SEO Mistakes Bloggers Make

They say, “Write what you know”. In my case, that means that writing a post about SEO is something I just had to do. I’ve been working in SEO for almost a year now, so I like to think that I’ve learned a few tricks that could be helpful to a lot of bloggers. I know many people get confused about the topic and will have lots of questions, but I’m hoping that to cover the basics that will make your blog look great to Google! I’m not saying that all bloggers make these mistakes or that I never make them, but these are just some of the things I’ve noticed on various blogs that could easily be rectified. If anything, I’m so tired of SEO when I get home from work that some of you will already be doing a much better job at optimising your blogs than I am!

Mistakes – and how to avoid them

Quirky titles

We all love a creative title, like a song lyric or ‘feeling blue’, but these won’t help search engines to find out what your blog post is about. For SEO it’s much better to think about what people might type into Google, for example ‘easy kale salad recipe’ or ‘Clinique night cream review’. Often bloggers will leave out ‘review’ or ‘recipe’, but these can be important to get your post in front of more people.

Images with no alt text

Pictures are great, but search engines can’t see what they’re about… unless you add alt text! In WordPress you can do this by clicking on your image and going to ‘edit’. If you’re using Blogger, just click on your image and go to ‘properties’. Make sure you describe your picture/post, e.g. ‘SEO tips for bloggers’.

Image file names like ‘DSC8765’

Same issue here – you need to give search engines as much information about your pictures as possible, and the name of the file is another way to do this. This might sound obvious, but make sure you’re including things people will search for, like ‘essie-ballet-slippers-review.jpg’.

No meta descriptions

Meta descriptions are the couple of lines you see in Google search results below each URL. While they don’t technically help you to rank higher in search engines, they can give people a taste of what’s on your blog and encourage them to click to your website. WordPress SEO by Yoast is the plugin that I’ve always seen recommended. For Blogger, just add a couple of sentences in the ‘Search Description’ box (no more than 156 characters or it will get cut off).

Never writing guest posts

If you want to build up your website’s DA (domain authority) and make Google think that it’s trustworthy and valuable, guest posts are great. By writing these, you can get links from other blogs to your website in a very natural way and this will help your DA. The higher the DA of the blog you get a link from, the better. You can check your links and DA with MOZ (if you have your own domain, as opposed to blogspot.com). This is something that PR/SEO people will look at before asking you to do brand collaborations. If your DA is 20 or more, that is very good! Mine is only 12, but that’s normal for a relatively new blog.

Are you guys still with me? I had to break this post up into two parts because it ended up being awfully long and SEO-heavy! Make sure you read part two with more tips on SEO for bloggers. I would love your feedback – did you find this helpful? Do you have any specific questions I can help with?

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