SEO Mistakes by first-time bloggers may impact adversely to your goal and reaching to right people or searchers.
New bloggers or content writers generally focus more on content and do not focus on some common SEO mistakes.
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is a set of activities by which you improve your blog or websites rank in the search engine results page (SERP).
SEO is the most important aspect for any blogger or webmasters to stay relevant and in front of their audience or readers.
Time is important for bloggers and if you do these common SEO mistakes then you will lose a lot of valuable time.
More importantly, you need to re-work a lot of things to adhere to the standard SEO process.
Common SEO Mistakes Areas
I have come up with top 7 common mistakes generally a blogger does at the beginning related to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and how to avoid those to save time and re-work effort
- Selection of Niche
- Keyword Research
- Quality of Content
- Structure for Growth
- Usage of Tools
- Maintaining the Blog
- Networking (Link Building)
Selection of Niche
If you are writing for a business or a Subject Matter Expert by yourself in any of the topics then its fairly simple to decide the niche
If you are open to any topic then selection of the right topic or subtopic is very important for the success of your blog.
Selection of a blogging niche can be done using extensive research and interest. If you write great blogs but there is no demand for the same topic then no one will read your blog.
Internet or online world is all data-driven and with the help of some free or paid tools you can find out best Niche for your Blog.
It’s always good to start with an area of medium to low competition and target very specific long-tail keywords to generate readers for the blog.
Niche selection should be based on demand from search engines and also your interest or knowledge area. If both matches then it will be good for you to write blogs of good quality regularly.
How a proper Niche helps in SEO
There is a huge competition on the web to reach relevant readers and when you start your blog or website your’s will be a new one.
Competing with already established and old sites will be very difficult and time-consuming hence its always good to find out a proper niche where you can target your readers
Also, the right niche helps you to focus on your strengths and thus keeps you interested in writing good contents or blogs
More on Niche Selection
Below provide more information on how you can select the right Niche the first step towards your blogging journey
- 4 Tips for Finding Your Profitable Blogging Niche from entrepreneur.com
- How to Choose a Profitable Niche from copyblogger
Keyword Research
Keyword Research is the backbone of creating your presence in Digital World and become profitable.
It’s not only required for SEO but also for Social Media Marketing, PPC and all areas of digital marketing.
Since user search starts with keywords so identifying the right keywords or phrases and search intent will help in succeeding in the digital world.
Blogging is no exception. For writing any content or blog you first need to find out the related long-tail keywords.
Generally, enthusiastic and new bloggers focus on writing great content and forget to do proper keywords research.
Each of your blogs should focus on 1 or 2 long-tail keywords with 1 broad keyword.
While long-tail keyword gives you visitors in the near term, board keywords will attract many more visitors once your blog becomes popular and authoritative.
Long-tail keywords may phase out over time but your broad keywords will increase the traffic slowly overtime to compensate.
How keywords help in SEO
The base of each search is keywords. Searchers use a set of keywords to find the appropriate website what they are looking for.
And search engines like google use these keywords and intent of the searchers to search the right content for the readers.
If you do not use the right keywords then whatever effort you put in creating your blog or website it won’t come in front of the audience or readers.
So keywords research is the most important and first thing a blogger or content writer must know and do it properly to identify the right set of keywords for creating the content or blog.
Tools for Keyword Research
There are plenty of tools available for ey words research. Some are from Google and some are free as well. Below is a list of popular tools.
Useful Videos on keyword research
Quality of Content
In the online or digital world, we are seeing the attention span of readers are very less. There are several alternatives available to them so they move from one page to others quickly.
The only thing that can keep your reader attached to your blog or site is the quality of content. If the blog is not well written and the flow of content is not well then the reader will lose interest and leave the site.
Content includes various aspects not only the text. Images, Videos, Infographics etc in your content helps to keep your reader interested in your topic and spend more time on your blog.
Good insights into the topic with data-driven facts in graphs or charts will help users to understand the key aspects without reading the blog in detail.
Sometimes readers glance through the blog and stop by the rich contents like images, infographics, graphs, charts etc.
How content quality helps in SEO
There is no second opinion on the quality of content and how they impact positively your SEO Ranks in search results. So content quality and freshness have to be your top priority from SEO point fo view to rank higher.
Apart from these, we need to also see keyword density, keyword proximity and keyword stuffing etc to ensure we are writing a proper content for readers.
Duplicate content is also a big negative factor and lower rank so as much as possible we should keep the content unique.
A tool to find duplicate content
More on Content Quality
Structure for growth
This is the most commonly occurred mistake by bloggers. When we start the blog we do not plan for its growth in the future. We write one post at a time and sometimes it becomes not so user-friendly or SEO friendly blog or site.
It’s always good to do proper planning for architecture and silo structure in terms of how you want to see your blog or website in future and cater to any growth
How it helps to avoid SEO Mistakes
Search engines can crawl easily a blog having a structured directory and well-architected and siloed content structure.
Valuable reading on website structure
- Site structure: the ultimate guide by Yoast SEO
- 8 blogging site structure tips that’ll get you more traffic
Usage of Tools
The online world is super competitive and without proper tools, its difficult to compete with your competitors and outrank them in search results.
There are various free and paid tools available for numerous activities for making the complex task easy and also take help in those areas where manually it’s not possible
Bloggers or webmasters should start using a few such key tools from start. It’s advisable to also start using a paid tool if possible as it gives much more insights for your content generation and other areas.
How Tools helps to improve SEO
SEO does not produce instant results. It’s a long term strategic activity if not done using tools it may take much more time to give results
There are hundreds of areas of SEO and numerous tools available for almost all areas to automate work or expedite analysis to reduce the time required for SEO.
Common SEO Tools
There is a complete blog for the tools. Below is a list of key tools you need to improve SEO
More on SEO Tools
Maintain the Blog
We keep on writing the blogs and do not focus on how the blog is performing from a visitor count of view and also the content obsolescence point of view.
Sometimes some of the blogs do not perform well and we need to take a look at those blogs and decide to update with appropriate keywords or content or completely taking off from your webpage.
Similarly, some of your blogs or content on your website may become outdated or obsolete. This does not help readers to solve their queries and may impact your site or blog’s image.
How freshness of a blog helps in SEO
Search engines try to serve the searchers with the latest content. They try to avoid outdated and irrelevant content to readers.
By updating the content or post if your blog you ensure not to have an outdated and old or irrelevant content in your blog or website.
This is good from an SEO point of view and also improves your site’s rank over others who are not updating the content regularly.
It’s good to review the existing content or pages and how they are performing. If some of the pages are not having views then you need to update the content with the right keywords or replace with new posts.
Tools
- Google Search Console
- Google Analytics
More on Maintaining your blog
Networking (Link Building or Off-Page SEO)
Internet is a huge web of inter-related sites. Your blog or website can be standalone one and not linked to any other sites but that does not help you to come in a higher rank of google search results.
Building a network and getting links from other sites and giving links from your site to other sites is very important. This is also called Off-Page SEO
Most of the time the first-time blogger may find it difficult and keep it for a later period of time. But it’s good to start thinking about how we get quality links from start and provide contextual internal links.
How Backlinks helps in SEO
In simple terms links from other sites which are also called backlinks validates your content quality and authority. It’s like getting the reference in applying for a job.
Search engines give more value If the backlink or reference is coming from an influential or authoritative site compared to less important of prominent sites.
An adequate number of backlinks from the related area can help your site come higher in search results.
Tools
Generally, you get backlinks by various techniques and one such technique is reaching out to other bloggers or webmasters.
To reach out to relevant sites you need to do lots of research which is difficult and time-consuming if done manually.
There are various tools available for free and paid to work on this area.
- backlink checker from Ahref – https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker
- Backlinks from Niel Patel –https://neilpatel.com/backlinks/
Videos from Ahref
More on Off-Page SEO or Link Building
- What is a Backlink? How to Get More Backlinks by Ahref Blog
Finally…
SEO Mistakes are costly for every blogger and webmasters. Generally, bloggers or webmasters do not pay attention to these common SEO Mistakes. This only delays your site’s visibility and the end goal of reaching your audience. Start SEO from the beginning and avoid the above mistakes to stay relevant and higher in search engine ranks.