Having a well-stocked blog is an absolute must for most businesses in terms of their website SEO. Blogs have become an essential tool in a well-rounded SEO approach, and offer a valuable service to potential customers at the same time.
However, bloggers continue to make fundamental mistakes in terms of the SEO compatibility of their content. Here are those typical errors, as well as what can be done in terms of simple solutions:
Using repetitive keywords across multiple posts
Keywords remain one of the core ingredients of a successful SEO approach, but that doesn’t mean hashing out the same keywords time and time again. Not only does this fail to add any value in terms of Search Engine Page Rankings (SERP), but long-tail keywords are therefore being neglected, and it is a much better approach to focus each blog post on specific long-tail terms.
Generally speaking, search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo will favor homepages over specific blog posts when it comes to SERP, so it is certainly folly to keep banging out the same keywords across your homepage and attached website pages, and then again across blog articles. This isn’t going to make much of an impact.
Instead, focus each individual post on an affiliated subject – something a little more niche connected to your overall product, for example, or flip it around and focus on the need rather than the solution (which is your product or service, of course). Basically, think about the search terms that potential customers are likely to type into that search engine text box, and they are the keywords that should be displayed across your blog posts.
Blog posts are poorly written
Believe it or not, the search engine crawler bots can actually discern good quality content over bad. Not only should your content be well written in terms of spelling (imagine misspelling those keyword terms!) and readability, but also in presentation. It used to be that simply littering mumbo-jumbo with your chosen keywords was enough to trick those same crawler bots, but these bots are now sophisticated enough to detect good content over bad. Don’t make that mistake.
Forgetting the alt text on images
This is a technical issue that has a huge impact on SEO. The alt text on the images should always describe the images being shown in mind of what the keyword terms are. Any contextual detail here helps the bots to determine relevance to the search term, and the alt text itself is also important for those users who are using tools such as screen readers, for example. The images help the search engines to verify the relevance of a page to the search term, so make sure that all images within your blog posts are fully detailed.
As an example, if you are selling cupcakes, images should be connected to the individual ingredients or the steps involved in the recipe, so alt text descriptions might include ‘whisking the eggs’ or ‘decorating the cakes’.
Incorrect use of tagging
It’s vital that you use categories and tags properly once the blog past has been written. In terms of categories, don’t go for too many, as you want to ensure that you are relevant to your core audience. Then when you tag, don’t just concentrate on keywords – tagging keywords is not going to add any value here. Instead think about relational words that potential visitors might connect to your service.
So, if you are selling sports shoes, then you would tag the relevant styles or the sports the shoes are connected with, or even the types of adjectives that you would associate with those kinds of shoes (for example, court grip for basketball shoes).
And don’t overdo the number of tags either – usually half a dozen is a good number. And try to broaden your range tags as much as possible, so avoid repetitive tags across multiple posts, which only serves to narrow the search focus.
Essentially with your blog posts you are trying to broaden the top of the funnel which searchers can drop into, so don’t make yourself too niche as then you will only be found by the most specific search terms, which reduces the probability of being found at all.
You’ll also like to read: 14 Days to a Better SEO Keywords for a Tech Business
Professional writer Bea Potter can be found contributing her insights and expertise at Assignment Writing Service and Assignment Help websites. She writes about blogging and education. Also, Bea is a contributor at Paper Fellows.
SEO Search Engine Optimization Image by Diego Velazquez from Pixabay.