17 Common Blogging & SEO Mistakes – Do You Make These?

So, you have scoured the internet and implemented all the different SEO strategies that you have found (both on-page SEO and off-page SEO techniques), yet you still can’t seem find your site on search engines and hardly anyone visits your blog!  I bet you are wondering why and you are feeling frustrated.  Well you are not alone.

You are amongst thousands of people who optimize their blogs, assured that they are all set for that coveted ‘Page 1 Ranking’ in Google. But, it’s not long before you realise that you don’t rank anywhere near Google’s first page, or the second page … third page … tenth page even!!!

You can’t work out why. You watch your hopes for a top rank, along with that better lifestyle you hoped your blog would bring you, disappearing in front of you.

The truth is, you’re making some BIG, costly, SEO mistakes.  Some of these mistakes may surprise you, whilst some might look a little too familiar.  Here are 17 of the most costly SEO mistakes you might be making on your site:

SEO Mistakes

1. You Write Too Much On Your Blog

You think that content is king, so you write every day on your blog because you think that will get Google to notice you.  You believe this SO much that you end up writing content just for the sake of it and end up just producing (or worse, spinning!) very low quality posts because you quickly run out of ideas.  Worse still, you may even get bored.

Google has been tightening up on the quality of blogs that rank in their search engine for a while now. Some of the old SEO strategies that once worked, don’t work any more. Writing low quality content stuffed full of keywords just to get ranked is one of the strategies that doesn’t work any more.

Still, you keep writing the same old stuff… just in case.

2. You Count The Comments You Get, But Never Respond To Them

Yes, you like getting comments.  They make you feel good, make you feel noticed, liked and interesting. You like to count the number of comments you get, but you never respond to them.

You don’t engage with the people who have taken the time to get in touch with you because they liked what you have written.

When you don’t reach out and thank them, answer their questions or simply chat with them in the comments section of your site, pretty soon your readers will get bored with you.  They will view your lack of a response as being uninterested or suffering from a lack of manners and end up going elsewhere, never to return.

3. You Don’t Interact With Other Bloggers

You spend most of your time working on your blog; creating content, optimising it for the search engines, stressing about web design, etc.  However, all this work never seems to pay off in bringing in more traffic.

All the time that you spend focusing on this side of your site, you are neglecting the equally important aspect of interacting with other bloggers.  You could make life so much easier for yourself by reaching out and engaging with other bloggers.  Blogging, at the end of the day, is all about community.  You need to interact with both readers (mistake #2) AND other bloggers to help spread the word about your site.

4. You Follow All The Latest Trends

This one, that one – any flavour of the month, you follow it because you think maybe this one will be your ticket to getting noticed by Google, making money on your blog, or just getting noticed – period.

5. You Are Obsessed About Your Blog’s Design

Be honest now.  You spend a lot of your time worrying about whether your blog looks right. Whether it looks “pretty”, has a cool looking logo or whether it’s got the latest “thing” that some guru tells you will make all the difference.

All this time that you spend obsessing about this is time wasted not creating quality content that your readers want to read. The kind of quality content that Google loves and could be driving traffic to your site!  Is it any wonder you’re invisible?

6. You Write Robot-Junk

No one that visits your site can read your articles, even if they wanted to.  You have spent SO much time optimizing it, making sure you fit in as many keywords as you can, that it ends up being a load of gobbledygook. It’s simply just robot-junk! Not only do search engines hate this, but more importantly, people reading it (or trying to at least) hate it more.  Why would people want to visit your site if they can’t understand anything?

No wonder you aren’t getting any traffic!

7. You Don’t Make Friends With Powerful People Online

You think these powerful people (these big bloggers with popular blogs and oodles of readers) won’t be interested in you.  You just think you’ll get ignored, so you don’t even try to get noticed by these powerful people. You care too much about page rank

Your obsession with ranking high on Google makes you forget about who really matters when it comes to blogging. You forget that it’s your readers who matter most of all.

Google notices how much you’re over-optimising your content and forgetting about your readers. The likelihood of your getting de-indexed when making this mistake goes up considerably.

8. You Stress About Social Media

You want people to Tweet your stuff, “Like” your content on Facebook, +1 your articles on Google+, Re-pin images on Pinterest, share posts on LinkedIn, etc.  You want as many followers, friends, fans, etc. that you can get, so you end up following anyone and everyone.  As many as you can.

You spend so much time stressing about things like:

• Have you got it right?
• Have you followed the right people?
• Have you circled the right people?
• Are your comments or tweets hilarious?
• Have you linked to the right stuff?
• Have you got a profile on every social media site out there?

You spend all this time stressing about social media just to get ranked, that you don’t notice… no one cares!!! No one cares about you or your site because you are neglecting to spend that time producing quality content.

Social media is a great way of interacting with people and spreading the word about your site, but you have to have something worth sharing in the first place.  If you don’t, then it’s pointless.

9. You’re In The Wrong Niche

That’s right.  Like it or not, you were in such a rush to get stuck in and make money on your blog, that you forgot the first law of blogging: Pick the right niche for you!

Not every niche will end up being right for you.  You may have picked your niche because you thought it would make you money fast or you thought that it would be really simple. There is no fast or simple way to becoming successful!  You have to put the hard work in to making a success yourself, so you may as well pick something that you are interested in or are passionate about.

10. You Are Just Another Sheep

You haven’t created a unique “voice” for yourself, so much so that you simply sound like every other blogger. Your content ends up being just a carbon copy (or worse, an exact copy!) of content you see on other blogs.

You think that by doing what everybody else is doing (and getting ranked in Google for) must be right. Following the herd just makes your blog boring and uninteresting. For this reason, no one visits your site, no one reads your content, no one listens to what you are saying because they have heard it all before. No one knows you exist.

You’re just another sheep! Baaaa

11. You Don’t Guest Post

You don’t take the opportunity of getting noticed in the fastest and most effective way.  You spend all your time focusing on content for your own site, you neglect to write for other blogs.  The more you do this, the more afraid you feel that your writing isn’t good enough.

Guest blogging is a great way to spread the word about yourself and engage with a new audience.  Not only that, but it allows you to get to know other bloggers and build connections.

12. Nobody Cares About Your Niche

Your rush to make big bucks is blinding you to how money is actually made on the internet.

Making money on the internet is fine. It’s okay. But you were in such a rush to make money quickly. You just picked the brightest, shiniest niche.

But, just blogging to make money is seriously damaging your ranking.

13. You’re Out Of Touch With Your Readers

You don’t spend time reading other blogs or interacting on forums where most of your readers hang out. This means you don’t know what your readers are thinking, what they are saying and doing.

You’re out of touch with your readers. You can’t “get in on the conversation” as you don’t know what the conversation is. How can you expect to write about subjects that they are interested in if you don’t know what their worries or woes are, what their problems are, etc.

Like we mentioned earlier, blogging is a community.  A community that you must be a part of if you want to be successful!

14. You’re Just A Self-Absorbed Jackass!

You think blogging is all about what you have to say.

You never make the effort to step out of your tiny blog world and get out and about in the rest of the blogosphere. The comments sections of other sites can be a great way to see what readers really want.  It can be a great place to see what people are thinking and what questions they are asking other bloggers.  You never know, a simple comment could inspire you to write a whole post.

Make time to respond to comments on other blogs (as well as your own) to get noticed by the readers there.

15. You’re Obsessed With “Making Money”

Okay, so you want to make money so that you can quit your day job or maybe you just want to make enough money to put aside “just in case”. That’s okay. That’s good thinking, especially when times are so unstable and you want to make sure you can ride any storm that hits you.

But there is a BIG difference between earning money and letting big, flashy, Dollar signs blind you.

Being in a rush to make money only makes you poor. Why? Because your obsessing about making money turns people off. No one will listen to you if you are always bragging about how much you made or how much you are going to make, especially if it isn’t true. Your blog will be less lively than a night club at breakfast and you will never create your nest egg.

Your blog will ultimately fail because people won’t read your blog.

16. You Have No Real Idea What Your Blog Is About!?!

Oh boy! Is this mistake a killer!

Is your site about technology? Is it about fashion? Is it about cooking, shopping, gardening, etc? Is your site about you or is it about your readers? Is about all of these, and everything in between (especially if it makes money)?

You jump on one bandwagon after another. Each time you think this one isn’t bringing in the money/traffic, you jump onto another, then another, then another….

You lose track of what you’re doing. You end up getting frustrated and bored, or worse still, you end up abandon it and giving up.

How can you hope to build a successful site if you don’t know what direction your site is going? How can you hope to attract regular readers if you end up switching topics every week!

17. You Don’t Link To Relevant Content On Other Sites

You’re blinded by your own importance.

You don’t include relevant links to other peoples content.  Content that introducing your readers to relevant, useful and simply just great content on other sites.

Google takes just as much notice of the links that go out from your blog as it does to links coming in to your blog.  Take advantage of this by linking to relevant content where appropriate.

If you are thinking that by linking to other people’s content, you are going to lose traffic, you’d be wrong.  People appreciate sites that share with them useful information, whether it be their own or other peoples.  They are much more likely to come back to your site if they think that it is a good place for quality information.  And as a bonus, sites are more likely to link back to your site if you are generous with your links.

Are You Guilty?

Do you make any or all of these blogging & SEO mistakes?  It’s okay to admit it.  Blogging is hard work and you know that SEO is important.

You’re smart enough to realise that what readers are interested in, and look up to you for, is your help and advice, your interesting ideas and opinions, your solutions to their problems, and they’re interested in you as a blogger too.

Truth is, all these SEO strategies won’t work without “remarkable content” on your blog.  Your best SEO strategy to get ranked in the top 10 in Google is the quality of your writing. You need to write remarkably well to attract readers attention.  Remarkable content is content that makes your readers want to share it with their friends, followers and everybody they know. This means that,  in order to be remarkable, your content has to be interesting, vibrant, full of new ideas or a new take on what’s going.

Here’s a quick and simple remedy for how to write remarkable content and really rank in Google…

Your Cheat-Sheet For Writing Blogs Posts That Get You Noticed (& Ranking High In Google)

It all starts off of your blog!

In other words, you need to…

1. Go and spend time hanging out on other people’s blogs and reading them.
2. Read the comments and look for any questions people ask.
3. Engage with people in the comments section and the individual whose blog it is.
4. Hang out with other bloggers.
5. Network! Send some bloggers you admire an quick email telling them that you enjoyed reading their latest blog posts.

When you’ve done this for a month or two, you’ll discover that you know so much more about your potential readers. You’ll be able to write remarkable content because of all this new information.  Your remarkable content is more likely to get noticed by Google because  its quality will be a lot higher than most of the stuff that gets published online.

More people will be talking about you and sharing links to your content on Twitter and Facebook which will also get you noticed and get you climbing up the rankings. Better still, you’ll start getting linked to by big, popular blogs too.

And then put the best SEO strategy of all to work for you… writing good quality blog posts!

So, What Are You Waiting For?

Start writing your remarkable guest posts for other people’s blogs.  Use your remarkable content to market yourself as a blogger to watch out for and subscribe to. Not just on your blog, use it to market yourself on other blogs where your readers hang-out currently.

Write. Practice. Write. Read other popular blogs.

Are you ready to get ranked in search engines for being remarkable?