5 Out-of-Date SEO Strategies
A long time ago it was easy to achieve a great search engine results position (SERP) with questionable, if not scandalous, SEO tactics. However, over the last decade, search engines have become much smarter spawning algorithms such as Google’s PageRank system and many popular SEO practices have been marked useless. But searching through SEO blogs and forums, you will find many of the outdated strategies are still being hailed as useful techniques. I have put together a list of five SEO strategies that no longer work and offer their useful counterpart.
Meta Tag Optimizing
Meta tags used to reign supreme when it came to search engine optimization and held the key to great results with searches. That boat has sailed. The meta keywords tag was strongly believed to offering valuable information regarding topics and terms used throughout a site. However, malicious site owners abused this tag by flooding it with misleading terms irrelevant to their content.
Useful Counterpart
Google has official stated that they no longer pay any attention to the meta tags for keywords. If you wish to build your pages and posts to rank for more keywords, use category and tagging systems to better label and organize your content. Tagging your content is one of the most effective ways to enhance the overall “searchability” of your site. Carefully structuring your site using categories helps your visitors find exactly what they are looking for and search engines are the same way. You should be able to reach anywhere on your from within three clicks.
Keyword Stuffing
I just told you how the meta keywords tag has been hacked out of the picture in terms of SEO and suggested tagging as the optimum alternative for ranking using keywords. Keyword stuffing is second on the list of dead strategies. A site was ranked by how frequent keywords appeared in a page’s content. Stuffing keywords into a post no longer works and can have a drastically negative effect on your overall ranking.
Useful Counterpart
Write your content the way it is meant to be read, by humans. Too many keywords used so closely together can seem unnatural and difficult to read or understand. Choose wisely where you use them by making sure your keywords are in prominent regions of your web page, like headers, titles, and descriptive text. Be sure to order your header tags (h1 – h6) in the proper order with your keywords and phrases.
Link Exchanges
No need to run around deleting your outbound or inbound links. We are here to improve the web, not unbind it. Exchanging links has always been a great way to funnel traffic into your site from external relevant websites and like other SEO strategies, it has been spoiled by the bad apples. Link exchanging schemes developed and tried to influence how search engines measured the value of site linking.
Useful Counterpart
If you are looking for a solution to build inbound links that point to your website or blog, try offering valuable content or testimonials in exchange for a link back to your site. This adds value to the external website when you give them a testimonial raving about their product or service. You can also offer to guest author on their blog by writing valuable relevant content that will interest their visitors. In return, you will be given a back link to your site.
Search Engine Submission
Have you submitted your site to Google to be crawled? I have. And I have since realized that it was a complete waste of my time. I am still amazed with how many people , including web developers and bloggers, still submit their websites and RSS feeds to search engines to be crawled. Stop it.
Useful Counterpart
Google’s ability to find, crawl, and index new websites is so advanced that the time you spend submitting your site could be used more effectively. Work on placing your back links on social media platforms like Linkedin or Twitter. Twitter is crawled by search engines constantly; so a link to your new site will be discovered quickly. Also try out Ping.fm, which offers the ability to post a link to several social media site simultaneously.
Spamming Blog Comments
Google introduced nofollow link tags to stop search engine spiders from continuing through a link and is know to devalue links within blog comments. This prevents other site and blog owners from leaving irrelevant comments on a post as their main back link building strategy.
Useful Counterpart
Leverage your time with more beneficial content that holds strong value to readers. Well-written, engaging, thought provoking articles will naturally attract quality inbound links from other blogs and new sources that search engines value far more than blog comments.
In summary
The tricks of the trade in search engine optimization are constantly evolving while search engines try to index the web and we try to get indexed. Avoid using any of the SEO tactics above because not only could they harm your ranking but permanently penalize you for banned strategies. For WordPress bloggers, it’s best to stick with up-to-date SEO tactics on WordPress Blog Search Engine Optimization.
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