This is a guest post by Nitin Aggarwal from Offshore Ally.

If you want to succeed as a blogger, it is important to have a firm grasp on the basics of SEO at the bare minimum. This does not mean that you necessarily have to be an SEO expert in your industry, but having a basic SEO understanding will ensure that you avoid these crucial SEO mistakes that could cause your blog to crash and burn.

1. Keyword Stuffing

What many of the best bloggers already understand is that keyword stuffing is an SEO technique of the past that should be avoided. Yes, it is helpful to include subtle keywords within your content or blog title so that they are picked up by the search engines, but to go with the example above, do not under any circumstance hire outsourced providers to write blog content saturated with keywords in the hopes of getting noticed by Google. It will not work.

Instead, create relevant content in your blog niche that includes subtle keywords to help your blog rank accordingly and eliminate penalization from Google.

2. Over-Linking

Another common SEO mistake that many bloggers make is going overboard on tag clouds, related posts, and navigational links for their readers. When used properly, these tools can enhance the reader’s experience, but they can also overwhelm and crowd the page with excessive links that will start to aggravate your reader base.

Instead, use links thoughtfully and purposefully to provide your readers with necessary information or relevant products as needed – which is actually what links were intended to do in the first place. Imagine that.