5 Common Blogging Mistakes costing you SEO
Here are 5 common blogging mistakes that may be costing you SEO juice. Whether you are blogging on your own WordPress site, or in communities like Active Rain, there is a good chance that you are missing some of these key elements. How do I know? I recently found out that I’m missing some of them too. Others, I have found that my friends are missing. I know because they didn’t even know what they were.
Common blogging mistake #1, #2 #3 – adding photos
Mistake #1 is not naming your photographs with keywords or phrases. How many of your photos are labeled, “DSC0123” or “123 Main Street Living Room before”? If either of those are your keywords, then you are golden. If they aren’t, then well, you are missing some SEO potential. Instead, name your photos something like, “Home Staging St Augustine before”.
Mistake #2 is not using keywords in your title tag. The title tag in WordPress is usually pulled directly from the name of the photo. If your photo is named DSC4561, then chances are, your title is the same. Instead of keeping it the same name of your photo, unless you actually named your photo correctly, you should rename your title tag.
Mistake #3 is not adding an alt tag. When you add your photo you’ll see the option, “alternate text” or “alt text”. If you are leaving this blank, then you are missing a huge opportunity for some SEO. Again, these should be keywords. Unlike the title tag, this doesn’t auto fill. It is usually just empty.
Now, if you’ve already made these mistakes in your blogs, no worries, you can go back and edit them to create more Google juice. This can be a little confusing but here is a little guidance.
In yellow above you’ll see that I have copied how your photo reads based on it’s name. While you can’t change this here in your code, or you will have errors, you can see why photo names are important. They are part of the code that Google is looking at.
In pink, you’ll see the title and alt tags. If you haven’t appropriately named them, then you can do back and do it now. If you haven’t been including this when you’ve added photos then chances are it says, “alt=” “. Just go put your keywords between the quotes. Sure, this takes some time, but you did this to rank in search engines, right?
Common blogging mistake #4
Are you using headings? This was a big ah-ha moment for me. You see, in the past, if I had written this blog, “Common blogging mistake #4” would have been in bold. Sure, you think it looks bold right now, but it’s not, it’s heading 3.
This time I’ll use my Active Rain blog as the example (although it looks the same as my WordPress blog in html)
Apparently Google likes headings, especially ones with your keywords in them. In Active Rain, you can simply replace the p between the < p > (no spaces) with < h1 > < h2 > etc, all the way up to < h6 >. (again no spaces). The higher the number, the smaller the font heading will be.
In WordPress, it’s even easier. Just click on the arrow next to “paragraph” at the top and you’ll find heading options right there. Headings do need to be their own stand alone sentence or phrase. Simply highlight them and then select which size heading you want.
A quick note on this, be sure you don’t overdo it. First, the title of your blog, is usually your heading 1. Don’t use this more than once. It confuses Google. Google apparently also likes it better when you have multiple headings in your blogs. Try to have at least heading 1, 2, and 3, as appropriate based on your content.
Common blogging mistake #5
Finally, the last common mistake is not writing a meta description. In Active Rain, your meta description is the first couple of sentences. In WordPress, there are several plugins that you can installs (my favorite is WordPress SEO by Yoast) that will give you the option to change this. Remember, you need to have your keywords in both your meta title (which is usually your actual title) and meta description.
In case you don’t know what a meta description is, it is the blurb that comes up when you do a search. The meta title comes up highlighted in blue, and the meta description is the text under it.
Now, how many common blogging mistakes were you guilty of making?
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Thank you for reading… 5 Common Blogging Mistakes costing you SEO
Tammy Emineth says
Great post and so true. It’s the little details that we have to pay attention to to really get a well optimized blog, page or article.
melissamarro says
Thank you Tammy. You are the one who knows too, since you are in the SEO biz. I appreciate your feedback!