Top 7 Common Mistake that Blogger Must Avoide

7 Common Mistake that Blogger Must Avoide

There are many SEO mistakes bloggers should avoid, although probably the most common is not to understand what Google is for.

We are using Google as an example because it is the most used search engine in the world (68% of searches in July, 2014.) The Chinese Baidu got 16% with Yahoo and Bing both below 7%. These four are the top four for 2014 to date, which is why we use Google as our example.

Google’s Objective 

 The objective of Google is to provide its users with a good search experience. That means receiving results relevant to the keyword or search term they used to find information, and not receiving multiple pages with the same results (duplicate content.) Nor does Google want you to find poor quality results with very bad spelling and grammar, pages with lots of adverts above the fold before you reach any content or blog posts that are filled with false information.

 Google’s algorithms are designed to hunt out the poor quality pages, the pages full of adverts and the duplicated information copied from other sites. Instead, it focuses on providing quality web pages offering useful information to its users. Google is a search engine and it’s customers are those using it to find the useful information they want. Google and all other search engines focus on giving their users exactly what they are searching for.

 Communicating Your Content to Google 

 You do that by means of title tags, description meta tags and use of keywords in the text of your post. Google has developed techniques over the years to enable it to discriminate between a natural usage of keywords and keyword stuffing designed to fool the algorithms. There was a time when using multiple repetitions of keywords worked, but not now.

 Among the many factors that Google considers when ranking web pages in its SERPs are authority backlinks. These are links to your pages from other blogs and web pages containing high quality content related to your niche. Before doing this, however, the search engine must be able to assess the content of your blog post or page. The most important aspect of your SEO activity is to explain to Google’s algorithms exactly what your blog post is about.

Here are The  Top 7 Common Mistake that Blogger Must Avoide

1.) Lack of Content

Before writing a blog post you should have in your mind exactly what its purpose is. You can just start writing and let your mind wander. The post must zero in on a specific topic, or even better – a specific problem that a reader might have. Such as how to avoid SEO mistakes! So you start by defining why you need to write this post, and what issues it is intended to remedy – just as we are doing here.

Fundamentally, a ‘lack of content’ refers to a blog post that does not offer the reader much information. It could be filled with uninteresting information, or it could even be too short. You can’t say much in 300-400 words. Google’s Matt Cutts states that he expects around 500 words plus. Sometimes even 700 words are insufficient to cover a topic.

2.)  Copied Content

Even worse than poor content is copying content from other websites or blog posts. Google actively hunts down duplication of content. As explained earlier, it does not want its user to find multiple results that are exactly the same.

3.) Buying Links and Reciprocal Linking

Google rewards blogs that have multiple links back to them from other related web pages and blogs. The more authoritative the domain or even page providing these links, the higher authority weighting is given to them. Many bloggers will try to cheat the system by paying for such links, but Google is now wise to this.

4.)  Failing to Inform Google of Your Content

Obviously Google staff cannot personally read all the many billions of web pages published on the web. The company relies on statistical mathematical formula to establish the content on each page of your website or blog. To Google, a blog post is a page, so we shall use the term ‘page’ and ‘post’ here as being the same thing.

• Title Tag : Google will read the Title tag in the Head section of your HTML. This gives it a clue as to the topic of your post. This is also the title that will appear in the search engine results if your post is ranked. This should be a maximum of 512 pixels at Google’s standard listing font of Arial 16 pt. D

• Post Title : You post title appears at the top of your post, and should contain your main keyword. This need not be the same as the Title tag, but it makes sense to make it the same.

• Description Meta Tag : The description meta tag in the Head section of your HTML gives the spider even more information about your page. This is the snippet that appears below the title in a Google listing. 

•  Header Tags : Google will seek out header tags in the body of your text. H1 HTML tags around a header or blog title tells Google that the text within these tags is important. H2 tags have secondary importance and so on. So if you are blogging about “how to train dogs”, with a section on training German Shepherds, your main header could be <h1>How to Train Dogs</h1> with a subheading later with <h2>Training German Shepherds</h2>. Google can then clearly see the hierarchy of the relevance of your blog post.

• Image ALT Tag : Google spiders/algorithms cannot read images. You should tell them what each image is about, using your main and secondary keywords to explain this. Add Alt=’your keyword + image description’ just before the final closing tag of your image HTML.

• For example : <img title="German Shepherd" src="" alt="How to train dogs image"/>. Should the image fail to resolve in a reader’s browser, this Alt tag will show instead, giving the reader some information about the missing image. The image title tag can be left blank, or a title added that shows on mouseover with most browsers.

• Keywords : This is discussed immediately below. Google uses an algorithm known as LSI (latent semantic indexing) that uses a character string recognition algorithm to establish the meaning of your post. 

5. Keyword Stuffing

A keyword is the search term that you are targeting with your blog post. You want it listed when a Google user uses that specific search term in the Google search box. Bloggers still believe that 3% – 5% of the word count of their post must comprise the keyword. Google disagrees! 1%-2% might be Okay, but it is possible these days to be ranked in a high listing position for a keyword that does not appear anywhere in the text of your post.

Semantic relevance of the general vocabulary used is just as important as they keyword itself. In fact, Google reacts badly to overuse of the keyword. A lot has been written about this, but research has shown that you should be fine if you use no more than 2% of a 1 or 2-word keyword, and 1% of a search term of 3 words or more. Just make sure that you use plenty of synonyms or related terms in your writing and you will do fine.

6.) Focusing on Looks

You might think that a fantastic-looking blog must impress Google, irrespective of its content. Not true! There are a few reasons why this might not be good for you. Sure, a reader wants to visit a good-looking blog, but first and foremost they want useful content: advice or information related to the search term used to get to your blog.

7.) No Internal Linking Structure

You should not only link your current blog to any other websites or blogs you run, but also link blog posts to others that are related to the same topic. You can optimize the internal ranking of any page on your blog or even a regular website. Each page or post starts with a PageRank point of 1, which can be shared between all the links leaving that post.

Not only does Google allow you to optimize the disposition of your internal PageRank points, but it also likes links between pages of related content. You may not get the same authority rank as you would through links from external blog pages or web pages of similar content to yours, but it does help the Google PageRank of the posts or pages you choose to link internally.