Running blogs isn’t a piece of cake. But before getting down to exactly why that is, we need to acknowledge that blog owners have advantages like publicity and advertising of their product or service, communicating with readers, writing/design/SEO/etc. skills development, and a lot more advantages that make running blogs an exciting occupation.
We’re back again to the not-a-piece-of-cake part. Aside from the skills mentioned above, blog owners have to work hard to create awesome product. And while doing them, they obviously overcome numerous difficulties. And make mistakes. Bad news: Nobody, in fact, is perfect. Good news: You can avoid disastrous mistakes. By the way, do you know what you’ve got to do?
Lucky we are to have the Internet, the great online network where people share their experiences and help other users avoid mistakes. We have a chance to read guides and articles devoted to any problem we need to solve. We learn what we need to do and see what mistakes we need to avoid in the process. This guide covers possible mistakes.
To be precise, here you can read about SEO mistakes. Some bloggers ignore this aspect, and this is the beginning of the end. SEO is one of the most important tools that provide a high rating for your blogs, and all the experienced bloggers keep this in mind. They care a lot about website optimization. Obviously, you know the lion’s share of these mistakes, but a little revision never killed anybody.
1. Dealing with SEO at the end
When you start a new website, SEO must be among the first things you consider. If you’re not a SEO expert, you can at least try to stick to some basic SEO checklist items:
- consider keywords in the text body and URLs
- optimize images
- insert internal and external links
- create original content
- Make your blog user-friendly, etc.
2. Tracking website analytics
Keep your finger on the pulse. Check your web analytics to discover how many unique visitors were on your blog, what they did there, and what materials they viewed. Every week (or once every few days) devote some time to analyzing your website traffic, and based on this, revise your web strategy. Give these web analytics tools a try: Open Web Analytics, PIWIK and Mint.
3. Expecting quick SEO results
Though you have to constantly track your website analytics, it takes some time for your blog SEO activity to show results. Don’t rush it: If you’ve just created a blog, don’t expect too much from it. SEO results will be seen over a period of time. Nevertheless, some results will be achieved in a week or less. For example, if you correct fundamental blog optimization mistakes like no interlinking between blog articles or duplicated content and titles, your SEO rankings will be improved in the short run.
4. Writing poorly
The more you write keywords in your web copy, the better ranking you get, right? False! First of all, a huge amount of irrelevant keywords looks miserable and defective. Secondly, it doesn’t produce an impressive SEO result. According to NewsCred, 53% of marketers rank content creation as the single most effective SEO tactic, and it makes sense. So what a good SEO text should look like?
- First off, it needs to be original so duplicate content didn’t affect rankings.
- Secondly, it should contain relevant keywords both in text body and titles, image alt, meta description and more.
- And thirdly, your blog posts are to be readable. It means that you have to create a clear blog post structure including subheadings, lists, make smaller paragraphs and indent the text.
5. Plagiarizing content
One of the worst things for any writer is to copy another author’s writing. If the original author checks content similarities with anti-plagiarism software and finds you took something that doesn’t belong to you, consequences can be awful. For example, your website can be blocked. Someday, you’ll be able to restore it, but your reputation can be ruined once and for all. You can use these checkers to make sure your content is original:
6. Duplicating content
Generally speaking, any type of duplications (both your own and another author’s content) is rather dangerous. You posted something a month ago, and now you’re writing on the same topic again and telling the same things. Not good. The same copy causes misunderstandings with indexation and traffic, and you only damage your blog. That’s why it’s much better to update your blog pages. Here’s what you got to do:
- Don’t create a new URL
- Insert new keywords
- Promote the post again via social media
- Renew meta description as well
7. Non-unique page titles
Unoriginal or inexplicable page titles won’t benefit you. Write relevant, clear and unique page titles manually in order to keep them SEO-friendly and understandable for web users. The same thing with images you use – try to optimize titles and alt tags for them. Titles should:
- Be unique for every blog page
- Contain keywords
- Be catchy
As an example, TWELVESKIP suggests more than 100 templates of attention-grabbing titles, so you can try any of them.
8. Picking keywords
You can do this procedure once when starting a blog and then repeat it after you run out of keywords. You should agree that it’s better than searching for relevant keywords after each blog article is written. Create a document where you can store keywords and mark those you’ve already used in order not to get lost in a huge amount of selected keywords. It’s good to use Google AdWords since it’s an irreplaceable tool that finds appropriate keywords and suggests related ones. Other alternatives are SEMrush or SERPSTAT.
9. Lame optimization
Bloggers tend to optimize, for example, only ten out of every hundred pages and stuff them with numerous keywords. And this is the thing that hinders your success – optimize all your blog pages for good SEO results.
In order to improve your blog optimization, you can use any of these online tools: Google Search Console, Xenu and ahrefs. They will automatically help you correct broken backlinks, explore blog position in the web, track blog mentions and more.
10. Ignoring readers
Your readers leave questions in a comment section on your website, so ask some questions. If you ignore their comments and don’t start discussions, readers lose interest to your blog. The end. You see, it’s not the best start.
One of the most widespread ways to encourage readers to commenting is to call to action in the end of your blog post. Ask what they think of the subject, what else they can add, how they would solve the issue if they were you, what was their personal experience. Also answer your readers comments promptly. And the final tip: Make commenting function easy so the readers could figure out how everything works at once.
How’s your SEO knowledge?
These are just the most common mistakes that blog owners usually make. There’s a lot more that you’ve already discover while running your web resource. What are these mistakes? And how did you correct them? Please leave your comments and recommend other users your own methods of dealing with SEO problems.
The post SEO Mistakes To Be Avoided At All Costs appeared first on GetResponse Blog - Email Marketing Tips.
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