Top 5 SEO Mistakes Every Blog Should Avoid

There are so many SEO myths out there that it has become nearly impossible to know what is true. This article will point out some of the common SEO mistakes that most bloggers make and how to avoid them.

You might have well-researched and structured blog content, but no better ranking is coming through. Why? It’s important to note that the SEO and digital marketing landscape has significantly evolved over the last decade. With Google’s ever-changing algorithm plus a host of misinformation hitting the SEO and digital marketing spheres every day; you can easily lose focus on the basic practices that should be applied to your blog to enhance its visibility, authority, and ranking.

We are all fully aware of the SEO best practices and secrets, but for some reason, we often fail to leverage the benefits of these tactics. This list of 5 most common SEO mistakes for blogs will help you fix a number of SEO mistakes that you might have overlooked or forgotten about.

1. Duplicate Content

If you are a serious blogger, duplicate web content is a no-go zone. You probably know that posting web content that is already published by other sites is punishable by major search engines. Similarly, using poorly rewritten or spun content from other blogs will only end up hurting your blog’s rankings.

In a slightly different version of duplicate web content, many bloggers try to target the same topic with a variety of very similar keywords. For instance, “make money blogging” and “make money with your blog” are essentially similar. So creating different posts for each keyword may not bring any meaningful additional value to your blog.

2. Un-optimized keyword structure

Keyword search should always be given precedence when designing your internal digital marketing strategy. You should thematically link all on-site web content to your topics and keywords and eventually to your overall business objective.

Many bloggers I know simply write their content to cover general topics, this way, it becomes very difficult for users to find you, however great your content might be. Additionally, without a specific keyword structure in place, it becomes difficult to understand your audience.

Keywords are basically the bridge between the user and your content. Keyword-optimized content plays a major role in position web pages to rank higher organically and drive impressions for targeted searches. This is why your blog content is your number one lead generator.

When creating your content or hiring a content writing service, focus on long-tail keyword phrases and if you can, include questions that begin with how, what, when, where and why. Additionally, include commonly search actionable phrases such as “hacks” “tips” and “guides”

3. Poor page copy

As an SEO consultant with many years of SEO content creation and Marketing, I have always advocated for writing web content for humans with search engines in mind, not the other way round. This simply means that as much as you are targeting to be ranked high in search engines, always put your readers first; make sure your content is appealing, light, and easy to read.

Don’t try to show off your knowledge of the niche jargon or focus too much on optimizing keywords while forgetting the readability and flow of your content. Always make your content valuable to the reader and as actionable as possible. Your blog content should be primarily designed to offer information, create awareness and brand you and your blog as an authority in your niche.

4. Leaving Title Tags Automated

The title tag is currently one of the most important aspects when it comes to search engine rankings. Starter bloggers usually publish posts with long titles and too many descriptive words. First, it’s important that you keep the titles as short as possible, but most important, focus on optimizing the title tags.

For instance, if you’re publishing a post titled “How to create web content that ranks better in Google” you should target your tags towards the keyword. In this case, the keyword could be “web content” so your title could be something like “How to create web content”.

5. Un-optimized images and videos

You probably already know about this, but many times you end up ignoring it. Un-optimized images and video file formats and sizes are the most common causes of extended load time which affect the SEO performance of your site.

The general recommendation is that all vector images should be formatted as .png while on-site images should be formatted as .jpg. Always optimize image alt text with the target keyword to help it rank better in image searches. The alternative text helps the search engine to understand the content of your image and it’s what is displayed when browsers fail to load the image.

When it comes to video optimization, be sure to place all your video files in one folder and create a video site map so that search engines can easily index your videos. Also, remember to optimize the Meta description of all video pages with targeted keywords for indexation.

Conclusion

These are just a few of the very many SEO mistakes that could be hurting your blog. And as you can see, most of them are free and easy to implement even for a beginner blogger. So take some time to skim your site to see if you might have missed any of the above in order to enhance the performance of your site.  Whether you decide to hire a content writing service or write your own articles, always make sure that they are optimized in terms of content, structure and keyword placement.