Starting a blog is a great way to connect with your readers and appeal to search engines. Today, many bloggers understand the importance of having a business blog but are making crucial mistakes in execution. Most times, this is because they don’t know where to begin and fail to plan properly. In a race to get to the front page of Google, they might even end up using black hat strategies and SEO tactics that don’t work anymore and can get them permanently kicked off of search engines. With that in mind, here are five bad business blogging habits you should stop doing:
Keyword stuffing
Many marketers and bloggers are eager to get to the top of search engines. They understand that keywords help Google determine what their content is about and how relevant it is. Therefore, if they’re targeting a word like ”influencer marketing,” they might use the phrase dozens of times in an article, including in headings and subheadings. However, over the years, Google has emphasized the importance of veering away from using natural language to appeal to search engines rather than to appeal to your website visitors. Google’s Matt Cutts warned web admins about the dangers of keyword stuffing at an SXSW conference in 2017, saying:
We are trying to level the playing field a bit. For lack of a better word, all those doing over-optimization or overly SEO—versus those making great content and a great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links, or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.
Choosing the wrong web host
One of the first things you’ll want to do when it comes to blogging is choosing the right web host. Your hosting provider is where your blog lives; you wouldn’t move into a new house without ensuring it was the right house for you, and you shouldn’t do the same for your blog.
Explore your options by visiting several hosting sites and perhaps even opting to try them if you can. You want to consider multiple things when looking at a web host, such as server locations, speed, who’s managing the servers, backup systems, etc. Then, once you have your contenders, the right idea is to use a Venn diagram maker to compare and contrast your choices. A Venn diagram allows you to visually organize information to understand the relationship between your considering items better. For example, by creating a chart, you might find that all your potential hosting choices offer limited free storage but that only two can easily integrate with social.
Clickbait titles
Everyone wants to attract readers with their blog posts and other copy. However, clickbait titles have become relatively mainstream, and marketers and business owners are mixing up the need to attract readers by duping them. In fact, in the professional writing world, clickbait is considered tabloid journalism. Be straightforward about what you have to say. Don’t trick people into coming to your site: it will only hurt you in the long run.
Over-automating
When blog automation first hit the blogosphere in 2006, it was supposed to be a good thing. Bloggers could use RSS feeds to pull relevant content from other publishers onto their websites automatically. Today, many bloggers are over automating to fill their websites. They believe this relieves them of the burden of having to write original pieces consistently.
However, auto blogging should be severely moderated—used only when necessary. A great blog has a healthy mix of auto and original content, with the bulk of the material being unique. Another reason why too much auto-blogging can hurt your business is that it deprives your blog of its brand voice. Readers won’t get to know who you are as a person, and when they cannot understand the brand, the chances of a connection are slim.
Using article spinners
A handful of bloggers are still using article spinners to dupe search engines. Here’s how it works: you see an article online that’s popular and has generated some buzz. Instead of rewriting, quoting, or paraphrasing that article, you decide to save time and cut corners by running it through an article spinner. The article spinner then churns out a “new” piece for you using similar synonyms and phrases.
The idea is that this “new” article won’t appear as duplicate content to Google, and you won’t have to do any writing yourself. However, article spinners almost always strip away natural language, leaving readers with just a shell of its previous content. For example, take a look at this paragraph after it’s been through an article spinner: Nonetheless, text rewriters quite often strip away characteristic language, leaving perusers with only a shell of its past substance.
