SEO Mistakes That Even Professionals Make Without Realizing

In the past, SEO was easy and literally anyone could have gotten great results after reading a few tutorials. Nowadays, everything is highly complex. We can easily end up making mistakes without realizing it. Even professionals end up in this situation.

What you need to do is take a step back and look at search engine optimization from an objective point of view. In the event that you think some strategy or technique is weird because it does not seem natural, there is a huge chance that you are correct.

In order to help you out a little, we will talk about some mistakes that a lot of professionals make. We are sure that this will help you in your blogging career.

Too Many Rich Keyword Anchor Links

Google understood a long time ago that when they see that the majority of web links towards a particular page is made out of the same exact phrase, something unnatural was happening. This is extremely true today. Think about how you link to other blog posts or sites.

Do you always use the same text like another blogger? Since you do not do that, why would that be good for you? Try to have variety since that will help out a lot and it is also a very good idea to try to include your site brand in the links after the latest Penguin update.

Too Many Links In A Short Span Of Time

More links mean more popularity, right? Wrong! Well, at least when thinking about how fast you receive those links. The truth is that when you keep getting a lot of links after you just launched your site or wrote an article, Google realizes that something is fishy.

Organic links are a lot more important and these are the ones you should be after. Steady and slow link building is what the SEO specialist needs to focus on.

Excess Homepage Links

You believe that you can build authority on your home page and that part of it will rub off on other site pages. This is not actually like that. Once again, think about it. When you link to a site naturally, do you link the home page or the page with the information that is relevant to what you write?

Really Bad Content

The best thing that you can do is write pages that have around 2000 words. That is difficult, we know, but just test it out.

When most of your site is filled with 200 words pages, the quality offered is definitely lower than when comparing with another site that has around the same pages but each one is around 1000 words. Which articles are more likely to be shared? Those shares bring in natural, organic links.

Failing To Understand The Importance Of Loading Time

There is a reason why hosting companies offer dedicated servers. It is because they are better than shared hosting. When your site loads at a very low rate and your hosting provider is to blame, you need to change that provider. A page that loads slowly will make the visitor leave. It will not bring in many natural links and this hurts your overall SEO strategy.

Just One Backlink Type

You found a service that allows you to get backlinks from niche blogs with high authority. That is great. BUT! Quality content generates different types of backlinks and has authority established in different ways. You should always think about social share, site age, author rank and where the links come from.

The bottom line is that most SEO professionals end up sticking to just one path. This is the worst mistake. If you want your blog to be a success, you need to branch out and mix things up.

Register with the Keepers of the Keys

First off, if you have yourself a blog then you have yourself a shiny website [applause!]. In order for search engines to better recognise, index and return your pages in search results you need to build and register your sitemap with all the major players, from Google to yahoo with Bing in the middle.

This sounds daunting but it really isn’t; there are plenty of free programmes online, such as Google Webmaster Tools, to help you and in the space of minutes you’ll have announced your arrival to the Google Gods.

Keyword Research

Now your site is indexed, how about making your posts more visible to search engine users? The trick here is to think like your reader; it’s unlikely someone from Chippenham looking for information on vegan food festivals is going to type ‘vegan’ into the search box and find your Wiltshire based food blog. But if your content is filled with helpful words like festival, food, review, Wiltshire, vegan recipes, event etc., it’s far more likely that your little gem of a site will be stumbled across.

Draw up a list of anything and everything that is relevant to your article, to you as a writer and to you as a reader. Drop specific phrases that reflect your specialism into every piece you write (but only if they flow naturally) and you’re increasing your chances of climbing up the rankings, thereby enticing some lucky so-and-so to read and maybe even share your content.

To Make Friends, Be Friendly!

Make your site search-friendly. Ensure that all your links work and that your photos and videos are the right file size – nothing puts off a visitor more than a page taking an eternity to load.

Don’t limit applying your keywords to just written content – ensure that every page of your site has a title relevant to the content. Charismatic and cryptic page titles will do you no favours. While you’re at it, don’t forget that people search for images and media too, so make sure that every video, photo or file you post has a great title and relevant tags, reflecting its content accurately and with relevance to your site.

Meta data: scary, technological phrase which, for bloggers, basically translates as a short summary of your article. The meta description will appear next to the title and page link in search engines and when you share your article on social media. Try to make it succinct, relevant and intriguing and you’ll increase your chances of readers clicking said link.

Interlink between your own content wherever possible. If an article you wrote a year ago has relevance to your most recent blog, offer a link to it in the body of your work, giving the reader yet more reasons to read your masterful content.

Note: never use ‘click here’ for the title of a hyperlink – as a purveyor of words you should be able to make the title fit seamlessly into a sentence (and it looks significantly more professional).

Share and Share Alike

You’ve checked your content is visible; now make it shareable by adding social media widgets to each post, making it easy as pie for readers to let their friends know how your writing has brightened their day.

In turn, it’s nice to be sociable and share the work of other blogs you admire – if you’re lucky, you’ll become known by other bloggers and they may even link to your pages on their site! This is called outreach and is actually pretty essential to blog marketing.

Start a conversation with your readers by inviting comments and suggestions on the topic of your blog. A call to action at the end of a good post will inspire the reader to share their thoughts and the more a blog is talked about, the higher the chances of it crawling up the search result rankings.