3 Brutally Easy-to Miss SEO Mistakes Blogs Make
Is your blog content great, but not ranking on search engines? You are not alone. The digital landscape has, over the last couple of years, evolved tremendously. Google and other search engines have also refined their algorithm to ensure that they offer the most accurate and relevant search results to users.
With the spate of misinformation about SEO in the digital marketing world, it is easy to make mistakes. With every search engine algorithm update, the internet is flooded with thousands of articles on how the change will affect SEO. What most people fail to understand is that the core principles do not change as much as the medium changes.
Here are three brutally easy-to-miss SEO mistakes that blogs make.
Inconsistent Internal Links
Internal linking is one of the most overlooked SEO aspects, yet it is one of the most important. As Search Engine Land notes, these links are relevant as they:
• Increase crawl rate by revealing deeply related web pages to search engine bots
• Enable web visitors to navigate the site quickly
• Distribute the link juice throughout the site
• Defines the site architecture
• Indexes the linked-to pages by using keywords used as hyperlink anchor text
Even though backlinks is one of the power search engines ranking factor, you can amplify the results by making sure that you have a strategic internal linking structure. Ideally, you should strive to have 3-5 internal links in every blog post that you publish.
Conduct regular internal link audit to know which web pages enjoy the most traffic and insert internal links on these pages to other relevant pages. Doing so will help ensure an even distribution of authority or link juice throughout the site.
Images and Videos that are not optimized
A large percentage of bloggers sideline the essence of video and image optimization. Unknown to them is that videos and images that are not optimized cause slow page load speeds, which compromises SEO performance.
All your vector images should be formatted as .png and on-site images as .jpg. More importantly, you should optimize the image alt text to ensure that it ranks for the target keywords.
How do you optimize video files? The first thing that you need to do is add all the video files in one folder. Then, proceed to create a video site map to help search engines to index the videos. Just like the images alt text, you each video should have an optimized meta description. You can also add a CTA in your video annotations and meta description.
Not Doing Keyword Research
Sure, machine learning technology and semantic search have gained massive traction, but that is no reason to ignore keyword research when creating your internal content marketing campaign. Concisely, all the content on your blog should resonate with the keywords, topics, and your overall business objectives.
Without keyword research, you will not be in a position to know what your target customers want. You will also not be able to get a clear glimpse of whom you are writing for. To help you understand the importance of including the right keywords in your posts, consider them as a bridge between the target audience intent and transactional content.
By having keyword-optimized content, you stand a better chance of driving impressions for targeted searchers and ranking high on SERPs. Informational long-tail keyword phrases such as questions that begin with words such as when, what, how, and where are ideal for on-site blogs. Actionable search words such as “tips” and “hacks” will also make your content more optimized.
Most bloggers also do not optimize their meta tags and heads with the targeted keyword phrases. Because the particular keyword phrase used by the searcher will be bolded – if it is contained in the meta description- optimizing them will increase click-through rate.
Also, you need to leverage semantic SEO, that is, use of keyword phrases that are similar and have the same meaning. This form of SEO will help you to come up with more readable and thorough content as well as increase impressions for different target keyword phrases.
More importantly, answering the searcher question will increase the chances of your content qualifying for a featured snippet especially in the current wake of voice search.
As you optimize the content, you need to be very careful not to fall prey to keyword stuffing, that is, use of too many keywords in a post resulting in high keyword density. A high keyword density will trigger search engine bots to categorize your content as spam. In addition, keyword stuffing will lower content readability thereby resulting in a bad user experience.
Conclusion
Avoid these fatal SEO mistakes when creating content for your blog to stand a better chance of getting a high ranking on SERPs.