1. Per­mit­ting Title Tags to be Auto Gen­er­ated (from the post title, cat­e­gory name, etc.):

Every cat­e­gory page and most perma­link pages (i.e. post pages) ought to be hand-​​crafted. Don’t just let the blog soft­ware reuse the post title or cat­e­gory name with your blog’s name tacked on in the front. Why? Because an idyl­lic post title is hardly ever have an ideal title tag. Opti­miz­ing your post title or cat­e­gory name by work­ing in syn­onyms, mul­ti­ple verb tenses, etc. into it can mess up its punch­i­ness and thus its reader impact.

How would you achieve this? If your blog is pow­ered by Word­Press, then you can use my Word­Press plug-​​in called SEO Title Tag. It even offers a “mass edit” man­age­r­ial inter­face for mak­ing immense edits across dozens or hun­dreds of pages at once. I am not aware of a alike plug-​​in for Mov­able Type or other blog plat­forms, but pos­si­bly this arti­cle will spur some­one on to write it.

If you don’t have the time or resources and wish to carry on with auto-​​generated title tags, you ought to, at an absolute min­i­mum hand code the title tag on the home page, and then on the rest of the blog place the blog name at the end of the title tag rather than at the start (or remove it alto­gether). This will give you more exclu­sively focused title tags.

2. Let­ting Pages Get Indexed That Should Never Be Indexed:

Some pages shouldn’t be per­mis­si­ble into the search indices because they are either fun­da­men­tally content-​​less (like the “Email this page” form or “Enlarged photo” pages) or because they are sub­stan­tively alike to other pages (like the “Printer-​​friendly” pages). Scru­ti­nize your indexed pages in Google using the site: inquiry oper­a­tor and look for which pages don’t deserve to be there. Then for­bid them in your robots.txt file.

3. Hav­ing Sev­eral Homes For Your Blog:

Does your blog have what search engine geeks refer to as “canon­i­cal­iza­tion” issue? If you can get to a page by man­i­fold URLs, then the answer is “Yes.” For instance, ries​.type​pad​.com and www​.orig​i​nof​brands​.com and orig​i​nof​brands​.com all guide to the same page.

4. Not Using Optional Experts to Min­i­mize Dupli­cate Content:

This may be well-​​known by other names in other blog plat­forms, but in Word­Press the optional extract on the Write Post form is where you can define alter­nate copy to exhibit every­where but on the perma­link page. That will make the con­tent of the post dis­tinc­tive to the perma­link page, reduc­ing the poten­tial that you’ll lose rank­ings for dupli­cate con­tent because the post would oth­er­wise be included in its entirety on sev­eral pages, includ­ing archives-​​by-​​date pages and cat­e­gory pages.

5. Not using rel=nofollow to strate­gi­cally direct the flow of link gain:

Some inter­nal links aren’t very oblig­ing because they have sub­op­ti­mal anchor text (e.g. “Perma­link” and “Com­ments”). Some exter­nal links just leak link put on to nobody’s ben­e­fit, such as “Digg this” links.

6. Over-​​reliance on date-​​based archives:

Most blog’s sys­tem­atize their archives by month rather than by key­word. That’s a shame because the anchor text of links is so imper­a­tive to SEO, yet these date-​​based archives tend to have ter­ri­ble number-​​based anchor text. Sys­tem­iz­ing your blog into cat­e­gories is a step in the right direc­tion, but imple­ment­ing tag­ging and tag clouds across your blog is a much more search engine most favor­able approach. Then you can ditch your date-​​based hier­ar­chy, or at least rel=nofollow all those date-​​based archive links. 

7. Using sub­op­ti­mal anchor text when link­ing internally:

It’s not unusual for Blog­gers to make use of “here” or “pre­vi­ously” or alike sub­op­ti­mal phrases as anchor text within post copy. Defy the temp­ta­tion and use rel­e­vant key­words instead.

8. Putting your blog’s URL or your RSS feed’s URL on a domain you don’t own:

Does your blog’s URL have blogspot​.com, type​pad​.com, word​press​.com, etc.? If so, please repli­cate after me in a Homer Simp­son voice: “Doh!” This is a adver­sity wait­ing to hap­pen. What hap­pens if you want to move to another blog plat­form or ser­vice provider? You won’t be able to 301 redi­rect. The finest thing you can do is put up a “We’ve moved” post then dis­card the blog.

Another mis­take is using Feed burner devoid of using their MyBrand ser­vice — which means that all your RSS sub­scribers are sub­scrib­ing to a URL you don’t con­trol. You’d be in a pickle if you ever wanted to change from Feed­burner to another ser­vice. After Google attained Feed­burner, they made the MyBrand ser­vice free. So there’s no jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for not using it. I use MyBrand with my blog, so my feed URL is http://​feeds​.stephanspencer​.com/​s​c​a​t​t​e​r​i​ngs instead of http://​feeds​.feed​burner​.com/​s​c​a​t​t​e​r​i​ngs.

9. Offer­ing sub­op­ti­mal pod casts:

If you are pub­lish­ing pod­casts on your blog, be cer­tain to opti­mize the ID3 tag, include show notes with each pod­cast, and cre­ate show tran­scripts (hint: Cast­ing­Words offers inex­pen­sive pod­cast tran­scrip­tion), and make sure you have a pres­ence in pod­cast direc­to­ries like iTunes.

Related posts:

1. Use Word­Press Seo To Bring Traf­fic To Your Sites
2. One Hour Com­plete SEO Imple­men­ta­tion on a Word­Press Blog
3. Uncov­er­ing The Secrets Of Pri­mary Search Engine Rank­ing Results Using Word­Press Seo
4. Word­Press Seo Tips You Can’t Ignore
5. 15 Tech­niques That SEO Begin­ners Can Use