Top 3 SEO Mistakes to Avoid in Blogs
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): TomKin Consulting LLC.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a core part of marketing and branding in the online space. If you don’t use SEO, you’re less seen. People online want to be seen. Why be online if you don’t want to be viewed?
SEO is the overall methodology to increase search engine presence. Every form of online branding will involve some form of SEO. It’s the backbone of efficiency in digital presence. Without SEO, your presence online will be suboptimal. It’ll be less than desired.
What is SEO?
See all those excited people in the photo by Priscilla, that’s what SEO should do for you. On the one hand, it should make you excited, ecstatic. On the other hand, it should keep more eyeballs on you.
If you reject SEO principles, you should expect suboptimal results. The reason is the “Optimization” in “SEO.” Because search engines love optimized content. It means “optimized” relative to them.
SEO isn’t scary
Whatever the search engines want, that’s what the SEO means. It’s specifically optimized content for the search engines. It’s not for something random. It’s not out of the blue. The people developing the principles weren’t idiots.
These were consciously, thoughtfully designed. Not with you in mind, it’s with the search engines in mind, for example, Bing, Yahoo, Google, especially Google. In fact, Google has far more than 75%, probably a lot more, searches of all searches.
So, in a sense, when talking about search, we’re talking about Google. Google is the man in the Wizard of Oz. It’s the big scary head. It’s makes a lot noise. It grumbles. But behind it, it’s a company, employees, and one dominating search engine.
The idea is the delivering content readily accessible to Google’s algorithms. Which is to say, its operating system. Its operations are search. You type something. You press enter. It looks on the vast virtual library of content, and voila! Numerous of relevant content for you.
SEO is about making the job for the search engine as easy as possible. If you fail to do that, searchers will fail to find you, as easily or as often. There are mistakes too. Not simply negligence in not doing SEO, decisions thought to be good. But, in fact, they’re detrimental.
What is the first mistake?
I can think of three off the top of my head. So, this isn’t referencing other websites. This is out of my own black box. The first mistake – and these three in no particular order – is irregularity. Let’s say you have a web domain, a website containing every web page.
You have an About page. You have a People (or person) page. You have a Contact page with a Contact Form. So on and so forth, then, you have the motherload or fatherload. The single most important part of a website.
That which drives traffic. The traffic part of the comment is for a purpose. As with everything else, I am presenting things with an intent, a choice. Those who pay more attention get a bigger pay-off. Simple as that, a healthy downtown core of a city has lots of traffic. It’s alive, not dead.
Irregularity is the enemy
The first mistake in SEO is irregularly posted content. This isn’t psychology with intermittent reinforcement. Where, you post at unpredictable intervals. Then people chime in more. It doesn’t work that way.
In fact, it can’t be. It’s a computer. It’s built by people with psychologies, not the other way around. Google as a massively networked algorithm likes regularity. If you post content regularly, then Google will give the proverbial thumbs up.
It’s a Field of Dreams situation. “If you build it, he will come.” If you build a regular blog infrastructure around the blog of the website, people will come. Because the Google gods will have blessed you.
An irregular posting of blog content is bad for Google. It does not like that. Google prefers predictability. An irregular posting of blogs. It’s on a Thursday one week. Then it’s a post on a Tuesday at night, not the morning, the next week. Some weeks have no content.
Or the blog is dead for months on end. These will kill a website. You require regular content. Otherwise, Google will – literally – penalize the ranking of the website. It can be hard to recover from the penalty.
What is the second mistake?
See that lady above, you want to be her. Happy! Let’s say, you’re posting content at regular intervals. You set a personal target. It’s something like one article a day. Too ambitious, okay, how about an article a week? So, you’ve picked a weekly blog posting schedule and promise to stick to it.
You commit to writing an article a day. Great, you’re really rocking it out. Things are running smoothly. It’s become a fixed schedule. Something that Google can count on, and the readership can expect.
You’ve committed to the things most pleasing to Google. You’ve committed to keeping a steady stream of content incoming for Google. This content is scheduled ahead of time. It’s in line with some of the more beginner SEO principles. Stuff like paragraph and sentence size, and so on.
Timing is (almost) everything
Sweet, next step, you can still make larger-scale mistakes. The kinds of mistakes diving your operation. One catastrophic error is not using analytics. That’s the fancy bar graphs. If you go in the website, you can see them.
It’s like the crappy math problems from high school. Those comparing finances and costs. That stuff, it’s so useful now. Those analytics provide a sense of the possibilities, targeted potentials. Look for the data about most views, these should be on the website.
These are the times of high viewership. You want to know the timings. The days and the times of the days (with the time zone). These can provide crucial insight. It’s like knowing when a good show is one, in reverse.
You publish material or schedule the regular material on those times. If you miss those timings, then you lose an audience. Or the audience that you do have. You miss them. So, it looks bad. Because it shows in the website statistics.
It’s a terrible mistake. And it can cost viewers. Especially for online producers of content, it means wasting time. If you use time right, then you won’t end up sinking time. But if you mis-use timing, or ignore it, then, believe me, you’re making a mistake.
What is the third mistake?
Your blog posts are like your kids. In fact, Lawrence Hill, author of The Book of Negroes, noted this in an interview with me. He views his books as additional kids. It seems absurd. It’s like comparing a child to a dog, or a cat.
If you said this to a parent, it’d be offensive. And for good reason, they’re not the same. But the meaning to the author is high. So, it’s a good analogy more than anything else. Let’s say, for sake of argument, you’ve made content. It’s regularly produced.
It’s published or scheduled at high tide for the readership. This is one part. But there’s more to it than this. And it’s another area of potentially big errors. It’s to do with the content itself. It happens more than you think.
You should write for the right audience
Making content irrelevant to focus, it’s a big mistake. It happens, trust me. It’s as if a wire is missing during writing the content. A writer, even good ones, can know the audience. They can have the outlet for them. Something within their remit.
Then they blow it. Big time, they write content completely off the mark. It’s like watching a professional boxer punch their self in the face. Why? Why would you do that? Similarly, this is more of a sensibility mistake.
Look at the previous content, it’ll tell you something. Examine the goal of the organization, ask yourself, what is the purpose here? What is the intended message? That’ll let you know the audience.
You can begin to write for them because they’re important part. You have a voice. It matters. But it’s not everything. The most salient aspect is the right audience receiving the right content. They search for the content on Google.
They search at a particular time and day. They find your blog. They like it. Then they keep coming back at that time. On average, or averaged over readers, it’ll be peak tide readership. So, they deserve the right content for them. Something accurate and relevant to their needs.
Your blog should provide it. And those are three common, big mistakes. The irregularity of the content; the untimeliness of the content; and the irrelevance of the content.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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