5 mistakes i did when starting a blog
naming urls(links)
Not making and submitting sitemaps
Not using a content management system(cms)
Structured data
Search engine optimization (SEO) mistakes
- No follow tags-while looking for ways to monetize the website you might venture into affiliate marketing. On the affiliate marketing links that you promote make sure to add no follow tags to avoid being penalized.Many websites that have affiliate links have affiliate Disclaimers
- Using wrong keywords and keyword stuffing: Using irrelevant or incorrect keywords can lead to low-quality traffic or no traffic at all. Keyword stuffing, which is the excessive use of keywords in content with the intent of manipulating search rankings, is a black-hat SEO tactic that can result in penalties from search engines.
- Lack of titles in links: Using descriptive and relevant anchor text (titles in links) helps search engines understand the context of the linked page and improves the user experience. Not having proper titles in links can make it difficult for both search engines and users to know where the link leads.
- Not putting images in the content or not optimizing them: Images can add value to your content and improve engagement. However, not using images or failing to optimize them properly can impact the user experience and slow down page loading times, affecting SEO.
- Not putting Open Graphs and Twitter meta tags: Open Graph and Twitter meta tags are important for social media sharing. They allow you to control how your content appears when shared on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Without these tags, social media platforms may not display the content optimally, leading to missed opportunities for engagement.
- Not promoting on social media: Social media is a powerful tool for driving traffic, increasing brand awareness, and engaging with your audience. Neglecting to promote your content on social media can result in missed opportunities for reaching a wider audience and potential customers.
- No favicons: Favicons are small icons that appear in the browser tab or next to the page title in bookmarks. They are a visual representation of your website and help users easily identify and return to your site. Not having a favicon may not directly impact SEO, but it can make your site appear less professional and memorable to users.
My First ever mistake was in nameing the urls of my blogs I would name my urls in formats like blog1.html, blog 2.html, blog 3 ...I would later learn the url should be short consice and descriptive of the content. example my-first-blogging-mistakes.html
Having researched how to know how many people saw my website and how many blogs they read I signed up for a google analytics account. When monitoring the data it would come to my attention that my website had more traffic coming from direct sources because I would share relevant articles to groups and share to friends and little to no traffic from organic sources.After researching the problem I was informed of google search console google which is a site built for web developers. What was needed was to create a sitemap (put all of my url into one document) which would help google discover my site and index the urls(make the blog article urls available to users when they query searches). later on I would discover that one has to make another sitemap for images found in the website. Bing also has a tool that you can submit a sitemap to increase chances of appearing in the bing search results.
This website is powered by raw html and css code.All the techical details of web development I learnt while setting up this website.Do not worry if you find technical terms used in the blog. There are great tutorials on YouTube and content management system plugins to solve the issues. After finishing the design of the website then came the journey of creating and publishing content on the website. Since I did not have a cms like WordPress I had to copy the format of my website each time i had to make a post and when there were required changes affecting all pages I would have to to make changes to every individual page which was time consuming and repetitive. At that time the idea of getting a cms was non existent to me But as the content grows on the website a need for a cms grows stronger.
While reading news articles and blogs from at well designed websites i would delve deeper into their source code and look at the qualities of a good website. I would encounter code that was simple to read but very foreign syntax.learn about structured data. The structurred data is a way of adding additional context and meaning in relation to the webpages content. Structured data increases a websites visibility in the search engine results page.