Common SEO Mistakes That You Should Avoid

[xylement]

Over the past few months, we see that there are hundreds and thousands of new bloggers evolving on the blogosphere. However, over a prolonged period, only few sustain. Why does this happen? Where do people go wrong? One simple reason could be an improper Search Engine Optimization. Rather than aiding SEO, people with or without their knowledge make the situation worse. I have enlisted few commonly made SEO mistakes that one should avoid.

CHOOSING UNRELATED URL OR TITLE
This is the most commonly made mistake by many newbies. They buy a domain name or choose one from the available blogspot domains keeping in mind to right some content say about "Making Money Online", "About Blogging" or some other stuff. But over a period of time, as they run out of content/topics, they tend to change their track and write a content which is completely not related to their title/URL. This happened to one of my fellow blogger and do you know the final result??? His blog was blacklisted on Google!!!

NEGLECTING ON-SITE SEO
There is a lot of buzz when it comes to ON-SITE SEO and OFF-SITE SEO. The basic reason being the difficulty in understanding the two SEO's. Later, comes the problem of optimization. Though I myself have a lot of difficulties in finding the difference between the two, I would suggest you to have the following for your blog - proper TITLE TAGS for your post (CLICK HERE TO OPTIMIZE), INDIVIDUAL META TAGS For Your Post (CLICK HERE TO ADD THEM) apart from the REGULAR META TAGS (CLICK HERE TO ADD THEM), proper links within your site - INTERNAL LINKS, ensuring that images have PROPER ALT TAGS and so on. Note: I don't stress too much on META KEYWORDS tag because, I never experienced any improvement having placed that tag on my blog.

FAILING TO RESEARCH YOUR KEYWORDS
One common fault which I encountered personally from my experience and through repeated search for SEO mistakes was to identify the potential keywords for your blog. I know it becomes a hectic process to identify the exact keywords for your blog. You might consider an SEO expert to do the job for you. If you are a blogspot user like me, the forget this point because we can't do much about it.

However, a person planning to host his/her website should consider doing a keyword research before building his/her website to know, what exactly people are searching for. With the automatic suggestions enabled on Google Toolbar or the search box, it has become a little easy to know what people usually search for in their niche. So, I would suggest you to optimize your site for those suggested keywords on Google.

FAILING TO CREATE A SITEMAP
Sitemaps are the most essential structures when comes to SEO. Every blog should posses a structured sitemap so that the search engine robots can easily distinguish those pages which are already indexed and those which need to be indexed. I will soon publish an article for creating a structured sitemap for blogspot users. However, you need to create a sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools. I assume that many would have done this essential step. If not, do it now!!!

I know many people who indexed their pages would have used "atom.xml" when they created a sitemap for their blog. Doing so will index only a maximum of 25 URLs. Use the text "atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=100" to get 100 posts indexed on your blog. You can vary the number as you want. I don't know how well it works. But, I use both for my blog. You can have a look at the screen shot above to understand this better.


Though there are a number of mistakes which we bloggers make, I enlisted only very few of them. However, I will be posting more about this topic in the upcoming weeks. If you know more about this stuff and you wish to share with us, you can consider writing a guest post on our blog , or just leave a comment below. We would love to hear from you!!!


Source from : Bloggerative

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[dadamson]

Great guide for newbies.

I am surprised you left out the most important part... LINK BUILDING

Newbies tend to spend way to much time playing within their websites, tweaking things, adding plugins, etc. But about 80% of your efforts SHOULD be spent creating high quality backlinks.

Cheers,
Dave

[yukon]

That never happend!

At least not for simply including unrelated content...

Ever heard of Wikipedia?

Originally Posted by xylement

CHOOSING UNRELATED URL OR TITLE
This is the most commonly made mistake by many newbies. They buy a domain name or choose one from the available blogspot domains keeping in mind to right some content say about "Making Money Online", "About Blogging" or some other stuff. But over a period of time, as they run out of content/topics, they tend to change their track and write a content which is completely not related to their title/URL. This happened to one of my fellow blogger and do you know the final result??? His blog was blacklisted on Google!!!

[paulgl]

LOL! A common SEO mistake is to neglect on-site SEO?
Well, shoot, that's the main point of SEO, isn't it?

That's like saying the first mistake in quenching your
thirst is to forget to drink the glass of water.

A site map? Never use em. Don't need em.

Yeah, Yukon. That's rich. Tell that to amazon.com, kayak.com,
uh zillow.com, ebay.com, even warriorforum.com....

Okay. Maybe that was a tad off. But how many people here
and across the web have their names as domain names? I
guess that practice is just bad. Pity they did not get the memo.

Paul

[iAmNameLess]

Some of these threads are just annoying....

And avoid redirects, really?? A 301 redirect can have an adverse effect on SEO? I don't think so.

[Knowledge Kick]

This doesn't make sense to me. Why doesn't monster.com get blacklisted for not being a site about monsters then?

[Charles Butler]

Originally Posted by Wildnettechnologies

What Is Most Common SEO Mistake ?
1 Graphic header
Very often sites are designed with a graphic header. Often, we see an image of the company logo occupying the full-page width. Do not do it! The upper part of a page is a very valuable place where you should insert your most important keywords for best seo. In case of a graphic image, that prime position is wasted since search engines can not make use of images. Sometimes you may come across completely absurd situations: the header contains text information, but to make its appearance more attractive, it is created in the form of an image. The text in it cannot be indexed by search engines and so it will not contribute toward the page rank. If you must present a logo, the best way is to use a hybrid approach – place the graphic logo at the top of each page and size it so that it does not occupy its entire width. Use a text header to make up the rest of the width.

That's what the ALT tag is for, so google knows what the keyword is, IF you use it for your keyword, that is

[vidhujain]

i didn't miss and I'll never miss that things.. thanks .

[simonbuzz]

Originally Posted by Knowledge Kick

This doesn't make sense to me. Why doesn't monster.com get blacklisted for not being a site about monsters then?

Yah he is right...and also I saw many sites that are not totally related to the niche they are targeting..and still they are ranking very high on the serps...

[kiranraj19]

Nice post. thanks for sharing

[GlobalMedia]

Originally Posted by Knowledge Kick

This doesn't make sense to me. Why doesn't monster.com get blacklisted for not being a site about monsters then?

Completely agree to you. I have never heard of such instances in which a blog/website is blacklisted for the unrelated content to their site url. It is recommended that one should use the relevant url but he is free to implement his ideas.

[summerbuzz]

for me common seo mistake is expecting immediate results, you wil never get immediate results in SEO. You must have patience in you. Succesful SEO requires good link building which takes time. SO you must agree to spend lots of time with good patience.