Blogging is more than just publishing blog posts. On the outside, blogging seems simple. But in reality it is not so. Here are some of the common SEO mistakes that can kill your blog.
As the owner of a blog, you’ll know the importance of SEO. It’s imperative for placing on the search results page, which will likely be your best source of organic visitors. SEO is no longer an afterthought in the blogging world, many bloggers understand the importance of making sure that their user experience is excellent and their technical SEO is up to date – but if you haven’t fixed these SEO mistakes, much of your SEO efforts will go to waste.
Downtime
Unplanned downtime is a threat to your website, no matter how big it is. Each unplanned downtime will cause potential loyal readers to find other content to consume, many of whom will never come back. Downtime is also awful for SEO. Crawler bots check your site for updates and content regularly. If one of these meets a server error code like a 500 internal error, the bot will try to recrawl the website throughout the day to check if it’s back up.
The longer it is down, the harsher Google will be on your SERP. They will penalize your ranking, and if a competitor jumps ahead of you, it might be challenging to recover. The only way you can prevent downtime is by having a good IT solution, like the hosted options offered by Kortek solutions.
I’ve been using Cloudways since January 2016 for this blog. I happily recommend Cloudways to my readers because I am a proud customer.
Keyword Stuffing
If you’re getting back into blogging and you remember SEO practices from almost 10 years ago, nobody is going to blame you for keyword stuffing… Apart from Google, who will penalize you for this black hat SEO practice. Keyword optimization is currently an essential part of SEO, but keyword stuffing involves cramming in keywords to try and get an SEO boost.
This will massively impact the readability of your blog, which will put off regular viewers. Google also checks for keyword stuffing and do not look favorably on those who do it.
Copy and Pasted Content
Content is king, that’s the motto uttered by almost anybody involved in the SEO game nowadays. Content is a vital part of improving your user experience, keeping visitors on your site, and boosting your SEO results. Your content should be unique and bring a different perspective to a subject than other articles you might have used for inspiration.
When you straight-up copy content, it’s easy to check for (plagiarism detectors are used by universities across the world, so of course Google has excellent ones) and when (not if) you’re caught duplicating content, Google will penalize you. Duplicated content may be tempting, but it’s a silly mistake that will cost you your rankings.
Cloaking
If you’re doing cloaking, you’re in major black hat SEO zone. It involves creating two different versions of a site and presenting one to humans and one to search engines, each version giving the different viewers what they want to see.
This is terrible SEO practice because it’s the search engine’s version of the page that makes them gauge whether it’s appropriate for a viewer’s search. When it’s not, a viewer will quickly click off your site. If you’re deemed to be cloaking, you could well be blacklisted.
By avoiding above SEO mistakes, you can increase Google rankings and drive traffic to your blog.
