important that the listed websites are good quality sites. Along these lines, Google’s ranking algorithm includes factors like grammar, punctuation and spelling mistakes etc., such factors affect the user experience. So make sure that your blogs follow all the language rules. Anything that affects the user experience automatically becomes the concern of the search engines.

23. Intentional typographical errors in the text

When the internet was still new the semantic capabilities of the search engines were very limited. Top search engines like Google indexed even words that had typographical errors. Using this loophole, many websites tried to take the backdoor approach to top ten ranking and intentionally added common typographical errors in the content. Today that is not the case, if an user makes typographical errors while making a search Google will return asking “did you mean…?” and list the results without typographical errors. If your blog articles should use such intentional mistakes then Google will notice you for manipulative ranking behavior and it will have direct impact on your brand’s ranking.

24. Cloaking – adding content that is not visible to the human visitors but just for the search engines

Cloaking used to be one of the biggest problems the search engines had to deal with. Today such practices may not be that prevalent but we cannot say that such practices are completely out of picture. Do not even dream of inserting text or information just for the search engines and hide it from the human readers. It will damage your blog’s reputation beyond repair.

25. Creating content that leaves out the reader completely from the picture

Some of the blogs that we see online are desperately trying to sell a product, brand or service. In this effort, they totally forget the readers and fail to provide content that actually adds value to the readers. Before you publish anything make sure that you double check the value of your content.

26. Not sharing your content in Facebook.

If you are passionate about what you are blogging, you cannot afford to keep your blog posts secret. You will rush to share your posts in Facebook to get as much attention as possible. Search engines look for such signals and not making efforts to secure visibility in Facebook will be a big mistake because Facebook today has turned out to be a power source for traffic to websites and blogs.

27. Not tweeting about your blog posts

When you really care to blog, not caring to tweet about your blog posts will be a mistake again.

28. Not including images in your blog posts

Do your blog posts include images. Adding images to your blog has far reaching benefits. It grabs the attention of the readers, the images get listed in the image search and it gives you an opportunity to pin the images in Pinterest.

29. Not pinning in Pinterest

If you have images added to your blog then you not take advantage of these images and improve the visibility of your blog by pinning the images in Pinterest?

30. Not sharing your content in Google+

Google+ will give your blog excellent visibility. You can give instant visibility to your blog by sharing them in your Google circles and not to make use of Google+ will be to not take advantage of one of the most powerful social media platforms on the web.

31. Not checking whether all your posts are opening correctly and having too many 401 errors.

After posting your article in your blog take a moment to view your post in the actual blog page to see whether everything is working the way you intended them to be working. The images could be in the wrong place or the content formatting could be different. There could be hundreds of other such issues which you need to make sure don’t exist in your blog post. All these boil down to user experience and the associated ranking boost. You should also make sure that there are not 401 errors.

32. Not making your blogs mobile friendly

Millions of people make use of their mobile gadgets and handheld devices to access the internet. Is your blog mobile friendly? Have you ever tried to access your blog through mobile phone? Is your blog content rendering itself correctly in the mobile devices? Just make sure that your blog works fine in mobile phones because you could be potentially losing hundreds of visitors by not making your blog mobile friendly.

33. Giving too much importance to images

Images are important but they are not everything. Is your blog giving too much importance to the images and has skimpy content. If yes, then you will need to reverse the situation and add substantial amount of content and reduce the importance given to the images. Search engines understand content and not the content of the images.

34. Creating all the text just keeping link building in mind.

Very often you will see blogs that are only concerned about link building. All the content will be built around link building. They fail to take into account the interests of the readers that come to the blog. What is the use of getting top ranking if the visitors that come to your blog from those top listings don’t like your blog? It is no good getting traffic for traffic sake. Your ultimate goal is to make your blog desirable and you achieve your business objectives.