Bloggers are often consumed with the task of trying to get more organic search traffic to their website. When this happens, bloggers often make some fatal SEO flaws simply because they do not know what they are doing or have not yet learned from their mistakes. By avoiding these seven common SEO mistakes bloggers make, you can help ensure that your website receives more organic traffic in a shorter time period.
1. Writing for the Search Engines
One common SEO mistake bloggers make is writing for the search engines and not their readers. If you only write for the search engines, you will end up with low quality content on your website that people do not enjoy reading, which will hurt your search engine rankings in the process as your site will not have the positive metrics search engines are looking for these days.
2. Ignoring Social Media
Another mistake bloggers make is ignoring social media. Since bloggers are worried about organic search traffic, they often to do not put too much effort into their website’s social media presence. This is a huge mistake to make as a strong social media presence signals to the search engines that your website has high quality content, and will result in higher search engine rankings.
3. Poor On-Page SEO
Internet marketing experts, such as Atlanta SEO expert, Everspark Interactive, often find that one simple SEO mistake that bloggers make which can be easily fixed, is poor on-page SEO. If you are not placing your target keywords in the title tags, headers or meta description of each blog post, you will have a difficult time ranking for those keywords. Also, implementing a strong internal linking structure can help improve the ranking of your individual posts by allowing search engines to easily index all of your content while also helping the bots understand what your content is about.
4. Building Poor Links
Building low quality links is another common SEO mistake that is easily avoidable. Most bloggers know they need to build links in order to run a successful SEO campaign but they do not know which types of links to build. If you build too many low quality links, your website will be penalized by the search engines and possibly removed from the results all together. By focusing your link building efforts on securing links from reputable, high quality sites, you will ensure that your website is not penalized for having too many “spammy” linking backlinks.
5. Anchor Text Over Optimization
When building backlinks, it is important that you make them look as natural as possible. Using the same keyword as your anchor text over and over is a surefire way to signal to the search engines that your links are not natural. By making sure that your anchor text is diversified, you will eliminate any chances of your website being penalized in the search results for having an unnatural looking backlink profile.
6. Using Free Hosting
If you run a blog, it is best that you host the blog yourself. Using free hosting for your blog does not provide you with the same level of control that having your own hosting does. When you host your own blog, you are able to control every aspect of your blog and do not need to adhere to the terms and conditions of the free hosting company.
7. Poor User Experience
One other common SEO mistake bloggers make is failing to focus on the user experience associated with their blog. While it is wise to make sure your blog is full of valuable, high quality content, that content is useless if your visitors cannot find it. When you are able to provide your visitors with a great user experience, they will be more likely to return in the future and share your blog with their social circles, which in turn will help improve your website’s rankings as search engines are now looking for these types of metrics when determining where to place a website in the search results.
Many bloggers struggle with their websites because they are unable to gain visitors from the organic search listings. By avoiding the common SEO mistakes listed in this article, you will increase your blog’s chances of becoming a success by allowing more people to find your website via the organic search results.
As a former blog owner and affilliate marketeer, author Georgina Clatworthy has had to learn the hard way to avoid many of the common SEO mistakes blog and site owners make. Researching the latest best practises from those in the know such as Atlanta SEO expert company, Everspark Interactive should help you avoid many of the above and set you on the way to making your blog popular and fun to write.
