SEO Mistakes Bloggers Make (Part Two)

My first post on the topic of SEO mistakes bloggers make ended up being so long that I decided to break it up into two. Please make sure you read part one as it contains some essential tips!

Again, I’m not saying that I never make these mistakes – I just want to help you guys become aware of some search engine optimisation (SEO) basics that can help you gain blog traffic. After working in SEO for a year, I’ve come to learn a few tricks and I’ve noticed that a lot of bloggers, big and small, are making mistakes that could be easily avoided.

 

(More) SEO mistakes – and how to avoid them

No evergreen content

An outfit post, a weekly feature (‘Wednesday Wishlist’), or a more personal post may be great content for your blog and can work well for social media but let’s face it, it’s probably not going do great things for SEO. ‘Evergreen content’, as media people like to call it, is content that will stay relevant for a long time and will continue to bring traffic to your blog for years. Recipes, city guides, reviews, and tips can all be good evergreen content because people will continue to search for these things. Even an outfit post could be evergreen – I’m thinking ‘how to wear a midi dress’, for example.

Huge images

Something we all love: big, beautiful, high quality pictures. Why is this a problem? It’s slowing us all down! Okay, let’s not be too dramatic, but Google loves to see websites load fast and if a page takes too long to load it might not even bother to read it. So make sure you resize your pictures so that they are the right width for your blog, and no bigger. In WordPress, ‘Resize Image After Upload‘ is a plugin that will do this for you.

Long, random URLs

URLs, or permalinks, are also helpful for search engines to figure out what your post is about. Include your keywords in there, but don’t make your URLs too long. By default, WordPress and Blogger will just take your title and add it to the end of your domain, but you can change it to remove words that aren’t important.’Newcastle-breakfast’ instead of  ‘4-lovely-places-for-breakfast-in-newcastle’, for example.

Keyword stuffing

The opposite of ignoring SEO, this is when people insert keywords many times in one article in order to trick search engines into thinking the page is very relevant. Nowadays, Google is much smarter than that. It can tell that these websites are not user-friendly and will penalise them. It’s much better to include your keyword in all the key places (permalink, title, image alt) and in the first paragraph of the post. Don’t overdo it! Write for humans, not for Google.

Mobile version disabled

Google favours mobile-friendly websites, so make sure your blog is easy to use on mobile devices! If you’re not sure how good your blog is on mobile, try Google’s mobile-friendly test. You may have to enable the mobile version of your blog template in the settings. If you’re planning on getting a new blog template, make sure it’s mobile friendly (preferably ‘responsive’ like pipdig‘s).

Internal linking

Internal links are the hyperlinks that you have within your blog, for example from a new post to an old one. These are important because they are a signal to Google that some pages are more important than others, and that your older blog posts are still relevant and valuable. The higher up a link is on the page, the more valuable it is – so if there’s a page you really care about, you could add it in your navigation bar. Make it a habit to mention an old post in every post you write (as long as it’s relevant).

Anchor text

Anchor text is the words that are highlighted in a hyperlink – in this sentence, it’s “anchor text” and I’ve linked to a page that explains what it is. The words you use for anchor text help search engines to understand what the page you’re linking to is about. So whenever you’re linking to something, keep that in mind. Especially if you write a guest post for someone, make sure they link to you with relevant anchor text and not just ‘click here’.

 

If you’ve read all the way to here (including my first SEO tips post), then I’m impressed. I know that SEO isn’t the most entertaining topic!

All of these mistakes can easily be avoided if you’re aware that you’re making them, and small changes can really make a big difference to the traffic your blog gets. This isn’t even a complete list (I tried to keep it simple!) but I think these basics should be enough if you’re not planning on making your blog a real business. If you have any questions, do feel free to contact me or comment below and I will try to respond as best I can!

Did you find this useful?

P.S. check out my first blogging tips post for some Instagram tips!