A healthy viewership is absolutely vital to keep a blog operating successfully. One of the most preferred ways to generate viewers is by implementing SEO strategies into your blog. SEO, short for search engine optimization, is an internet marketing strategy that gives certain, well-linked sited higher visibility in search engine results. Basically, the higher the visibility, the higher the chances of fishing out viewers.
All marketing strategies, including SEO, require proper implementation in order to be successful. In order for SEO to be successful, you have to know what you’re doing and what SEO mistakes you should avoid. If you’re a blogger and are planning on building an SEO strategy for your blog, here are 5 common mistakes new SEO bloggers make on their first month of internet marketing.
Avoid Free Hosting Sites
If you’re new to the blogging world and have started building an SEO strategy to go with your free hosting blog site (Blogger, Typad, etc,), stop and step away from the computer. Because you’re using a free hosting site for your blog, you’re limiting your Plugins, themes and blogging tools that are necessary for good SEO results. Instead, try going with a premium host site that can give you your own domain for a reasonable price.
Buying Links
Sure, buying links can help you rank higher in search results, but this effect wears off pretty fast. When you buy links, it’s easy to create an obvious pattern of restricted linking. You may be able to get away with it at first, but sites like Google will be able to detect “irregular linking activity”. Instead of buying a link for your blog, why not try manually linking your blog with high-ranking sites? It’s free and perfectly safe, at least for Google’s standards.
Lack of Organization
It’s common for blog owners to forget to enumerate or add categories to their blog pages. In SEO, the more organized your blog or site is, the more you can boost visibility on search engines. SEO also revolves around user-friendly content, the more user friendly your page set-up is, the more popular your blog and the higher you will rank. So next time you’re making changes to the structure of your site, organize, enumerate and categorize your blog in order to maximize “crawl depth” (easy accessed information for search engines).
Forgetting to Share
Blogs and social media platforms have a close relationship, meaning that blogs that rank high in search engine results usually have sharing options built into the website. Sometimes, blog owners forget to add these capabilities due to time restraints or lack of experience. By adding social media sharing buttons, you’ll be able to spread the content that you generate across social media platforms, thus, maximizing reach. Sharing across social media platforms will also earn your blog mentions and new audiences, all of which are easily measured with social media metrics and Google analytical tools.
Short Posts
At times, blogger just want to post short, random information in order to stuff a keyword within the body of the text. When your posts all less than 400 words, search engines will see your blog or site as “low quality” and ranking you at the bottom of search results. Internet marketing extraordinaire, Mark Vena, explains that search engines consider quality posts to be between 500-600 words with relevant keywords distributed appropriately within the body of text, a common length between the most successful blogs. Writing quality posts like these will help you climb the search engine ranks.
Building an effective SEO strategy can be somewhat difficult, but if you know what mistakes to avoid, you’ll have a much clearer picture of how to build an effective strategy and how to implement it successfully. Happy blogging!
