Are you still using outdated SEO practices for your business website? If you want your business to remain alive in this complex digital marketing world, you need to adopt advanced SEO techniques to drive organic traffic to your website and avoid obsolete and outdated SEO practices. Here are some completely outdated SEO marketing tactics you need to remove from your game guidelines.
Obsolete SEO Practices You Need To Avoid Completely
Search engines keep on improving the algorithms for ensuring a positive user experience. For this, they will remove anything which will hamper the user experience.
Low-quality content and spam are the things that search engines want to get rid of. There are several ways in which they will affect marketers. You need to update your tactics to increase visibility regularly.
Make sure that you update your content regularly according to Google's quality guidelines. Not complying with the guidelines will make your website run behind the things it needs to comply with. So, SEO practitioners have been changing their tactics with respect to this. There are a few outdated SEO marketing tactics you need to remove from your game guidelines.
1. Robot-Philic Content
Make sure that you understand what it means to write naturally. Search engines are quick to catch unnatural content.
One of the inappropriate things is writing for the web. For example, repeating a subject with a proper name whenever you mention something about it. Or mentioning plural/non-plural versions or variations of the word to cover all bases. If you think crawlers will notice keyword repetitions like this in several different versions and lead to a higher page rank. Well, it does not work anymore.
Search engines are now much more advanced and will look skeptically at repeated keywords, or their variations, and also gauge the user's unfavorable experience if it's otherwise generally bad content.
Some practices for making it robot philic are discussed ahead. And you need to avoid them if you want to rank higher and earn a trustworthy brand reputation (so important for eCommerce sites!).
Misusing Keywords
There are so many ways webmasters and marketers do not correctly understand the role of keywords in general SEO initiatives. Find out the way they’re used in day-to-day strategy.
Here is a deeper look at the various types of keyword misuse and mismanagement.
Irrelevant Keyword Targeting/Confusion
Most often, the best SEO practitioners like to fit their content and messages within the limits of their keyword research.
Things which are generally done:
- Shaping the content and the metadata to represent keywords.
- Aligning the content for its proper intent as users want to go for searches targeted for high-volume keywords.
However, there is a great risk involved. Brands may lose the attention of the readers before they can convey their real message to them.
When the marketed keywords do not align with the page content, you might face a hindrance to getting success — even if it has a good quality.
Some of the things you shouldn't do ever
- Never try to mislead users or direct them to content that is not represented correctly with the use of high-volume keywords just for increased visibility.
Google truly abhors this practice. And it is considered an obsolete and black hat SEO practice. If you approach the best SEO company, they can tell you more about this, like the practice of writing articles with high keywords density. We’re discussing it as the next point here.
Unnaturally Enhanced Keyword Density
If you’re just writing for a specific keyword density, it will lead you to miss the mark as it is a misplaced marketing tactic.
Google does not only focus on keyword density or any specific ratio related to specific keyword usage in a copy as is thought. Google uses just content quality to determine how helpful it is for the users and to determine if the webpage is an effective source to answer search queries.
Google robots are now much more advanced than simply resorting to keywords’ crawling. Search engines like Google utilize several signals to take care of search results.
Keywords are important for the topics and ideas you represent. Content-based on new ideas and topics are the lifeline to rank for the users’ search queries.
The content quality and the way messaging gets delivered is the lifeline of an SEO strategy.
Keyword Stuffing
Worse still. Marketers practiced keyword stuffing as an old trick.
The first question you need to understand-Is SEO just based on keywords?
The answer is no. It depends on whether users are getting what they want and how easily and conveniently.
When you load your page content with high-value keywords with aggressive targeting across the website, it might initially trick the engine and help you get a higher rank in search engine results. But, if the content is shoddy and meaningless, it will prove disastrous. You may face a penalty or the page be removed from Google search altogether. If you thought keyword stuffing would make the page outrank the competition, understand that it no longer works like this.
Search engines are now completely wary of the practice of keyword stuffing and especially unnatural text combinations. Such a text is considered an attempt to manipulate the search results. Now, Google demotes such content.
But when keywords appear naturally in your content, Google does not demote the content. Content that provides value to the customers gets ranked higher.
Again, write for humans, and not for search engine crawlers.
Certain prevalent practices
Webmasters think it appropriate to boot the system with the use of keyword variations using high-value keywords in the website’s footer.
The keywords need to be highlighted properly in sketchy terms. Keywords having the same color as the site’s background are often hidden from the human eye but not from the search engine crawlers. Camouflaging keywords is not the right approach to raise its quality bar or hide keyword stuffing.
Avoid such practices at all costs. Write for humans, and search engines will follow.
2. Article Directories
Google has become way more intelligent, nevertheless, it does not prevent people from attempting to dodge the system.
Initially, or for some time some of these tactics can bring noticeable improvements to a website, a brand, and related digital properties.
For example, article directories worked pretty well for quite some time.
Article syndication was considered an easy practice. It was similar to what was offered on other channels such as TV and print which are using syndicated content.
Though Google finally improvised the algorithm with the Panda update in 2011 and set new benchmarks. Panda cleaned up the SEO marketing world taking down the targeted content farms and directories, and websites harboring spammy content. What is spammy in it?
- False or wrong information.
- Bad tone or haphazard writing style.
- Irrelevant publication
- Duplicated from other sites.
Article spinning is also a related black hat tactic that was carried out with the help of certain tools for forming quality content using similar words, phrases, and is derived from the stolen content of the same niche organization.
This technique of spinning often results in a messy collection of words and phrases attempting to offer the same information as in the original article and usually in the same format. No wonder, this does not work anymore.
Now, your high-quality content must possess the characteristics such as:
- Originality
- Expertise
- Authority
And Trustworthiness.
3. Link Buying
Buying links is again repulsive practice for Google.
It was a practice in the past to pay quickly and get a high volume of links pointing to your site.
But, now, you need to maintain a high-quality backlink profile that points to your website. Getting toxic, low-quality links from a low authority, spammy websites will be detrimental to your site’s profile.
With quality content and useful information for your end-users, you can legitimately earn backlinks, and this way, you don’t need to pay to build backlinks.
If you’re optimizing for search engines and not humans, you’re likely going to fail.
The Concluding Keypoints
- A negative user experience will alone make Google downrate the page.
- Overuse of similar keywords through the website will result in self-cannibalization- it makes a website harder to use and impedes navigation as the content on various pages is so highly similar.
- Some of the wrong practices include targeting exact match search queries, buying exact match domains.
- And while publishing your content on the net, use relevant websites users trust. A low authority website with high spam is a no-no. But, you also have to ensure that you do not just rely on domain authority for getting links.
- Overall, check if the website gets the relevant traffic and whether it speaks rightly about your business to the online audience.