Some people will tell you that blogging to them is just a hobby, others will tell you that they make a living out of blogging while others will say they have free internet and time and that is why they blog. If you blog for any of these reasons or any other reasons please read on because this post is for you.
This post is part of a series of blog posts on blogging, today I will share with you the things you should not do to your blog. These are some of the things that can affect your blogs’ performance online thereby reducing the number of visitors to your blog and may in one way or the other affect the reason as to why you blog.
Things You Should Not Do To Your Blog
1. Changing Your Blog Design More Often
It takes some time for a new blog to be noticed by search engines, Your blog design has a certain structure to which these engines or robots get a used to and have adjusted themselves to crawl your blog in certain ways. It is good practice to stick with one design and maybe change it after a 6 month period if need be.
During the changing of designs, there are some plugins or links that you may end up forgetting to include in your new template and may affect your blog. Search engines need to re-crawl your site and adjusting accordingly to your new design structure every time you change.
However, you can overcome the challenges that come with changing the design or template by the use of a theme framework. A theme framework enables you to easily customize your blog without affecting the base structure and may keep your settings if done right. I recommend you use the Thesis Theme Framework which is cheap, but very good and recommended by many professional bloggers. You can also use the Genesis Theme Framework a favourite for many bloggers on WordPress platform.
Alternatively, you can outsource our design services, at Nabaleka, we are not only The Best Web Designers in Kenya but we are also the best SEO experts in Kenya. So we will do an analysis of your website content including all the links and your new design will have everything as it was before the re-design.
2. Failure To Submit Your Blog To Search Engines
Search engines crawl the internet looking for new content and new websites or blogs and index them whenever they encounter them. This process can be natural and might take longer than usual for search engines to find your site and index it. Having a blog and not submitting it to the search engines is like the proverbial winking to a girl in the dark, no one including the robots will notice you.
To submit a blog to search engines is easier, just Click Here to submit a blog to Google. You can also submit your blog to Bing and Yahoo by Clicking Here. There are other search engines such as Baidu and Yandex but not necessary in our context. You may also need to submit a sitemap to these search engines for them to index your content automatically in future.
3. Failure To Post Regularly
Finding blogging topics and posting them is not an easy task and some bloggers may take a long time to update their blogs with new content. This really hurts your blog’s performance, like I said before search engines keep on crawling the internet searching for new content and may come to your blog several times to get new content and if they find nothing after some time they will keep off.
Webmasters and Bloggers say that if you only publish or update your blog once every month it is like, not blogging at all. Don’t keep your blog and readers thirsty for content, if you don’t have time you can you can buy articles from Freelance sites; iwritter.com is one good place where you can find quality original articles from experienced writers from all over the world on any topic you give them. Other Freelancing sites you can buy articles from include
Other Freelancing sites you can buy articles from include oDesk, Freelancer.com, and Elance, start there and you will not be disappointed.
4. Changing Your Domain URL
A domain is your web address, this is where people go to find your blog, search engines go to find your blog, and this is the URL all your links point to. Changing it will make some people and bots get lost trying to find your blog, you will lose your domain rank of which you have worked so hard to get or the years you have blogged. This is because changing to a new domain is like starting everything all over again.
Your Domain has accumulated backlinks which are an important factor when it comes to search engines ranking and losing all that to a new domain will cost you your blog.
There are ways in which you can migrate to a new domain without going through the pain of starting afresh but that you will need the services of an expert and will cost you dearly. If you want to Avoid all that better not change your domain URL. If you must change your Domain, we suggest you redirect the domain to the new one using a 301 redirect method.
5. Changing Your Posts URL
I will give you the same reasons as those I have given for not changing your domain URL. You can change your post title, you can change the search description or even change the contents of your post, but you need not change your post Url after you’ve hit the publish button. (DON’T) If you change search engines will report the earlier post URL as a broken link and if you make this a habit you will end up with many broken links that might drive away readers and bots from your blog. But again if you must rename, then you can use a 301 redirect to maintain the link juice flow.
6. Not Sharing Your Content on Social Media
The reason we do blog is to get people to read our blogs and get educated or entertained by us, of course, some of us blog for money yes. But what use will it be if you make great content and keep it to yourself and hope that someone will come across it by some chance? Search engines might do that but if you want more people to see what your blog about you have to share it on Social Media.
Go ahead add social share buttons on your blogs to help your readers share the great content you have and let it go viral. Nowadays Social Media is a new SEO strategy since search engines crawl more often the Social Media sites and when they encounter your links they will crawl your blog too more often. Remember Sharing is Caring.
7. Copying Content From Others
Why on earth should you start a blog just to post copied content somewhere else for your readers, it does not add up. If you don’t have something for people as a blogger please just stick to being a reader. You will fail miserably if your intention to begin blogging is to copy and paste content all over the net. Google will hunt you down and will penalize your blog, other bloggers will report your blog and you will not benefit from any of your lazy efforts. If you don’t have content I suggest you buy it from experienced freelance writers or have others guest blog for you.
