Bloggers: 10 SEO Mistakes You Should Avoid

Bloggers: 10 SEO Mistakes You Should Avoid

Search engine optimization (SEO) is vital to any successful blogging campaign. Therefore it should be implemented in the right manner. SEO itself is quite intricate for numerous reasons, but mainly because Google uses an algorithm, which takes several factors into account when ranking a webpage, and they keep changing it.

There are virtually so many SEO myths that it has become very difficult to know what’s 100% true, but I can advise you on which SEO mistakes you should not make:

1. Buying Links

You might get a short term boost by buying links if your website is already popular, but you’re still taking a risk here. Paid links are sometimes flagged by Google’s search engine experts. You may wonder, how will they ever catch me? Well, Google’s bots and a special team at the company search for questionable linking patterns every single day!

For example, if you pay for a few hundred links to be pointed to your website in the very same day, some links will probably be flagged as a sort of ‘irregular linking activity’. Links from totally unrelated categories will seem suspicious as well.

I would recommend the old fashioned method of comment linking, manually — your blog will still be able to grow, albeit at a steady pace. Over time, the end results will be worthwhile. If you are however settled on purchasing links, do not use the same anchor text for all of them; mix it up a bit.

2. Duplicate Content

Many bloggers I know try to target the same topic with a variation of essentially very similar keywords. For instance, ‘make money on facebook’ and ‘making money with your facebook’ are quite similar, and creating a completely different page for each keyword won’t add much value to your site.

How much can you really play with topics or keywords that are essentially identical? If you can’t, then you’ll probably end up writing the same content for both keywords, which poses a risk of a search engine penalty. Instead, you should try to penetrate one original topic or keyword in detail and make an effort to strengthen each post.

3. Chasing PageRank

Don’t get me wrong, PageRank is important for any website’s success. The higher the PageRank you have, the better you rank in search engines, and the more visitors you’ll get. However, it’s definitely not the only metric that’ll help you improve your blog’s success. Furthermore, Google has mentioned previously that PageRank is just one of two hundred (wow!) indicators used to crawl and rank a website. Instead, you should focus on your analytics, ROI, and relevancy as recommended by Google itself.

4. Leaving Title Tags Automated

The title tag is undeniably one of the most important aspects when it comes to search engine rankings. Beginner bloggers usually write a post with a long title that describes the topic in too many words. First, you want to keep the title rather short, (not more than 60 characters) but more importantly, you should aim your focus at optimizing the title tags.

Why SEO certification is a horrible idea

Why SEO certification is a horrible idea:

Most people don’t know this about me, but I have a master’s degree in Counseling Psychology, and I even had a private practice for a few years. While I think I was pretty good at it, I wasn’t cut out to listen to people’s problems every day (and maintain a professional demeanor). Throughout that short career I was always bothered by industry certifications and their dual-relationship with state and federal politics.

I recently read about a survey meant to see if a third-party certification for SEO is feasible. I can only hope the answer is no, and I’m going to tell you why.

10 SEO Trends You Can’t Ignore If You Want High Rankings

The age of SEO being simple is over. You’re responsibilities have been massively upgraded by a flood of new SEO trends. So how do you keep up?

I thought I’d give you what I see as the ten most important changes you should not ignore if you want high rankings… hopefully allowing you to keep up with this fast-paced SEO world.

Panda/Farmer/Scraper

Google makes a lot of changes to its algorithm, but most people don’t notice the changes. However, you probably almost immediately noticed changes when Google rolled out its Panda/Farmer/Scraper update.

In fact, Google said that the change actually would impact about 12% of search results in the U.S. It negatively impacted low-quality pages and content farm sites and awarded those sites that provided high-quality content.

For example, Mahalo.com ranked for 33,875 keywords before the update to just 9,740 keywords after. That’s a decrease of more than 70%. It’s important to see that the keywords were like these: Zealand air, digg or tax check. Before the update Mahalo.com ranked in the top ten SERs for those keywords. They fell out of the top 100 results.

The Scraper update, which came a little later in the year, targeted scraper sites. Matt Cutts said, “we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.”