5 Website Mistakes Bloggers Make Again and Again

Once you've made the leap and transitioned into running a blog full-time, it's easy to get on the treadmill of producing content, poring over analytics and trying to optimize your posts.

And while this is all valuable activity, quite often there are basic website mistakes that a lot of bloggers going from amateur to professional make.

These little changes can make a huge impact on the professionalism and reputation of what you do, so take the time to review your site for any of the following common errors, and watch it provide a much better return on investment.

Using A Subpar Web Host

Web hosting seems to be a cost that a lot of bloggers feel it's okay to scrimp on or opt for a cut-price deal from whoever they purchased their domain from.

When people visit your website, they are operating on goodwill, so if it's constantly down you may find the opportunities and traffic quickly subside.

A good web hosting package is worth investing in - you should certainly spend more on it than you do a set of business cards, as it's likely to be more useful and be seen by many more people!

Choosing A Domain That Is Hard To Spell Or Remembers

This seems so obvious, you wonder how anyone could possibly get it wrong - and yet you see it all the time - bloggers who choose a domain name that is either tricky to spell out, impossible to remember or even sounds strange when it's multiple words all run together.
A memorable and easy-to-spell domain name is a must, even if it takes you several tries to find one that ticks this box, fits your purpose, and is available - and while you’re at it, make sure the matching handles are available on your social media channels.

Yes, people may eventually bookmark your site if they love it, or if you’re the best careers page or a stylist or business analyst going, but they won’t know that in the first place if they never reach your site.

So whether you’re running a blog about motherhood, personal finances, cars or tech  give it the best possible name

Using A Non-Domain Email

It's a small detail, but one which speaks volumes about your professionalism - if you’re still using a Gmail or Outlook email address, stop right now.

Nothing makes your business seem like a hobby so much as this small factor. If you want to be taken seriously, purchase the email address that goes along with your own domain.

Then, you can change the domain settings to redirect to whichever inbox you prefer - that doesn’t matter - all that does is have the outward address set to your own domain.

Not Upgrading To SSL

Visitors need to know that your blog is trustworthy and SSL certification can help you achieve that goal and worry never more about trust issues when you’re using it to sell a service or a product.

Not having that ‘HTTPS’ is a bad move. Think of the World Wide Web as the Wild West - people know that there are a whole lot of cowboys out there.

Make it clear you’re not one of them. If you have the RapidSSL Certificate, people feel a lot more confident about making a transaction or even just giving out their data.

Avoiding Basic SEO

Most of the time, bloggers went out to create high quality backlinks as soon as they create a blog and publish a few blog posts.

That's a big mistake in the blogging industry.

We don't have to rush for the backlinks or any advance level SEO techniques in the very first move for generating organic traffic to a blog.

We should focus on creating high quality content first (at least 100 blog posts) and it also depends on the kind of niche you are working on.

As there are some niches that we can cover in under 100 articles and there are some topics we can't cover even in 200 articles.

However, a professional blogger who knows the actual weight of a high-quality article could easily point out things and give enough information in an article that makes the reader to stick the blog and read more relevant pages for sure.

So, this mistake is about avoiding basic SEO. Yes, instead of creating content bloggers go for creating backlinks, while there's a big gap in-between.

We have to do these basic SEO things too:

1. Install Google Site Kit (If not on WordPress then connect Search Console, and Analytics with your blog)
2. Submit a sitemap and make sure it is working fine
3. If you can compromise on the blog design, enable AMP
4. Create a logo and basic pages (contact us, privacy, terms, about us, and more)
5. Interlink your blog posts accurately
6. Properly add Alt tags to your blog post images
7. Make use of headings and bullet points in every blog post
8. Update your previously published articles
9. Share on social media and bookmarking sites
10. Add schema markups to your blog posts
11. Use breadcrumbs and a fast-loading theme
12. Have an easy-to-see and remember permalink structure
13. Add relevant meta description to each blog post
14. Check if your pages have the correct canonical tags
15. Lazy load images
16. Compress CSS

And there's much more you have to do but, if you can do these 16 things with your blog, you are ready to generate some revenue.

Make sure you are checking these things on a regular basis to keep your blog fresh and updated for the readers and search engines too.

Plus, making the move is great for search engine optimization for your blog, so it's a no-brainer.