Top 5 SEO Mistakes Bloggers Must Avoid

Daily and in the past several years, the digital marketing landscape has had tremendous and very significant changes. The reasons for these changes emanate from the fact that bloggers are becoming more knowledgeable and serious about blogging business, and the search engines are becoming smarter by the day. Nobody wants to lose out amidst all these changes. Bloggers have discovered that blog posts which specifically use a variety of on-page SEO tactics can give relatively more opportunities to rank in search engines and get customers to visit any site. Whether you’re new to the blogosphere or you have been blogging for some time, it pays to be aware of some of the most common SEO mistakes relative to blogging. Significantly, some SEO mistakes may seem basic because they occur often. Even at that, they manage to hinder many blogs from achieving optimal search engine rankings. Optimizing blogs for SEO may be a very tedious business, but it is necessary if you’re looking to reach your audience and compete against others in the blogosphere which a highly competitive atmosphere out there on the Internet. Here is a list of the top 5 SEO avoidable mistakes which many bloggers routinely make.

01. Not Inserting Internal and External Links in Your Blog Posts
 
Inserting links on blog posts help to prove to search engines that your content is valid and relevant. Internal links should link to a core or pillar page on your website, as well as direct readers to a related blog. If your blog includes a topic that has been mentioned in another blog post or web page, you should link back to that page. Internal linking helps to keep visitors on your site and helps surface your other authoritative pages to search engines.

02. Failing to Optimize Title Tags

A real grave error if optimizing title tags is overlooked. This is because title tags are one of the most important aspects of search engine rankings. Readers and search engines use title tags to determine the relevancy of any blog content. The real reason you should always keep your title tags targeted towards a keyword whose popularity you must have chosen using any relevant keyword tool before optimizing for it.

03. Keyword Stuffing

This is at times known as blackhat technique in SEO which many search engines now frown at. It should be avoided at all cost. Expert bloggers now know that keyword stuffing, that is, including keywords as much as possible in your content, is readily one of the most common SEO mistakes many bloggers make. It can be avoided by sticking to one or two long-tail keywords to center your blog post around. Long-tail keywords keep your post focused on the specific goals of your audience. They invite and encourage visitors to read your whole post and seek more information from you thereby helping to recognize your expertise.

04. Poor Page Copy

Blogging is a highly competitive business and the attention of online surfers is always very limited unless there is something unique that helps to arrest their attention for a while. Therefore, when writing a blog, you must keep in mind that you are writing to help people solve their problems. Your blog is not meant to impress search engines but to impress real people. For this reason, you must endeavor to keep your content light, informative, educational and entertaining. A good content is one that can be easily understood and is visually appealing, utilizing the simplest language while discarding unnecessary jargon.

05. Not Writing Enough Content
 
Out of pure laziness, many bloggers tend to write too little content. Search engines have no respect for content that is too scanty. Besides, writing short posts can hurt your reader loyalty. When search engines identify your blog as “low quality” simply because it doesn’t have enough content, it is extremely difficult for them to rank. Expert bloggers now recommend an ideal blog post of 300-750 words. Don’t get caught in the web of not writing enough content for your blog. If you do, it can rub off negatively on your blog ranking. 

 

5 Ecommerce Marketing Strategies Your Small Business Needs

If you are running a small business online, just pay attention. One major challenge many small business owners face daily is how to increase online sales. One fact you must know is that it is a rat race for small businesses out there online. That makes it a really difficult task to know where to start and how to stand out from the thousands of other e-commerce sites online. A real challenge no doubt! That is where e-commerce marketing strategies come in really handy if you know what you are doing. Give a try to these here 5 marketing strategies that have been proven to work for many e-commerce businesses in the past and are still working for others.



Content Marketing

One of the most popular marketing strategies right now is content marketing. It is the process of creating online material like blogs, gifs, videos, infographics, photos, or any other form of content that suits your target audience, with the aim of increasing visitors to your website. It can also educate your customers so that they can improve their performance within the niche. The more of your content someone sees, the more familiar the potential customer becomes with your brand.

Social Media Marketing

If you run a small online business and you are not on social media, there is a tendency to ask, where are you? If you are on social media and you are using it right, it can have a big impact on your sales figures within a very short while. It is also one of the quickest and easiest ways to create brand awareness. You can easily create an account on social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest then test and find out what works best for your type of business. Your marketing strategy gets worked out from the information you gather and your business prospers as a result.

Email Marketing

There has been talk that email marketing is waning in popularity. Well, that is neither here nor there at the moment. For many e-commerce business owners, email marketing still drives the fastest immediate results in terms of webpage traffic and sales. It may take awhile to build your email list but it just has to be done if you hope to make any success out of email marketing. Here is how, according to experts. You can build your email list in one of two ways or both. Firstly, by asking customers to opt into your newsletter when they check in/out and secondly you can choose to add an opt-in form to your homepage or other popular pages of your website.

Guest Blogging

If you are a good blogger, guest-blogging by publishing blogs on other sites can be a great way to connect with a whole new audience as well as establishing yourself as an authority in your industry. The bottomline is traffic to your own linked site if readers find your material interesting and rewarding. That is why you must not restrict yourself to publishing blogs only on your own site if you want quick results.

Search Engine Optimization, SEO
 
SEO techniques are a bit too technical for a newbie in e-commerce marketing. You can get expert help if necessary to get your site ranking high in search engine results. Very significantly, your website has no significance if a user cannot find it on the most popular search engines particularly Google. SEO makes your website organically visible on search engines. With a proper mix of the right keywords in your content both on-page and off-page, the site can be optimized to make it search engine friendly. That helps to attract the much needed traffic to your website making it a good e-business strategy.