Search engine optimization (or SEO) is important to any successful blogging campaign, whether it’s a personal journal where you share your thoughts on your favorite things or a business networking tool where you share your experience with the world. Because optimization is such a complex group of techniques and strategies, there is a lot of false information floating around the internet that many inexperienced people take for granted. We have compiled a list of 8 SEO mistakes that you should avoid at all costs.
1. Automated Labels – Most beginners will write a post that has a long title, which describes the topic using too many words. You should keep your titles short (no more than 60 characters) and optimize the tag using the keywords you are trying to target.
2. purchase links – While you may get some kind of short-term boost in your rankings by buying links, you are playing a dangerous game by making this kind of decision. Google bots are trained to look for questionable link patterns and they will catch you.
3. Chasing PageRank – While it is true that PageRank is important to the success of your blog, it is important to remember that this is not the only factor related to its success. Use your SEO strategy to focus on other elements, like analytics and relevance.
4. Duplicate content – Some people think that creating pages for similar keywords is a great way to improve your rankings. However, this often leads to duplicate content, since there isn’t much you can say about the keywords before there’s nothing left.
5. free blogging – While there are many free blogging services out there that can provide you with a good platform to post on, these types of services are not compatible with plugins, themes, and other extensions that you want to use as part of your SEO strategy.
6. Keyword Stuffing – This is one of the most common mistakes out there, even though it is completely unethical and actually ends up hurting your rankings. Aim for separate pages for each keyword, don’t use hidden content, and focus on creating useful pages.
7. Little content – Many blogs tend to be full of posts that are simply too short. The main way this hurts your SEO strategy is that it can affect the loyalty of your readers – they will come to expect a certain quality from your posts and you cannot alter this.
8. Sacrifice the content – While it’s important that your blog has a nice design, otherwise potential readers won’t be drawn to it, you should avoid becoming too obsessed with how it looks. Don’t clutter the page and keep graphics to a minimum.
While there are, of course, a number of other SEO mistakes that you should avoid making at all costs, the ones we’ve outlined above involve the mistakes we’ve found to be made most often. They will greatly affect the success of your blog and its potential ranking. It doesn’t matter if your blog is for personal or business reasons: if you want it to be successful, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with each of the SEO mistakes above and avoid making them in your own posts.
