Doing SEO for your website involves ongoing, involved tasks that take quite a bit of time to do. There are many ways that you can increase your website exposure, which includes posting Youtube videos, guest blogging, writing press releases, establishing a set of proper meta tags and titles for your website and plenty of other important SEO strategies.

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All of these help increase your website ranking with Google. While there are plenty of ways to help your website, there are plenty of ways you can hurt your site, too. Below you’ll find a few SEO blunders that you’ll want to avoid.

1. Writing About The Same Topic Twice

Everything on your website needs to be 100 percent unique. If you write about the same topic twice by accident in a similar way, Google will most likely only rank one of the pages instead of both, meaning you’re competing with yourself for the same keywords (aka cannibalising), and your effort will be split. Instead, start with a core topic and brainstorm and keyword research smaller sub-topics which can be internally linked.

2. Clumsy URL Structure

The URLs on your website are such a serious part of your SEO efforts that you should never allow them to become a jumbled mess. There’s no excuse for having URLs that are random character strings since WordPress and other content management systems have settings to make them more ready- and search-engine friendly. I recommend just sticking to titles in your post slugs, and not including dates.

3. Leaving Alt Tags Blank

Having pictures that go with the content for your is great for not only generating more attention, but also is great for having another place to put your SEO text. If you leave them blank, you’re missing out on a whole new avenue by which Google spiders crawl your content. Since the Google spiders can’t exactly crawl images, you really need to provide it with alt text so it can properly assess your content. Remember that ALT attributes are for helping readers with accessibility issues understand what the image is about, so consider them first and don’t stuff your ALTs with keywords for the sake of it. A visually impaired person should be able to understand what your blog images are about.

4. Building Links Way Too Quickly

This is especially true if you’re thinking about purchasing links. If Google sees that one day you acquired about 10 backlinks and then another day you acquired 1000 backlinks, it’ll realise that you have gravitated away from your normal behaviour and look into where your links are, which may result in being flagged as link spamming. This is also true if you build links organically, but then get bored and stop. Keep your progress moving at a steady pace and you’ll definitely see results.