Top 20 SEO Mistakes That Kill Your Blog - Semalt Overview
The relevance of this topic is due to the fact that most entrepreneurs and business owners understand the importance of providing additional information about their product, the life of the company, and new services on their website in a blog format.
At the same time, due to the presence of a lot of conflicting information on the Internet about SEO, and more often due to absolute lack of knowledge or negligence, gross SEO mistakes are made in the optimization of blog articles, which can simply ruin a good undertaking.
So, Semalt, the best SEO agency, has identified 20 of the most serious and common SEO mistakes that are made not only by beginners, but also by experienced specialists, and we also commented on how to fix or avoid each mistake.
Top SEO mistakes
Find out below the main SEO errors:
1. SEO texts
After the release of the Baden-Baden algorithm, everything that falls under the definition of over-optimization will fly out of the search with a whistle. A large number of such pages can ruin not only a blog but the entire site as a whole. Simply put, search engines don't like this kind of "magic".
2. Unskilled copywriters
who do not understand what they are writing about. It doesn't matter how much they charge for 1000 characters, 50 dollars or 500, if they do not understand and do not even try to understand for whom and why they are writing, just to fulfill the blog. Uniqueness 100%, use of keywords in different forms, etc.
Look for a copywriter who understands the topic and can write interesting texts for each separate heading in the blog, and not trying to fill the blog with useless topics that are not related to your main thematic.
3. Randomness
Themes for all materials are created on the fly, about 5 minutes before the scheduled publication. As a result, your blog lacks integrity and order. Materials are written and published as if they are not tied to any single goal.
Make a plan and follow it, don't try to come up with it on the go.
4. Endless rewrite
Let's say you are running a blog of a beauty salon and as a text about new products in nail design in 2017, you simply rewrite an already rewritten article from another beauty salon blog from 2016, which is a rewrite of the same article only from 2012.
And at least that's all. The new is the well-forgotten old, instead of the actual material that is interesting to the target audience, the output is a chewed newspaper.
Write relevant and really interesting texts that will be useful and interesting to the reader.
5. Theft
Even worse (the worst thing that can happen to a blog) is copying someone else's content to your site. Why invent a bicycle? Here and so everything is written, you can even insert pieces from a couple of sources, add your own conclusion, and "it seems like nothing happens".
There is only one recommendation here - write the texts yourself!
6. Do not modify articles, do not update old content
Published and already well.
Refinement of the article based on data from the panels of webmasters helps to at least climb 3-4 positions, and maximize search traffic by 587%!
7. Complete lack of SEO optimization
Articles are simply written and published, because SEO is long dead, and therefore if you think so, blog pages are not in the search.
To get started, check out Semalt SEO section on our website.
8. Write for yourself, not knowing what is interesting to the target audience
Then it's better to write a book or stories, there will obviously be more benefits.
You need to write not about what the director of the company wants, but about what your potential customers are interested in, the selection of topics for blog articles should be based on the selection of key queries.
9. SEO bum
Most often, this is the result of blog registration in +100500 directories. Bypass these outdated link garbage dumps and do not believe that this is a white directory and so on, otherwise your site will turn into an SEO bum, which is known only in link garbage dumps. The same applies to the bulk purchase of links using various services.
It is best to buy links from thematic, reliable resources. The cost of such a link will, of course, be more expensive, but the value will also be several times higher than 100 low-quality ones.
10. Your blog and your company's core services are separate
Not understanding how you can promote the main pages of the site using a blog. This will lead you to the logical conclusion that writing articles for a blog is a waste of time.
11. There are no internal links that will help further study the topic
Please note that some of the words in this article are links, by clicking on which you can find useful and important information on the topic of the highlighted word and thus form a more complete understanding.
12. Don't cover the topic completely
That is you generate low-quality content that no one will read, much less reread.
And as you know, recently search engines work not only with keywords and SEO settings, but also with meanings.
Expand each topic as deeply as possible.
13. Texts are not copy protected
To make search engines understand that your texts are your texts, add them through the webmaster's panel.
In the Yandex webmasters panel, before publishing, add the text, in the "Site Information" section - "Original texts".
In the Google webmasters panel, after publication, in the "Scanning" section - "View as Google bot".
14. Lack of AMP pages
With the growth of mobile traffic, you need not only a responsive and fast website, but also accelerated (AMP) pages that load instantly.
Make AMP Pages.
15. 1 year = 1 article or irregular blog update
Thus, you lose not only readers who stop visiting the site in search of new interesting material, but also the attention of search engines, which, depending on the frequency of content updates, crawl the site more or less often.
Choose a comfortable refresh rate (for example, once a week) and work in this mode.
16. Unoptimized images
The ideal size is up to 20 kb, and 100 kb is possible if you need to show detailed images. But everything above 200 kb is overkill because 4-5 images and your page will already weigh more than 1 Mb, it will be heavy and take a long time to load.
Optimize images with compression. https://tinypng.com/ - does it online and completely free.
17. Over spam in tags
For each CMS tag a separate page, which partially duplicates the content of other pages. The more tags, the more similar in meaning: "fur coats", "X fur coats", "buy a fur coat in X" - the more the site pages lose their uniqueness.
As an exit, you can close the tag pages from indexing in robots.txt or use a minimal set of tags (tags).
18. No buttons to share on social networks and messengers
If an article from a blog cannot be shared on social networks or a message sent in instant messengers by clicking on the appropriate button at the end or beginning of the article, then consider that you are blocking your article (in case of fiery content) the ability to go viral on social networks.
Put buttons at the beginning and at the end of the article to share on social networks and instant messengers.
19. There are no pictures with the attribute, which indicates the keyword
The name of the picture can also contain a keyword, and not be called IMAGE_325.
If the site is in HTML, then the picture is written as follows: <imgsrc = "image address" alt = "keyword">.
On popular CMS, such as Joomla, WordPress, and others, when adding a picture, there is usually a field for the ALT attribute, which you just need to fill out without being too lazy.
20. Promotion for high-frequency and commercial requests
If you are trying to promote a request for "windows" using a blog or order a laptop, for example, using articles on the topic "The best windows in X" or "How to order a laptop in Y ?", then I assure you that this will not lead to anything other than wasted time and unfulfilled expectations. To understand this, it is enough to look at the search results, where, according to HF queries, there are mainly main pages of sites, and commercial ones - sections of the catalog with goods.
High-frequency requests should be promoted to the main page or the service/product category page. Commercial requests for a service/product category page or product card, if this is a specific request for a specific product or brand.
Conclusion: How to avoid making SEO mistakes?
To get started, use the material in this article as a kind of checklist and check your blog for each of the twenty points for SEO errors in your blog.
If you have complete order on all 20 points, then the blog is guaranteed good positions in the search engines, and you are satisfied visitors and satisfied customers (or fans).
However, if one of these points is missing and you can't make it, don't worry. Semalt will take care of bringing your blog from nothing to the top of the best blogs in your domain. In fact, here at Semalt we make blogs top search engine rankings. Because we are SEO experts and we have high caliber SEO services for you and also analysis tools that perform as well as you would expect. Let's discover together a brief overview of these tools:
Please click on these links to find out in full detail how these services will be of great use to you. If you have any other questions regarding an SEO service, please feel free to contact us for complete satisfaction.