7 Ways To Kill Your Blog

We’ve all heard of all the great things that could help in increasing traffic and improving website traffic. But little has been said about how certain practices kill our blogs. So the next time your checking those numbers and come up short, here are a few things that you should consider when your stats are sliding down.

SEO Writing

Don’t get me wrong, SEO is an integral part of any successful blog. But when you start writing for search engines and spend less time writing better content then it’s bound to drag your readership down. SEO should be built around your content and not the other way around. People read blogs and SEO makes it easier for people to find your content. Striking a balance between SEO and quality content is your best bet that you’re addressing both concerns.

Quality is king has become a common cliché but we should never sacrifice our SEO strategies either. One technique that I find very effective is to write the entire article first and focus on creating a unique and informative piece. After I have written the complete article I then focus on incorporating the keywords into my content.

Wrong Keywords

Keywords are the building blocks of SEO. These play an important role in determining how pages are created, anchor texts, domain URL and of course your content just to mention a few. Keyword research should be done at the start of your SEO strategy and you have to get this right the first time, every time.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps helps search engines index our websites faster. Most of us assume that every nook and cranny of our blog is crawled by search engines. Submitting a sitemap leaves no room for second guessing. It makes sure that all your latest contests are available for search engines. This is just one of the little things that can give us that edge over our competitors. Sometimes it’s not the things that we do but what we fail to do that gets us into trouble.

Going Black Hat

Blat Hat SEO strategies provides us with instant results but when search engines catch us dipping into that cookie jar there might be dire consequences. Your content might be labeled as spam or worst get blocked by search engines. Black Hat SEO techniques to avoid include buying backlinks, duplicate content and hidden scripts.

Not Checking the Numbers

Website monitoring tools were created for a purpose and that’s to help us understand the health of our blogs. If we want to be successful bloggers, then spending a few minutes every day to learn the tricks of our trade could go a long way in helping us reach our target numbers. Numbers to look out for includes traffic and bounce rates.

Google analytics in particular is an excellent tool for monitoring your website’s health. Bounce rates for example give us a glimpse of how people think about the content. Good bounce rates mean that people are surfing through the blog.

Not Optimizing Posts

If there is any strategy that a blogger should master then it would be to optimize his posts for SEO. Blogging means constantly writing fresh content. And if you manage to place the right amount of keywords then you will surely give your blog in a better position at searches.

Areas that should be optimized are the title, content headings, tags, descriptions and of course the content. A great part of optimization means researching appropriate keywords and using them accordingly. Just imagine if you were able to produce an optimized post each day. This does not only provide your readers with a steady source of fresh content but a rich source of keywords that help you get ranked higher.

Ignoring the Social Side

Getting people to visit your blog is one thing but converting them into loyal followers is another thing altogether. Blogs are personal in nature. It has its own personality and if you don’t care of the social side of your blog then you’re bound to lose all the traffic you have gathered through the years. If you feel that this is a very tedious tasks, there is always the possibility of getting a social media intern to help you.

Interacting with your readers and listening to feedback makes this communication easier. It shows that there is a person behind the blog that they could relate to. It also helps in brand building and helps them associate the blog with you. This is particularly true if you are also running your online business. Ignoring the recent launch of Google pages for business for example, is something you should avoid not using.