Read the first part here Avoid Simple SEO Mistakes And Increase Traffic To Your Blog. Let us continue our discussion to explore SEO mistakes that can reduce traffic to your blog.
6. Using PLR articles to save time
Content writing is one of the most important blogging activity. Writing articles consumes lot of time and can be very taxing on the health of a blogger. Hence, most bloggers instead of writing unique content try to save time by buying cheap articles and publishing them on their blog. Such articles are PLR (Private Label Rights) articles. Before buying any PLR article, you need to make sure that the article is unique and not published anywhere else.
Google imposes a heavy penalty on sites posting copied content. Copied content is not good for reader experience and search engine rankings. Imagine if you are searching for a particular information on Google and you get the same article in the top 10 results. Will it help you? Certainly not. Purpose of Google search engine is to give you all the possible information related to your search and this is possible when there is variety in the search engine results.
7. Not optimizing URL and post headers
URL of the blog should contain the primary keywords. Most sites have URL similar to the blog post title. If possible, avoid long URLs by skipping the stop words in your blog post title. Having a consistent URL structure helps search engines track and index your site quickly. In addition, the blog title and the Meta tags should include the target keywords. The blog post title should contain the primary keyword of your blog post. The Meta description can include your primary and other target keywords. Search engine results will display your post title and Meta description in the search result snippet. Making the title relevant and interesting will help you get more readers for your blog.
8. Not using Google Analytics or spending too much time on it
Google analytics is a very important tool used by bloggers to track their sites’ progress. It will give your accurate analysis of traffic to your blog. You can use it to see which content is doing well and which content is not lagging behind. This will help you to understand and adapt as per the audience requirements. Some of the bloggers spend too much time in analyzing the data and forget about their remaining duties as a blogger. As compared to analyzing the data every day, it is better to analyse your sites’ performance once a week. This will help you understand your audience and define plan of action for the upcoming week.
9. Not optimizing for other search engines
Google is the leading search engine but you cannot ignore other search engines like Bing and Yahoo. They are capable of sending huge traffic to your blog. Try to optimize website content so that it can be crawled and indexed by other search engines apart from Google. In addition, content is structure in a manner so that it makes it easy to share on all social networking websites. Do not forget to make use of local SEO to get top priority in local search results.
10. Not removing dead links
Removing dead links is as important as link building. A site full of dead links will reduce user experience and attract penalty from search engines. If a user clicks on the link and ends up on a wrong page or page that does not exist anymore, he will have a very bad experience. Such experience shows carelessness of a blogger and affects the attractiveness of the blogger. A user with such kind of experience may not visit the blog again. To avoid such instance one can make use of various online tools to hunt for dead links on a blog. A site with too many dead links will lose its credibility in Google and may be delisted. To avoid such things from happening to your blog, it is very important to make sure that all the links are live and relevant.
How do you perform SEO on your blog? How do you strike the perfect balance of quality content, SEO and user-friendly blog? Please share your thoughts and experiences with us by commenting on this post.
