Common SEO Mistakes That You Should Avoid

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, INDIVIDUAL META TAGS For Your Post apart from the REGULAR META TAGS, 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.
google-webmaster-tools-sitemap
CLICK THE PICTURE TO ENLARGE
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 - Guest Posting Guidelines, or just leave a comment below. We would love to hear from you!!!

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Fernando said on December 9, 2010 at 11:17 AM :

Yeah! Great post!
I think these points you mention here are pretty much vital.
Like the keyword research.
Nice to meet you and hope to see you around!

REPLY
Mukund said on December 9, 2010 at 8:25 PM :

@Fernando: Thanks for the comment!! I hope you enjoy the other updates on my blog as well! Would like to see you more often on my blog via comments!!!

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Anonymous said on January 31, 2011 at 7:13 PM :

Some people may want to choose very popular keywords which are irrelevant to their websites or some that are searched by very few people. This can be very harmful to the website. You should choose the keywords that are both related to the site and popular among people.

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Mukund said on January 31, 2011 at 7:26 PM :

@Anonymous: Hmmm! A valid point you made here! Yes! Should make sure that the keyword is relevant to the content and is most searched by people as well! Thanks for the comment! Would love to hear more from you!

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SEO said on May 9, 2011 at 2:51 PM :

I like you’re these nice tips so nice and use full any seo services. I m using many directories that are helping a lot for grabbing traffic on my blog I will try this also very interesting article. thanks share this page I am so happy know these good ideas. Thanks share this good think.

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web designer hampshire said on May 9, 2011 at 3:48 PM :

I think these points you mention here are pretty much vital.
Like the keyword research.

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Mukund said on May 10, 2011 at 10:04 AM :

@SEO: Thanks for the commend buddy! Hope you improve your SEO with these tips and you don't commit the common mistakes that many do!!!

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Mukund said on May 10, 2011 at 10:04 AM :

@web designer hampshire: Thanks for the comment buddy! I hope you enjoy the other articles on SEO as well!

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Sagar said on June 5, 2011 at 12:30 AM :

Ya you're absolutely right ! We need to add "atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=100", the URL's are limited to "26" otherwise Google might not be aware of those URL's but then too Google index's them automatically.

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Mukund said on June 5, 2011 at 9:58 AM :

@Sagar: Yes! Your right, they will index all the posts but what stays in their current database would be the last 26. It is better to have all the posts rather than the last 26.

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Vicky said on March 3, 2012 at 3:14 PM :

Hey ,I also do the same for my Gets Latest Updates blog .

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