I remember the trepidation I felt approaching SEO for my personal website. I was reminded of those early days after reading the “12 Most Valuable Pieces of SEO Advice” by Bill Ross. In my career I received training for writing, but what no one told me was that most of Search Engine Optimization happens off the page. It turns out that factors like the markup of your site matter for how your content will get ranked.
Of course I was confronted by another challenge, how to muck around with my code. I thought I could handle all my efforts by just downloading the All-in-One SEO plugin. To my dismay I found out in several weeks that Google had stopped crawling my blog! I had heard stories of websites getting pulled from results with no feedback. You can imagine my panic when I felt I might be one of that number! Lucky for me, I had a webmaster tools account. After using a crawler test it became obvious that I had screwed up my robots.txt to the point that nothing was getting indexed. Ouch.
It was a harsh lesson, but one that has taught me the most about the nature of search. I understand more about the underlying principles that Google, Yahoo, Bing and others use to match queries to content. I have taken up two new hobbies because of my research; design & development. My New Year’s resolution is to design a WordPress theme from scratch. I wouldn’t be brave enough to try if I had not learned from my errors. Today I am sharing twelve mistakes I have made so you don’t have to repeat them.
1. No meta tags
In the beginning I skipped writing unique content for Title and Metadescription tags. This was a big mistake on my part. Search engines will use this information to display a summary of your content. The listing will default to show matching text on the page if this information is missing. This often fails to show your site in the best light, check out what Google has to say.
2. No focus
Is focus important? Yes, it is a matter of consistency. This is a strong signal that your content is relevant to a search query. Setting up appropriate categories for your blog and developing a content strategy early on will make things easier on you.
3. No title tags
There is more to the title tag than naming a page. We can use “title=” in our images and link markup. This adds a layer that search engines can crawl. The more text you can feed the spiders the happier they are. I actually started ranking #1 for some image queries after adding this tag.
4. No redirects
Have you ever moved your content around and found out you had a lot of 404 errors? Missing links are bad mojo. This isn’t just about SEO it is about professionalism. No one is going to read your content if they can’t find it. When you make changes to your slugs use a plugin like quick redirect to forward readers to the new url.
5. No images
I had a habit of writing posts that were a wall of text. Sure the content was optimized, but it would strain your eyes to try and read it. Break up text with images and white space so it is easy on the eye. They can also be optimized so your content can be found in an image search.
6. No link building
I have to admit that I am still learning link building strategies. I find this is where the line becomes thin between white hat and black hat practices. There are plenty of legitimate ways to build backlinks. For example, I made a goal this year to do more guest posting.
7. No robots.txt
As I explained at the start of my story, I royally messed up my robots.txt file.Save yourself some worry and upload one to your root directory. It controls what content crawlers index and can be written in notepad.
8.No sitemaps
It used to take a week or more for my content to show up in a search engine. Then I downloaded a plugin that could build a sitemap for my site. Now it only takes a few days. Sitemaps can be built for images and video too. Submit them to Bing and Google’s webmaster tools.
9. No video
I suggest you start a YouTube account. At first, I was worried about being on camera so I avoided this option. I decided to try and started with simple videos. I added audio of an interview to an image and uploaded the mix to YouTube. I was shocked to see the jump in traffic! Like images, videos can be optimized and appear in search.
10. No network
Don’t go it alone. Before the current incarnation of my blog I had an entertainment website. It never took off because I ignored the importance of networking. This year I joined the SITS girls forum and participated in a blog challenge. The women in my group promoted my posts and I received 2,000 unique views in a month for a brand new blog! I will never ignore this component again.
11. No newsletter
This is an area in which I need to catch up pronto. Amy Tobin discussed email marketing in her post, “12 Most Stealthy Tactics in Getting Your Email Opened”. The time has come for me to make a change. Have you had success with newsletters?
12. No community
Community is your online family. They may argue with you in the comments, but they only write them because they care. Sometimes it is discouraging when I see so few comments on my blog. The building of community has been slow for me, but I know it is worth the time. The tribe that builds around your content is special. Search engines get this and are beginning to incorporate social signals into their algorithms.
Looking back it seems really silly to me how afraid I was. If all you have to fear is making a mistake, then you are pretty lucky. Sometimes it is our failures that lead us down a road of discovery.
Looking for solutions I began to study usability, design, and code. I feel that my ideas about content have matured because of this. Have you had a similar experience? If you are new to SEO, what is your biggest fear?
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