Everyone wants their blog posts to rank without understanding how SEO works. Let us face it, without knowing about SEO, it is practically impossible to make your blog a success story.
Bloggers believe that by devoting all their attention, effort, and energy to creating content, they will be able to draw in the traffic, metrics, and leads. Not at all.
According to leading digital marketing experts, the success of a blog depends on bloggers being aware of and executing SEO strategies. Even though this is a given, the question arises- why do bloggers not do SEO?
The simple answer is because it is difficult!
Contrary to popular belief, formulating and executing a performance-oriented SEO strategy is no child’s play. While you have tons of online resources to teach you what you should be doing, the fact remains, that executing the same is tough.
If you are someone who has started blogging very recently, you should be paying attention to what we have to say.
In this resource article, we are going to discuss seven SEO mistakes that bloggers should avoid making. If they avoid these mistakes, they can turn around the fortunes of their blog. Before we get to the list of mistakes, let us first look to define Blog SEO.
Blog Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Meaning and Definition
First things first. Blog SEO is different from SEO that looks to rank brand sites and their product and service pages. In other words, if you are a blogger, you need to follow SEO strategies that are tailor-made for improving the performance of your blog.
In very simple words, Blog SEO refers to the overall process of creating and optimizing blog content for your blogging website. Optimizations are required if you want your site to start ranking on Google’s Search Engine Rankings Page or SERPs.
Blog SEO involves looking after everything-
- Keyword research,
- Creating content,
- Working for On-Page success, and
- Engaging in link building.
Yes, even if you have a blogging site, you need to build links on your blog articles.
Blog SEO allows bloggers to ensure a steady stream of traffic to their blogging websites. In this regard, traffic from search engines is considered the most durable and steady form of traffic that will help power your blog’s metrics, reach, rankings, and traffic figures!
List of 7 SEO Mistakes Bloggers need to Avoid Making
1. Creating Thin Content-
One of the golden rules of SEO is creating high-quality, long-format content. Bloggers need to understand that what they are writing needs to provide some value to the readers. Sometimes this often gets overlooked when too many technical optimizations are piled on top.
However, the fact remains that high-quality content will help set the foundation for all the SEO strategies that are going to come later on. Take a step back, check with authority articles that are ranking and evaluate your content.
See where you stand. If you feel you are nowhere close to where the leaders are, go back to the drawing board and start all over again. Bloggers need to determine the experience of the users after they have gone through the article. If this is perfect, you have set yourself up for success.
2. Adhoc Keyword Research-
According to leading experts at an seo company dubai, keyword research is as much an art, as it is a science. This means that bloggers need to understand the value and benefit of sound keyword research. If you do not have the money to invest in paid tools, there are tons of options that can help you.
Start with Google’s very own keyword planner and then move on to Keywords Explorer. You need to understand keywords to help gain an idea about what users are searching for online. Once you have that at your disposal, you need to structure your content around keywords.
Additionally, keywords act as breadcrumbs for Google’s algorithms. It understands what the article is all about after locating a specific set of keywords. Ensure you are not cutting corners when it comes to keyword research for your blogging site.
3. Having Heavy Images, Videos, Animation, and Infographics on your Blog-
Content in different forms and types is always welcome. It helps in creating a better and more engaging experience for the readers. However, there is one major danger you need to contend with. Having a working knowledge of how Technical SEO operates helps bloggers.
If you have tons of unoptimized images, videos, animation, graphics, etc. on your blogging site, the same can become very slow thanks to all the weight and load. Make sure that you are using software or plug-in that helps in optimizing by compressing the size of the videos and images.
Google’s algorithms hate a blog site that has a poor loading speed. It acknowledges it as something that compromises the user experience. Bloggers need to be always mindful of the fact that they need to pay attention to Technical SEO for improving performance.
4. Forgetting about Internal Linking and Improving Site Navigation-
Most of the resource articles that you go through on Blog SEO point to one area that needs to be focussed on. This area is interlinking different pages of your blog site with one another. However, this is not something you are supposed to do in a discretionary manner.
There is a lot of thought involved when interlinking your blog pages. Make sure that the articles you are linking to are relevant for the audiences in their journey. If it is something opposite of what they were reading, Google will penalize you for leading users on a misleading experience.
Interlinking is important as it helps improve the site’s navigation and improves organic sessions. Both these are positive signs that can help improve metrics and rankings. Make sure to pay attention to the correct way of interlinking articles and pages on your blog.
5. Being Careless on Duplicate and Plagiarized Content-
No matter what you do, never publish duplicate content on your blog pages. For Google’s search algorithm, this is a cardinal sin that can invite manual action from the search engine. You might think that borrowing a couple of paragraphs here and there will not make a difference.
However, that is not the case. Bloggers who use freelance content writers to create blog content need to use a plagiarism checker tool to ensure that the content they are publishing on their blog site is 100% original.
According to leading SEO experts, Google only provides value and benefit to the original publisher of the content and no one else. Even if you are giving reference links crediting the original web page, you can still invite trouble.
6. Failing to Promote the Content you have Published on your Blog Site-
If you are not an authority site and expect everyone to discover your content organically, think again. Failure to promote a well-written blog on different digital platforms is one reason why blogs fail.
Bloggers need to understand that we are living in an era dominated by social media and Q and A platforms. Effective promotion of your blog on both these will help divert traffic to your blog site. For example, you need to present yourself as an authority on a Quora question thread (that you have written the blog about).
Try to write an informative 200-word response and place the link to your blog. If the readers are convinced with your inputs, they will have no hesitation in clicking on the link and going to your blog article.
7. Not working on establishing Relationships and Networks with others-
The blogging community is a tightly knit one. There are many instances of kindness where a fellow blogger will help you out with a link when you are starting out. If you want your outreach strategies to be a success, make sure you are working on building those relationships.
Networking on social media platforms, forums, and community sites is important. Not only will you get to know a lot about SEO and Google updates, but there might also be plenty of monetizing opportunities that might come your way.
This is why bloggers need to invest in building long-term relationships with stakeholders in this industry. Courteous responses to emails, answering contact form queries, and being active on community sites can go a long way in this regard.
The Bottom Line
Blog SEO means that your content creation strategy needs to be in line with your SEO efforts. Bloggers cannot afford to be just great at creating content and forget all about On-Page and Off-Page SEO optimizations. By avoiding the mistakes mentioned in the article, bloggers can make sure that their blog site is successful.
Creating a performance blog that has metrics, traffic, and monetization opportunities is not easy. However, neither is it impossible to achieve!
If you have any other questions or doubts on Blog SEO, or would like to add something to the article, please do so in the comments section below. We would love to hear your thoughts after reading the article.