8 SEO Mistakes That a Blogger Must Avoid
Purchasing Links:
Keyword Stuffing:
Composing Little Content:
4. You don’t actively promote your blog posts
Don’t expect that because you’ve written what you think is a good post, people will start sharing it on Facebook or tweeting about it.
This is not going to happen in the beginning or until you have managed to build a decent audience (which includes hundreds of email subscribers, thousands of Facebook followers and tens of twitter followers).
Promoting your own work in the beginning is not a mistake at all and it is not something you should be shy about.
It will take a lot of effort, good content and persistence for others to share your work, but once you get to this point everything else becomes easier.
How to promote your blog posts? There are a lot of ways but the most effective are:
- Publish it on your social media pages (both personal and business)
- Share it with your followers (both personal and business)
- Use Facebook Ads to promote your posts to a pre-defined targeted audience (based on the profile of your average visitor)
- Write a summary of the post and publish it on LinkedIn (use LinkedIn publishing platform for long-form posts)
- Send it to your email list
- Link to it from older posts (internal linking)
- Write a guest post and publish it in an authoritative website and link to your post.
5. You are not using Google Search Console and Bing webmaster tools
Not having your website registered with Google Search Console and Bing webmaster tools is like driving with your eyes closed.
Both Google and Bing created the webmaster tools as a way to help website owners find out more about their web properties.
There is absolutely no valid reason why you should not register your website.
There are many benefits to gain and the process is simple and even a beginner can do it.
Instead of guessing what might be wrong and you are not getting as much search engine traffic as you should, open your eyes and take advantage of the feedback given to you by search engines.
6. You are not following a consistent publishing schedule
It doesn’t matter if you publish new content daily, every other day or once a week; what is more important is having a consistent publishing schedule.
Decide in advance how many times you plan to publish new content (and when) and stick to that plan, no matter what.
What I do to make sure that I don’t miss out my plan is prepare a few blog posts in advance so that I have one week to 10 days to find some time and craft new content.
Consistency does have an SEO value and it does bring in more traffic.
Pro Tip: You can also read my previous post: How often should you publish new content to get an idea of how you can create your publishing plan.
7. Your content is not of high quality
Latest trends in SEO are about authority and trust.
Your goal is to build trust between your website and users and authority between your website and search engines.
One of the ways (it’s not the only way) to build authority is by constantly publishing high quality content.
It’s a huge SEO mistake to concentrate on anything else and forget about the importance of content.
Instead of trying to have as many pages published, try to build authority and trust through your content. The benefits are a lot and go beyond achieving high rankings.
What is authoritative content? Content that has the following characteristics:
- Informative and useful to the user
- Accurate
- Insightful
- Analytical
- Unbiased
Pro tip: I urge you to read how to write SEO friendly blogs to get an idea on how to create high quality content and avoid this very basic SEO mistake.
8. You are not following internal linking best practices
Inter-linking your pages together is necessary for 3 reasons:
- You help search engines discover more pages from your website
- A link to an internal page is a signal to search engines that this page is important for your site
- You help users find out more about a subject they are interested in.
Most web site owners don’t even bother to make internal links either because they believe it’s a waste of time or because they are not aware that internal links are good for SEO.
What is internal linking?
Internal linking is when you link from a page to another page in the same website.
Internal links are great for SEO since they allow you to create your own small web by linking your pages together. This helps search engines discover or revisit pages from your website and also gives extra information to users about a particular topic.
The most common mistakes that many webmasters do with internal linking are:
- Not using internal linking at all
- Using too many internal links
- Not using descriptive anchor text when linking to another page
Best practices for internal links are:
Google has many times mentioned that webmasters should pay attention to internal links because it helps them navigate a website better.
The screenshot below is from the Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide published by Google a few years ago.
- Make the links descriptive and avoid using anchor text like “click here” “these” or other words that does not help Google and users understand what the linking page is about.
- Don’t use tag clouds – this is a bad practice of internal links
- When possible add the internal links within the main text of the page (and not in the sidebar)
- Don’t always use keywords in the anchor text but use text that flows naturally in your content.
- Don’t always link new pages with older pages but go back and link old pages with new pages. I know this is hard but you have to add this task in your schedule.
- Make sure that the pages you want to rank higher in the SERPS have the most internal links. You can view the relevant report in Google Search Console.
- Aim to have 2-10 internal links per page (depending on the length and type of content).
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