Blog SEO Mistakes To Avoid

Often articles focus on what needs to be done right to increase the SEO on a blog. But what about those things you might be doing wrong? Often, it is a matter of overlooking mistakes that can make the difference between a high and low ranking in search engine results pages.

Take a look at these common Blog SEO mistakes. If you are making any of them, take steps now to ensure you are on the right track.

The Wrong Content

Take a good look at the content on your blog. Are you really writing about what people want to read? Sure, it may be easy to write a post about what you ate last night, but is that going to help you make online sales?

Honestly, even the most trivial of topics can become popular blog posts if you take the right approach. Think about a post where you might write about last night’s meal. Now browse through the listing of most searched topics on Yahoo, Google, Bing, or any other directory of blogs. Relate that topic to your niche if possible. Perhaps the high fat content in fast food is a current subject of interest for lots of internet users. Take this information and tie it into your post if your niche is health focused.

Now go back and include the keywords and phrases that were used to find that topic. Remember to add these to the title of your post as well as in the meta tags. It is a mistake to write uninteresting content, but a good idea to turn it into a popular post by tying it to current topics of interest.

The Wrong Permalinks

One way that search engines find your content as it relates to a keyword search is by using the URL. A very common mistake of blog owners is not using the right permalink structure.

Look at the difference between the two URLs of an identical post entitled “Healthy Fast Food Options”. The first uses a permalink structure based on the number of the post, something like this: www.example.com/?p=123 (by the way this is the default setting in WordPress). The second utilises the category name and title of the post, so it looks like this: www.example.com/health-food/healthy-fast-food-options.

Which one do you think the search engines will be able to correlate to particular keywords? Obviously spiders can’t place any value on a number, so that first URL is virtually meaningless. Don’t make the mistake of settling for the default permalink structure, instead make it work for you by including keywords, this is a vital step for your Blog SEO.

Not Enough Varied Content

Does your blog contain post after post of pure text without any images, audio, or video content? Then you are making the mistake of not utilising the power of various forms of content. Include at least one image with each post wherever possible. This increases the chances of your blog coming up for searches related to pictures or photos. The same holds true for audio or online video content. Particularly in this age of mobile media devices, content other than text can be more popular.

To be truly effective for search engine optimisation purposes, all of your alternative content needs to be properly tagged. Remember that search engine crawlers can’t see the image or hear the audio track, but they can pick up on the tags used to describe it.

These are all common mistakes when maintaining a blog. Get your Blog SEO mistakes corrected immediately and you will enjoy the benefits of good SEO that will drive organic traffic to your blog and give you more chance of your articles going viral.

See you at the top of Google!

Sean Rasmussen
SEO Australia Pacific
AussieSEO.com © 2007 - 2010