Sometimes it is useful to get tips on the internet about a topic of interest. However, it can be just as effective, if not more, to read about the mistakes people have made about a topic of interest. I have been blogging, advertising and more for several years now and, since I first started, have come a very long way. There are definitely things I wish I told my naive self to not do when I first started and things I wished I told the same person to do more of. With this, here are 3 mistakes I have made, over the past several years, when it comes to search engine optimization. Hopefully you won’t be doing any of these!

#1 Copying Content – Always Bad SEO

When I first started out in blogging, a lot of my interests and hobbies were already blogged heavily about on the internet. Therefore, when I wanted to start up a website about a hobby and interest of mine, it was near-on enough impossible to get the website going and successful since competition was already extremely fierce. I resorted to looking at other websites in the same area and attempting to ‘re-word’ the articles, putting my own twist on the article. However, Google and other search engines can read straight through this and see that:

1. You are copying content.
2. You are not adding anything new to the internet.
3. Your content is not as useful as the original already on the internet.

For this reason, I learnt the hard way that copying content is a big no no and will severely waste your time.

#2 Creating Articles Too Short

The SEO an article receives is dependent on the length of the article. The more content there is for search engines to process, the better the picture the search engine can get as to what your content is about. Having long articles also helps SEO since web users stay on the website longer to read the content, providing evidence to search engines that the web user is finding your content useful if they are not clicking back onto search engine results any time soon.

One of my ideas I had was to create a website which had quick tips that you can slide right and left, about anything or a category that you can choose on the website (that you can swipe right and left based on if you thought the tip was useful or not, a bit like Tinder). The problem with this is that traffic generation for the website was, well, non-existent because the tips were so short that search engines did not rank them high at all.

#3 Guest Blogging

For one of my first websites, AskWillOnline.com, I use to accept lots of guest posts from the bloggers as they helped to provide my website valuable content as well as gaining them a dofollow backlink to their website. However, after a few years, I got a ton of emails from the same people telling me to remove the links from the articles. The problem was that Google was penalizing websites where the links were due to guest blogging, such as providing a link at the bottom in the ‘About the Author’. Google preferred natural linking within the articles: links should not be forced into the article and, if they come across as forced, such as with guest blogging, then the SEO of the website and article will be negatively affected.