We built our business on smart SEO blogging strategies, and now we're here to help you do the same. Search Engine Optimization and inbound marketing are the best tools for a small business looking to establish a presence on the web, especially if you're on a tight budget. If you're doing it on your own, SEO blogs are extremely inexpensive – really, only whatever your time is worth – while being a great way to drive visitors to your site.
Obviously, though, there are right ways and wrong ways to go about writing SEO blogs. So, we wanted to take a look at some of the more common mistakes we see, and how you can go about correcting them!
Six Mistakes To Avoid In Your SEO Blogs
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Poor keyword strategies. Without good keyword usage, you're not going to get the people you want to your blog. It's not enough just to write; you need to write with an eye towards incorporating terms which Google will associate with your company. Before you do anything else with your SEO blogs, make sure you know what your keywords are and use them.
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Paying for links. Once upon a time, it was fairly standard practice to pay (or at least swap items of value) in exchange for inbound links. Google, however, frowns on this practice and now heavily penalizes you for it. Trading links for links is still acceptable, but do NOT offer any incentives with real-world value in exchange for links.
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Neglecting your metadata. “Metadata” covers any information embedded into your webpage that the search engines can see, but most users cannot. (At least, not without digging into right-click menus.) These elements, such as tags and HTML headers, are important for helping search engines properly index your content, and help ensure you are linked to relevant searches. Don't just use the default values; make sure to properly fill out the metadata.
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Recycling content. There are a lot of services online that promise to make it quick and
easy to generate content by “spinning” existing articles with a thesaurus function that replaces words with synonyms. The claim is that this will give your blog a boost, but the plain truth is that it just fills your blog with poorly-written garbage no one wants to read. Don't succumb to the temptation of the quick and easy path. Only publish original SEO blog writing.
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Being overly promotional. This one is a tricky balance. Obviously, your blog is a promotional tool and no one thinks otherwise... but don't be gauche. Try to keep your SEO blogs focused on issues that are relevant to your readers, rather than just tooting your own horn. No one likes a braggart, and that's doubly true on the Internet where honesty is appreciated. When in doubt, lean towards modest understatement.
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Not updating enough. Fundamentally, any blogs are better than none. However, you'll get a lot more hits if you publish SEO blogs 4-5 times a week rather than just once. And you'll get a bigger boost if you can publish more than once a day, on average. If you don't have time to create enough content, it might be time to consider hiring an SEO marketing agency.
There's a lot that goes into blogging, and we could probably write a list of twenty common errors if we thought anyone would stick around to read it. Instead, let's toss this to the floor: What other problems do you often see with SEO blogs, and wish more people would fix?