by Brendan Meehan

Created on: January 07, 2011

Does your blog need traffic? Are you marketing on a shoestring budget? SEO (Search Engine Optimization) might be a cost effective way to get visitors. Unfortunately, many bloggers are clueless when it comes to SEO. They make mistakes that hurt their blog, preventing it from taking top rankings in the search engines. While good SEO will not provide a solution for all your marketing woes, it can drive quality traffic to your website. This allows you to monetize your blog using contextual advertising, affiliate banners, or text links. With ample human traffic, your blog instantly becomes profitable. The following are common SEO mistakes that might be hurting your blog; hindering it from acquiring the most visitors possible.

Inconsistent or Malformed Permalinks

Think about blogs with top search engine rankings you regularly visit. Do the permalinks to your favorite pages constantly change, sending you to 404 dead pages? Or, are the permalinks incorrectly formatted, making them impossible to remember or bookmark?

Most likely, the answer to these questions is a resounding “NO”. Blogs with top search engine rankings pick one permalink format, and then stick to it. Consistency is important. Also, it’s likely these blogs utilize a simple permalink structure. Instead of complicated year/month/day/category/author/post title combinations, their permalinks are basic; containing only the post title, or date and post title. This makes blog posts much easier for search engines to index and rank. Increasingly, search engines give higher rankings to websites that are user-friendly. If you want a leg-up on the competition, make sure your permalinks are simple and memorable.

Improper Sidebar Navigation

The nerve center of a blog is its sidebar navigation menu. It is important to create a menu that is both human and search engine friendly. Many times, bloggers will make menus that are minimalist or extremely complicated. Some menus are heavy on ad code and light on actual links to the blog’s content. These bloggers are forgetting the nuts and bolts of sidebar menus, hampering search engines attempting to index their website. Blog pages can’t get ranked if a search engine doesn’t know they exist. Moreover, human visitors can’t enjoy your content if it is impossible to find.

A good sidebar will have text links to sub-pages, content categories, archived posts, and other blogs (blogroll). Tags should be kept to a minimum, so that human visitors

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