11 Deadly SEO Mistakes to Avoid in 2021

1. Poor page index

If there are too many indexed pages performing well on your site, you should finish them as soon as possible.

Why? The overall quality of your website content can affect your search results.

If your content strategy includes creating a longer content form, you will see better results over time and your search traffic will eventually grow. But if your content strategy incorporates a combination of minimal content and insufficient content, your site standards may suffer.

Your site level may be charged by one or more of Google's algorithms. Now why did you take the opportunity?

If you have already published the tone of a blog post on your blog and if you are sure that some of them (or many of them) or do not bring you traffic, you should start working on improving or redirecting those pages.

What is the best way to fix pages with downtime?

Currently, we only show 400 Blogger Passion posts in Google Search.

Did you know that, we have published over 900 posts (excluding pages)? Even after we get about 1000 posts, we only show about 400 results for our site in Google search and the reason we want to identify the top content.

If you are wondering how to do it right, here is a simple step by step guide on how to find and edit your slow-moving content to increase your overall search levels by 2021 and beyond.

Step 1: Go to Google Analytics and find your top 10 (or top 20) pages. If the content on those pages has not been used yet, it is time to redefine it.

Step 2: Also find a list of all the malicious posts and pages on your site. Look at your final year or two-year traffic report to find those pages that do not bring you visitors from search engines like Google.

Step 3: Make a list of all the pages that are not performing well in the spreadsheet (and URLs) so you know what is wrong with Google.

Step 4: Start making changes

Once you find the content that is not working properly, you can do 3 things including;

• Update with the latest information

Integrate with the same content (if you have too many blog posts on the same topic, find a blog post or page that carries a lot of traffic and merge the remaining posts on that page to make it more detailed)

• Redirect (if it doesn't work, you can simply use 301 redirects to redirect your mismatched post to a page that creates a lot of traffic, giving you more linking and authority juice to pages that are already doing well)

Stop creating crappy content

Did you make the very first mistake of writing a short blog? Do not write short blog posts containing 300 words or less. They are not accustomed to finding traffic in search engines. That means writing is no better than writing an article with 300 words or less.

If you want to get better search rates, start creating 2000+ blogs, see the image below to understand it better.

Stop typing ONLY search engines

Yes, we all love search engine traffic, because we can build better blogs and make more money with PPC ads and related programs where search engine traffic flows through our blogs. But what if you are only focused on writing search engines?

You will not find loyal readers, your readers will not find it easy to digest your blog posts and may eventually unsubscribe from your blogs. This is one of the mistakes that can damage the integrity of your blogs over time.

2. Ignore page layout

There are two mistakes most people make.

1. Do not research keywords OR

2. Not upgrading their content with selected keywords

If you make any of the above errors, you will not find search traffic. It's that simple.

Stop creating text content ONLY

This is one of the most amazing SEO mistakes of many bloggers. They only create text content, they don't care about being everywhere by creating videos, podcasts and / or infographics to expand their online visibility. Don't forget that YouTube is also a search engine that sends a lot of traffic when you create relevant videos for your blogs.

Page customization is the process of maximizing your individual pages with keywords (called key and secondary keywords) to improve their search engine rankings.

That is, you need to first find basic and second keywords in order to be able to use them in prominent areas in each of your locations. Here are a few quick tips for making the best use of the page.

Use SEO friendly URLs (which should be short but you need to use your keywords)

• Start a topic with your keyword (usually the best way to get more natural visibility as title tags play a big role)

• Add as many images as possible to make your content stand out (and use ALT tags with keywords to add a search)

• Enter your keywords in the H1 tag

• Enter your keywords in the meta description

• Put them in subheadings in h2, h3 and so on

Use your keyword in the introduction (if possible within 100 words)

Plugins for WordPress users

The great thing about using WordPress is that it offers plugins for using a variety of pages (most available for free).

There are 2 plugins that we highly recommend if you want to add your content well and have it.

• WordPress SEO by Yoast

• Level Matt

Let's talk a little bit about them now.

WordPress SEO by Yoast: This is the most popular SEO plugin developed by the Yoast team used by millions of people around the world. This is also the same action plugin we have been using for years now.

It helps you to quickly expand your blog posts and pages with targeted keywords and also suggests where to put your keywords to make them rank better in search results. It also helps with XML site maps, setting canonical URLs and more.

SEO is a Rank Math plugin: This is a NEW plugin that has been creating a lot of good buzz since its inception. In fact, the Rank Math plugin is considered one of the best Yoast SEO premium plugin.

3. An older version of HTTP is still in use

Are you still using the HTTP version on your unsafe site?

Did you know that HTTPS is a feature of SEO ranking? Yes, that's right. Google shows more love for HTTPS pages compared to HTTP.

Whether you know it or not, browsers like Chrome and Firefox clearly mark websites that provide forms on non-HTTPS pages as unsafe. They show “unsafe” error pages for visitors who browse those existing pages on HTTP.

HTTP represents Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure and SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer.

The secure version i.e. HTTPS version uses an SSL certificate to establish the connection between the browser and the server so that any information including bank details, credit card or debit data, etc that is exchanged between your browser and website is encrypted.

We have written a detailed guide to switch from HTTP to HTTPS using SSL certificates where you can find all the details on how to easily secure your site for more authority, branding, and improved search standards.

Once you have installed free SSL certificates to move from HTT to HTTPS, you need to verify that your site URLs are running on HTTPS.

So how can you find that out? It's as simple as manipulating various non-HTTPS URLs for your site domain (for example, www.example.com; http://www.example.com) and making sure all 301 redirected to HTTPS is a version.

In case you are wondering how to easily change all your URLs from http to https version, here's a quick fix.

If you use WordPress, there is an incredible (also free) plugin called the True Simple SSL plugin that automatically finds your settings and prepares your website to run over https.

Quick note: Before installing and activating the plugin above, you just need to make sure you get an SSL certificate (as discussed above, using sites like Bluehost) to enable it.

4. Site assessment: what are they?

One of the biggest mistakes most bloggers make is this: they don't know about Site Audits.

If you are also one of those bloggers who do not really know what site testing is, you should learn more about them and use them to get better results with SEO.

Let’s make it easy for you: what is site testing anyway?

Site testing helps you find all the technical and SEO-related issues on your website so you can address those issues to improve your overall ranking in search engines.

Simply put, site testing provides rich diagnostic information where you can easily find and fix all the issues of your website that prevent your site from getting more traffic.

So how do you get started with site testing?

Site testing is definitely a technical thing so if you are not a tech professional, we highly recommend you choose a few SEO tools.

In our case, we use and highly recommend the Semrush tool which is one of the most popular SEO tools in the world used by millions of people. It gives you a Site Audit feature where you can easily find and customize your entire SEO site or technical-related issues in one place.

Here's what you can do:

Helps you get the health of your site (gives you health points)

• You can prioritize SEO issues and decide what to fix first

• Track SEO continuity and optimization

• You can find and correct technical issues such as hreflang errors

• You can easily find all the AMP implementation issues

Not only that, it helps you with content-related issues such as;

• Pages without meta descriptions

• Pages with longer titles

• Alarm tags missing from photos

• Broken links

• And the list goes on

All in all, it is a great tool to easily find and fix your site issues using site testing. If you are wondering how to get started with it, let us help you with a free trial.

5. Avoid duplicate content

According to Semrush research, 50% of websites (which collect data from 100,000 websites and over 450 million pages) have duplicate content problems.

Now, what is duplicate content anyway?

Here's how Google defines duplicate content: "large content blocks within or across all domains that may not be fully compatible with other or similar content."

To put it simply, duplicate content is “content from the Internet in more than one location.”

But here's the thing about repetitive content: it won't make you punished.

Yes, that's right.

At Google Q&A, Andrey Lipattsev, Google's Search Quality Senior Strategist, said there was no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.

But that does not mean, you have to become accustomed to duplicate content.

After all, search engines like Google want to show "unique and highly valuable content" to users. So if you run duplicate content on your site, it will not help you with search traffic.

Duplicate content not only damages your reputation as a blogger but will not help you get any additional traffic (Google crawlers are smart enough to find copied articles in search results).

Use different headlines when publishing your blog posts, be sure to do a quick search on Google to find the headlines to use. Use those topics that are no longer available. If you are looking for a simple solution, you can also use free tools like Portent to get many unique theme ideas for your post.

Offer loans where needed. For example, if you put someone else's content on your blog, be sure to link to the source first.

Similarly, whenever you use data (infographics, charts, screenshots, photos, etc.) from other sites, provide a link to their sources to avoid copyright issues (or copyright issues) over time.

Be inspired by your favorite posts, but don't copy them. Try to make better blog posts by adding more value by adding photos, infographics, videos, or podcasts. Also, provide a link to the back of the post where you take the inspiration to write a post.

6. Broken links everywhere

Broken links whether they are internal or external links are harmful to the SEO of your site.

There are 3 BIG problems with broken links (both internal and external broken links)

1. If a user sees a 404 page instead of the useful information they want to read, they will see a bump (a sharp drop in traffic also increases the slowdown of your site)

2. Your visitors will see your site as inferior (so your site will suffer conversion rates)

3. Problems with Google search (whenever search engines visit your website, crawl a certain number of pages, but not your entire site and in case you have a TON of broken links, your pages will not be betrayed and indexed)

So how can it fix the problem of broken links?

In Blogger Passion, we regularly identify broken links using the Semrush location search tool. It's one of the best Semrush products where you can easily find all the broken links (including toxic links) on your site.

You can also use any type of link testing plugins or tools to easily find and fix all your broken link problems.

In case you are wondering what kind of link testing tools or plugins are available online, here is a list.

• Broken link detector from Screaming Frog (you can use this free tool to easily crawl a website quickly and find broken links such as 404 errors with the server and you can post bulk errors and source URLs to fix them, or send them to anyone)

• Broken link check plugin plugin (this is a free plugin that crawls your entire website and finds broken links and images on your website)

Xle's Link Sleuth (a computer program that scans websites for easy broken links)

Although there are many tools available online that you can use to find and repair broken links, the tools mentioned above (including Semrush) are simple and effective.

7. Using black hat SEO techniques

The black hat SEO has been around for a long time. If you are still pursuing the black hat SEO techniques, you should judge them right away.

Black hat SEO means the use of aggressive SEO techniques and tactics that focus only on search engines like Google and not on people.

To put it simply, black hat SEO involves entertaining search engines only through an aggressive link structure or content farms and does not focus at all on users. In fact, websites that follow black hat SEO techniques are punished by Google algorithms sooner or later.

Here are a few of the most popular black hat SEO techniques (avoid them by all means if you don’t want to be fined by Google

Keywords entry

Paid links (especially from sites like Fiverr)

• Automatically generated content (there are too many tools to retrieve content from other sources, you should never promote that content)

• Connect the farm

• Building door pages

• Invisible links

• Spin the article and the list goes on

All in all, if you use any of the above strategies, your overall search and traffic levels may decrease over time. It is better NOT to focus on such things and to focus on the things that really improve your standards.

Now how can you fix this problem?

You should only learn and apply the white hat SEO techniques.

White hat SEO involves entertaining both search engines and targeted audiences on your website. That is, your content is written for both people and is well adapted to search engines like Google.

Here are some of the white hat SEO techniques you can use to get better rankings for your site in 2021 and beyond.

• Build responsive mobile design

• Improving the UX of your website (User Experience)

• Improve the speed and performance of your entire website

• Appropriate navigation links are used

• Creating a long range of content to improve standards

• LSI keywords are used to improve content

• Remove toxic backlinks to your site

• Techniques for building green links such as guest posting, email access, broken link structure, etc. are used to create links

Quick Note: When it comes to links, it is very important to improve your backlink profile by removing all toxic backlinks from your site. We have written a detailed guide to removing toxic backlinks where you can find all the details.

8. Ignore your website analytics and metrics altogether

Here are some important website metrics you need to take care of.

• Organic organic

• Page views

• Beating rate

• CTR

• New return visitors

Let's talk about them for a moment so that you can better understand them.

Organic traffic: This is a very important metrics that tells you how many users have come to your website with search engines when searching for what they want with keywords

Rate Rate: This is another important metrics that show your "user interaction and engagement" on your site, and also tells you the quality of your site, how much time your visitors spend on your pages, the more engagement of your site, and the slower rate you will get.

That said, here's a great tutorial is done by ConversionXL around bounce levels.

Click-through Rate (CTR): Estimates how many users click on your links such as pages, posts, ads etc after you see them.

New visitors coming back: This metric tells you how many new users visited your site compared to how many people visited your site directly.

Pageviews: This is no different as one user can visit multiple pages with a single visit, and these pages can help you easily find out what kind of content you are doing well on your site depending on the ideas they receive.

9. You have a bad website structure

The difference between high traffic websites and low traffic websites is this: high traffic sites have better site structures and sites that do not get any search traffic are often well placed. It's that simple.

Here are some of the reasons to focus on improving the design of your site.

• The design of your website affects your search standards

• Affects your website user information (and how they navigate your site)

• Affects your site's vulnerabilities

What is the best way to build your website?

Just look at the Blogger Passion website layout once.

As you can see above, we have organized all the categories, menu, navigation, etc. keeping users and search engines in mind.

You can see that we have organized all the sections on our blog in a logical way (when you navigate the sections of the Post, you can easily find all the categories).

And when you click on any category, you will find a list of all the articles in that particular category. It doesn't help that readers easily navigate to any type of content they want but also the search engine bots find it easy to crawl the whole site without any problem.

Here is a good example of an SEO site structure.

As you can see above, the SILO structure follows. An easy way to describe the structure of the beast is to have a target page, with many supporting pages linking to the target page.

If you see our sections on Blogger Passion, we have built them systematically (by following the SILO structure). You can do the same for your website where you can make the main categories different and create sub-categories related to the MIDDLE category where they cross.

10. You are not looking to increase the exposure of your blog

There’s one big mistake that all beginners bloggers make no matter what you are in the industry: they don’t waste time in providing too much exposure to their content.

They spend a ton of time (many hours) on content creation and optimization of that content but spend less time promoting their content. If you make the same mistake, you will not get online visibility.

Now how can you fix it?

There is a strong correlation between SEO and social media. In fact, search engines like Google take social media signals like Facebook shares, tweets, etc when they are considered while setting up a web page. That is very important for you to focus on improving the visibility of your content, especially on social media sites.

That being said, here are a few quick things you can do to increase your blog's exposure, social media shares, and live visibility.

Publish to your social media pages: Immediately after publishing any content on your blog, be sure to publish to your social media accounts including your Facebook pages. If possible, try to find similar Facebook groups where you can share with other bloggers and promote your latest blog posts to bring targeted visitors to your site.

Use Quora: The best part of using sites like Quora is that, you can write a summary of the post and publish it in Quora, Medium, etc. Just make sure you use original content and do not copy attachments from your blogs in response to Quora. It will not help!

Share it with your followers: If you are blogging for a while, you may already have some followers on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. You can reach out to them online and ask them to share your recent blog posts. But do not do it as often as you would like. You should also return the same if you want to build a relationship.

Use Facebook Ads: Facebook Ads are a great way to advertise your posts where you can reach targeted audiences based on your regular visitor profile. It may cost you a small amount of money but it is worth your money especially if you are trying to promote your “marketing posts” where you can earn money.

Send it to your email list: If you have an email list (if not, you should start building it from now on as it offers $ 40 ROI for every $ 1 spent on average), you can send an email newsletter about your latest blog post. If you are publishing too many posts per week, it is best to send a weekly alarm (once a week) where you can post all your blog posts at once.

Link to it from old posts: Internal link should be whenever you publish something on your blog. Find and link to your old blog posts that match the topic you cover. Not only does it help to better crawl search engines but it also helps your audience find content to read. It ultimately increases your audience engagement.

Write guest posts: The last thing you can do is write guest posts and publish them on the relevant website and link to your post. It not only helps you build a link but also helps you build relationships with other bloggers.

All in all, how much time you spend on improving your blog post and providing more exposure to your content directly affects your overall authority and authority traffic.

11. The speed of your website is important

There’s your quick tip: go to Pingdom tools and find the speed of your website (by entering your URL).

Now, your question: does your site take more than 3 seconds to load?

If so, you need to prioritize your # 1 to make your site speed work. Why? If your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, you will lose 40% of your website traffic. One of the mistakes made by many bloggers is that they do not focus on speeding up their site.

So why leave your website traffic and sales on the table? Start focusing on improving your website loading times and performance to start getting more traffic and sales.

So what can you do about increasing the speed of your website?

We have written a detailed guide to increasing website speed but what to say, here are your quick tips;

1. Invest in fast and secure capture: We love WPX hosting. Since we started using WPX hosting (previously we used Hostgator), the speed of my website is increasing rapidly, now we are loading in less than 2 seconds which is great.

Although WPX hosting costs $ 25 per month and Hostgator comes for only $ 6 / mo but WPX makes your site faster and safer (as they use dedicated hosting servers).

Here are some of the features you will find;

• Free site migration

• Daily backups

• SSL certificates

• Dedicated hosting

• Fast customer support and much more

If you want to know more about WPX hosting and its features, you can read the post from here.

Customize your images: We all know how important images are to bring more traffic to our sites. They also provide visual appeal to your audience. We strongly recommend using at least one image for every blog post you publish.

But one of the common mistakes made by many people is that; they do not improve their images before posting them on their sites. There are 2 types of image optimization.

• Adjust image size: Before uploading your photos within your blog post, be sure to limit them. You can use plugins like rn shrink.it or you can use many free online photo editing tools to reduce your images. That way your blog pages will take less time to upload your photos, which is why it gives your audience instant upload times to read.

Customize your photos with ALT tags: Always use ALT tags in your photos with your keyword. That way, you can bring in visitors from Google's image search that can be very helpful.