Search Engine Marketing – 5 Simple Mistakes Why My Coupon Blog Never Ranked

This is a guest post:

How effective is your search engine marketing?

Getting a blog ranked on Google top 10 could be the most important feat to achieve. If you’re doing business online, it’s necessary that you understand how search engines work, so you can abide by their terms and succeed. Being on the Google’s homepage for a highly sought after key phrase in an evergreen niche is an open check to cash in.

How successful would you be if your offline business appears on the nation’s #1 newspaper? You should be ready to attract new customers and clients while building your credibility and goodwill.

Everyone have sad experiences in life and business. When I first launched my coupon blog that reviews some household brands like sittercity coupons, canon cameras, 6pm discount etc, I made some mistakes that hindered effective search engine performance.

As simple as these mistakes are, they would sabotage your efforts. I’ve listed the mistakes below and revealed proven tips to get rid of it quickly. Enjoy and share with your friends and those who may find it useful.

1. Keyword Stuffing

Isn’t this common and well quoted around the web? But don’t take it lightly. Several SEO writers who advise you to avoid keyword stuffing are consistently doing it. They seem to ignore the very basic of coaching. When you ask someone to stop a habit, why should you continue in it?

Don’t be deceived, you can never make it to Google homepage when you blindly jam-pack key terms here and there. Search engines are getting wiser by the day and programmers who are behind these are intelligent. You can’t continue tricking the very platform that’s proven to grow your business. Add keywords when and where necessary especially on the title. That’s where it counts the most – Please don’t stuff or you would get stuffed!

2. Duplicate Content

On the bid to get my discount review blog ranked, I copied other author’s work and published with a single click (I linked to the site). What I failed to realize was that when a fresh article goes live, search engine spiders would crawl and index it almost immediately.
Each time you duplicate content or spin an indexed article, you would be invoking the weird Google panda to bite your ranking.

Writing fresh article may not be everyone’s meat but with focused learning, dedication and practice, you would become a writing maniac. When my first coupon and discount review blog was sandboxed, I had to sit down and re-plan my online business. Today, I get 67% of my buyer traffic from Google alone. Isn’t that wonderful?

3. Unmasked Affiliate Hop Links

For those who promote affiliate offers, you know how ugly and quirky those customized links are. But do you realize they hinder your pagerank and pull you down on search engines?
As a matter of facts, when you link directly to a sales page via your affiliate link, you’re not building link juice to your domain name. Instead, you’re giving double benefits to the product owner; promoting his offer and linking to his site.

Consequently, when an affiliate program is no longer active, how would you unlink and control broken links for thousands of pages?

Bottom-line: redirect your affiliate links through your domain name. This way, you’re transferring link juice to your web pages and increasing your sales conversion. You could easily tweak your “redirect” if an offer is inactive and redirect to a similar offer – it’s very important!

4. Lack Of Fresh Contents

Another simple mistake we all know is lack of fresh content. How often do you update your blog? A lot of bloggers don’t even take this serious but it’s supposed to be reckoned with. Search engine spiders are desperately looking for fresh updated web pages. If you want to be friendly with Google and other search companies, you’ve got to update on a daily basis.

But I don’t have time to write articles every day, you ask?

Well, there is a way to get through that excuse. If you cannot post on your blog daily, then ensure you publish only detailed articles at least 2 times weekly. Instead of writing a 400 word article, extend it to 800+. This little strategy would supplement for the lost days.

5. Lack Of Quality Backlinks

Do you need plenty of backlinks to rank on Google top 10?

The answer is “No.” Even though off-page linking is vital to your overall search engine performance, what you should aim for is “quality” external links. I kept building links to my blog and needless to say, I got over 76 crappy back-links within 30 days.

Google does not respect those links and so, I was pushed out of the search ranking. But they had mercy and sent me to page 14 – what a pity?

If you must build links to your web pages, then make sure it’s of high quality and relevant. I’ve seen new blogs getting on well with Google even with few links. Their saving grace is quality content, on-page optimization and easy site navigation.

SEM Takeaway

It doesn’t take so much to improve your pagerank and drive real time traffic at warp speed. It’s isn’t about waking up earlier and going to bed late. Map out your strategies and stick to proven techniques that work. A lot of people; bloggers, internet marketers, SEM/SEO consultants are still falling prey of these mistakes. I’m glad you’ve found solution in this article.

Put it to work in your business. Set your priorities right from the very first day and don’t look back. See you on Google top 10 soon.

About The Author:

Michael Chibuzor shares things he has learned first hand through his own blogs. He has followed the approach he describes above to grow and monetize his Sittercity promotion code page over at WeightLossTriumph.com. Sittercity makes it easy for caregivers, nannies, and babysitters, to provide their services to parents and seniors by allowing the two parties to negotiate work contracts.