4 SEO Mistakes You Are Probably Making

You have to optimize your blog for the search engines in order to get traffic. However, lots of people make mistakes when it comes to SEO. Once you stop making the common mistakes, you will start getting more readers.

Blogging has gone beyond writing and waiting for readers to troop in, except you already build your fan base, otherwise you’ll be needing Search Engine Optimization to pass your message to the entire world.

In one of my previous posts I have highlighted two of the most important factors to consider when writing for SEO, in this post now, I’ll be highlighting the 4 mistakes many upcoming bloggers make when it comes to search engine optimization.

SEO Mistakes are common among upcoming bloggers or even some established bloggers who have the wrong concept about SEO, below are 4 of those Mistakes and how you can tackle them;

1. Keyword Stuffing

This is one of the most common SEO mistakes that bloggers make. They get a keyword that they like, so they end up overusing it in their posts. Then, the search engines actually penalize the blog for keyword stuffing.

Keep your keyword density around 3% per post. Any more than that will hurt you with the search engines. Not only that, but your readers will get annoyed if every other word they read is one of your keywords.

A very good way to avoid keyword stuffing and still maintaining a good keyword density is to use Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), a process where the search engines look for word synonyms and you actually rank for it. I’ll be writing a comprehensive article on LSI very soon.

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2. Only Optimizing for Search Engines

At one time, search engines only checked to make sure that blogs and websites were optimized for them. Now, they actually check to make sure the sites and blogs are optimized for readers as well. That means you need to create quality content and update it often. You need to limit your advertisements and provide a good user experience. Otherwise, the search engines will put you down at the bottom of the pack.

And one of the best practices when writing any article or post in to always put your readers first. At the end of every article, head over to the post and read through as you would read a post not written by you. This way, you’ll understand how your readers will react when reading such post.

3. Using a Poorly Coded Theme

Poorly coded Premium WordPress templates can also hurt you when it comes to SEO. If a search engine can’t properly crawl your blog, you won’t be able to move up in the ranks. With that in mind, only use themes that are coded by experts. Otherwise, you could end up fighting for last place in the search engine rankings.

You do not need a fancy theme to rank well on search engines, what you should be looking forward to is simplicity and speed. Good designs are good but many good designed themes are heavy and will slow down your site, this is a BIG disadvantage because load speed is one of the factors used for ranking by search engines.

If you want to purchase any theme on any market place like Themeforest or any other store, I’ll advice you go through the comments and reviews of the theme and see what others are saying concerning performance and speed.

And if you need a theme recommendation, I’ll advice you to go for Genesis Framework themes by Studiopress.

4. Failing to Interlink Between Posts

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Most people don’t realize that interlinking between your posts can actually help your SEO. When you interlink between posts, Google will see your site as an authority in your niche. That will give you some added weight in the search engine rankings.
In order to understand this, let’s look at an example.
Let’s say you run a blog about cats. You create a post about cat behaviors, and you include a link to a post you wrote about behaviors cats exhibit when they are ill. That will give you some extra clout with Google.
Keep in mind that you should use good anchor text when interlinking blog posts. Don’t just say “Click Here.” Instead, you need to hyperlink some keywords.
If you are making these mistakes, you are hurting your SEO campaign. Take the time to fix the mistakes so you can start moving up in the search rankings.