Ask any professional blogger, why he is blogging and you are about to have a lengthy and boring monologue on how blogging has changed his life and how his passion for blogging is doing good to the society as a whole. Enough of this rubbish. We all know why people blog. There is a motive involved for sure and that is without making further ado – making easy money. However, there are some glorious exceptions where people blog hard just to make themselves promote as a thought leader. So, that simply means, majority of bloggers that we come across each day are writing for a living and to achieve this, they do weird things that often time strain their relationship with the readers who are the life blood of their blogs. They go on stretching the concept of optimization to the point of being making their blogs unacceptable to general readers. As things stand, you need to figure out what you are trying achieve. Do you want to milk the blog dry? Alternatively, do you wish to have a long-term plan and want to keep a great relationship with your readers? It is up to you, but here I am going to add few things that you must not do unless you do not mind losing your readers:

Write for the Search Engines: This is the biggest mistake that wannabe bloggers make. They are of the opinion that they need to stuff keywords in the body content like hell and they do not mind making the content read meaningless to a normal human being. All they care about online visibility and keywords density. These tactics may have worked previously but now, it does not work anymore. After the roll out of Penguin and Panda, the concept of stepping up keywords density to get better ranking has become an obsolete concept and can backfire in some worse cases. So, you should stay away from any such marketing gimmick. Writing for the search engine is the worst thing that you can do to your blogging career. Stay true to your passion and come up with interesting post that people will appreciate and you will be just fine.

Topic or Targeted Keywords: This is another common vice that shared by almost all the bloggers. They do extensive research to figure out which terms are mostly used by people and how long it may take them to get higher rankings in those terms. Obviously, getting higher ranks in those terms can help you bring some traffic but you are ignoring another obvious fact. These terms are also targeted by other bloggers and that means, you are entering a highly competitive zone. So rather than chasing the keywords, you should invest all your efforts into finding great topics that can help you grab the eyeballs of the audience. A decent and nice article can go a long way make your blog a huge hits among audience.

Build Trust or Build Links: I have personally come across some website owners who were totally obsessed with the concept of link building. It seems they have nothing in the world to concern other than links. They nourish a peculiar concept that their business will flourish based on the organic ranking in Google and therefore, when Penguin strikes, they are at a loss. They do not know what to do. So, do not be shortsighted. Do not focus on the narrow concept of link building rather take a look at your website and channelize your efforts to make it look great, add great content and create a truly engaging social media marketing strategy.

So, now the ball is in your court and you need to decide which path you should choose.

Michael Evans is a passionate bloggers and a social media addict. He is a regular contributor to WebDesign.Org, a well known web design library.