5 Common SEO Errors
For the past 3 years I have been used to blogging and in fact I came across a tip or another about “how to start a successful blog” without giving a single thought to common SEO errors – or even SEO in general.
Convinced who knew enough to start my own blog, I took a courageous step and bought a domain after choosing the niche on which my blog will focus.
Choosing a niche was not really a problem, because I had long been interested in what I was naturally interested in.
My knowledge of the subject was also sufficient to establish myself as a thought leader for the public in this niche.
Choosing a niche is very important and this article about micro niche websites explains why.
After choosing my niche, getting a domain name, finding top WordPress web hosting for bloggers, I thought my worries were gone.
I thought I just had to worry about how I could be consistent with the message I made available to my audience.
Every blogger knows about SEO and the usual jargon that the cyber space is floating over it.
We all know that performing SEO expert in pakistan on a blog will increase the visibility of search engines and consequently affect the amount of organic traffic that your blog will get.
In addition, I also had simple tasks such as image optimization, writing anchor text for outgoing and incoming links, so that the blog is mobile friendly and responsive, etc.
However, it was not known to me to understand the technical part of SEO, and then I had to solve it.
I also learned about it through my Google Search Console account.
Let’s dive into the SEO river!
# 1 Content No keyword optimization
Now I felt that keywords were not needed because of the conflicting information I received online about keywords. I once read a blog post suggesting that Google no longer checks keywords before your blog can be ranked.
Besides, in addition to keyword optimization, experts keep screaming to write in a natural way and let everything flow without any distractions. As a result, when I finish writing my message, it is “naturally optimized for the wrong keywords.”
For example if my post is on digital marketing and maybe how essential it is for companies. The best opinion is that the term “digital marketing” will be mentioned a lot in this post, hence this is the keyword. However, if you enter this keyword as a search query on Google and carefully examine the result, what did you see? Yes, did you see those big blogs? They have taken everything. Well, technically not everything.
Now, don’t get this wrong – as I am of course writing, I tend to use short-term keywords that are highly competitive and that already have many large weapons. To be honest, I have no chance against these people. They have been around for a long time and deserve every position they take on SERP.
Hence, since my blog posts already rank for competitive keywords, a competition that I can’t consider winning at all, I hardly get any traffic from search engines.
I learned it the hard way, because I wasted a lot of time writing articles that people can hardly read. I urgently needed to do something about this issue. From I went to the Uber suggest tool and the Keyword Tool, combining these tools. I got some suggestion for keywords based on the original keyword that I used. These keywords are called “long-tail keywords” and are often less competitive. What have I done?
I chose these suggestions with sufficient search volume and spread it all over that specific blog post. The logic behind this is to be ranked for much less competitive keywords. For example, if the keyword contains roughly 300,000 searches per month and I have 15 long keywords that have around 3000 searches in a month. I think what I get is fair. After a while I will also start ranking for the competitive keywords, because that post is becoming more popular.
# 2 Having 2 Domain Versions (http & https)
Google Chrome specifically, now marks site without an SSL certificate as unsafe. Aside from that, there are speculations flying over that these also have an effect on the ranking of sites. Google has directly told webmasters that HTTPS is now used as a ranking factor.
I followed these instructions and bought an SSL certificate through my hosting company (which later gave me a number of problems). After purchasing this SSL certificate I was happy, but this happiness was short-lived when I discovered that users can open my blog with: “https: // www.”, “Https: //”, “http: / / www. “,” Http: // “. If you do not know the implication of this, I will tell you. It simply means that Google distributes my site privilege between these domains, greatly reducing my growth rate.
Moreover, my content can be seen as duplicate content by search engines, which is true. The sad news is that I will be punished for this too. How worse can it be? Losing on shares and being punished again? Not really! I didn’t want that, so I went looking for a solution. During this search I learned that it is easy to convert a 301 redirect on all other versions to a certain one. This guide showed me how to do it, including screenshots and a short video.
Then I could redirect the other versions to the “https: //” version, which I already needed anyway. Then I went to my Search Console account and requested that I crawl and index the pages again.
# 3 Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for Mobile Users
AMP are cached pages that Google shows to users who have received your site as one of the results for their searches. Is AMP really worth it? These versions are usually very fast and respond, so it is recommended that everyone implements them for their blogs.
Fortunately I use WordPress and there are countless plug-ins that can do this for me successfully. I personally use AMP for WP – Accelerated Mobile Pages and it worked great for me. You do not necessarily have to use this, there are other good ones that you can choose from.
Now I am sure that the version that mobile search users see is well optimized and safe for my SEO.
# 4 Very slow site speed and web hosting downtime
It was a new blog with very little content that was ready to be published, so I opted for shared hosting (the lowest plan actually). Normally this should not be a problem because I didn’t have any traffic on the blog yet.
I knew this was the only way to upgrade my plan and create a free Cloud Flare account to host my blog in different strategic locations. Fortunately, when I did this, I noticed significant changes in site speed (it was still a shared hosting account, but a much higher plan with more allocation – according to them). Testing with Google Page Speed Insight showed that the speed lag due to the host’s response has decreased.
Moreover, because of the insincerity of my host provider, they secretly closed the server when I suspected I was asleep, which resulted in a high downtime. I tried to change the host, but it didn’t work because I bought the SSL certificate through them and they are not ready to make a refund.
I actually got a new host, transferred my domain to them, but the SSL certificate was not there. The implication is that everywhere I have posted my links as “https: //” an error will appear because it no longer exists. That’s why I had to go back to my previous host and upgrade the plan.
# 5 Ignore Site Cards.
With sitemaps that are placed once on a website, search engines can search your pages faster. In essence, the risk that the bots do not crawl through some of your pages is limited unless you have specifically given the instruction in the file.
I used this tool to generate an XML sitemap for free and then immediately uploaded it to my Google search console. Pretty simple!
Final Thoughts
Although this list is not complete enough to cover all SEO Errors that you encounter as a blogger. These few were my own and I was able to solve them myself, even though I was a newbie. Although technical, still easy to maneuver.