Obsolete SEO Techniques It’s Time To Forget
Due to constant changes to policies, search engine giants like Google are constantly forcing SEO experts to adapt to new realities. SEO methods that were efficient not too long ago are now not only completely useless, but can actually affect your search results negatively. But what methods should you ditch completely and which ones are still efficient? In this article, we’re going to explore three SEO methods you should stop using immediately.
Excessive Link Building
It was once common knowledge that links, and links only, were the end all be all of SEO. This led business owners to focus on producing as many backlinks to their sites as possible, irrespective of quality. However, due to Google’s recent Penguin algorithm change, the relevance of backlinks is more important than ever and you can see many websites with only a handful of backlinks outranking websites with backlinks ranking in the thousands. Google Penguin made it more difficult for website owners to spam the web with tons of irrelevant links, which often came from poor quality sites. If you want success with your link building methods, try focusing on getting a few relevant links from high ranking sites rather than using a shotgun approach.
Focusing On Keywords
While keywords are still a very important aspect of SEO, focusing solely on metrics such as keyword density is completely useless these days. There was a time when SEO experts had a secret keyword density formula that was said to be optimal for search engine results. Often, this percentage was around the 3% to 5% mark. This however changed completely with the introduction of Google’s recent algorithm changes which put more focus on latent semantic indexing (LSI). So now, instead on focusing on the word itself, the algorithm focuses on context and will group certain words together according to their relation to the text in general.
For instance, words like “corporate tax” and “business tax” will get you ranked for both keywords irrespective of how many times each keyword is used in the text. In addition, keywords that are completely irrelevant to the text won’t get you any results and might even hurt your rankings. Instead, the best way to go about it is to write user friendly content with a general theme in mind which will allow you to insert relevant keywords naturally into the text. Keyword rich content is just another word for spam these days, and the user experience is more important than ever, so focus on quality first and you’ll eventually get results.
Mass Directory Submission
Mass submission to directory sites used to be one of the methods most commonly used by SEOs in the past. While it did have its merits once, this method is now completely outdated and could seriously hurt your rankings. Instead, you should focus on local and well respected directories with strict admission guidelines. More SEO providers such as SEO Guru Atlanta (visit website here) have started focusing on local search instead of directory submissions to bring local, highly targeted traffic to their clients. Third party sites such as Yelp, Foursquare and TripAdvisor have more significant effects on search engine results today as they are more relevant and user driven, which boosts social signals as well, another important factor in today’s SEO landscape.
The goal of most modern search engines is to provide the best experience to its users. This usually means providing users with the most relevant search engine results to their queries. A search engine strategy that uses antiquated manipulation techniques is set to fail.
