Every blogger knows the importance of search engine optimization. Without proper SEO, getting organic traffic from major search engines like Google can get difficult. And since search engine traffic is free and highly targeted, no blogger should miss out on it. However, if you look around you will find that there are many bloggers that tend to make SEO mistakes that cost them in the long run. In the following article we look into a few common mistakes that you should avoid as a blogger if you’re looking out to get ranked high on the search engine result pages….
#1: Purchasing Links
When you buy links, you take a risk that can cause damage to your relationship with Google and other search engines. While it may give you a temporary boost, it will definitely prove to be harmful as time goes by.
There are many times when paid links are flagged by Google and this can affect your rankings. For example, if you purchase a few hundred links to have them pointed to your own website, all on the same day, you may have some of these links flagged not only for irregular link activity but also for other reasons if the links are not relevant.
#2: Duplicate Content
Google wants your blog to bring value to the table. If you’re going to create duplicate content on your blog with only little variation just for the purpose of populating your site then it’s not a good practice. For instance, ‘understanding section 529 college savings plans’ and ‘knowing section 529 college savings plans’ are pretty similar topics – so even if you create a totally different page or post for both these keywords, it will still put you at risk of getting a search engine penalty. The Big G has an advanced algorithm that can easily catch you playing with topics/keywords that are identical.
So what’s the solution? Taking our above 529 plans example, what you can do is penetrate this topic and go into the details in order to find subtopics that you can work with. The deeper you go, the better it is. This will help you in strengthening each of your blog post and also give you the needed edge over the competition.
#3: Writing Little Content
Gone are the days when you could write a 300-400 word blog post and have it ranked in Google. Today, things are different after the infamous Google Panda and Penguin updates. You have to work on your content and create something that’s worth it – or else it simply doesn’t make it to the front page.
The reason why Google made this update is because there were many junk websites or blogs with little content were ranking high due to factors such as a high number of incoming links. But now your blog has to have in-depth content that is not only written well but is also organized well.
So what does this mean to you? Let’s say you run an education blog and you’re writing about the cost of living that a student would incur when moving to a new city. Don’t just write a few paragraphs about it. Go in-depth in explaining the why and the how. Use facts, figures and link to other education sites/blogs that discuss the cost of living factor. This will only add more depth to your content, but will also make it more valuable helping attract more quality incoming links.
Conclusion
The above SEO mistakes that we discussed are pretty common amongst bloggers, but they’re also big. So if you are making these mistakes then it’s about time you fix them to rank better in the search engines.
