In the 90’s it was easier to get to the top of the search engines. But as search engines evolved, many of the SEO practices become less effective.
However, if you visit SEO forums and blogs, you will see many of these obsolete tactics still advised as legitimate tactics.
To end this misinformation, I summarize the tactics that I have applied and read from the Website Magazine issue date May 2010. Below are the popular, yet obsolete SEO tactics that no longer work and some effective alternatives.
Keyword Stuffing – I believe most online marketers and web developers still use this old school technique. In the 90’ the practice of “keyword stuffing” is very effective because search engines were unsophisticated. The problem with this practice today is that it can have a negative impact as Google imposes penalties on gamed content.
Alternative for Keyword Stuffing:
Create content for your readers not for search engines.
Make sure that your niche keywords are present in important region of your webpage such as headers, subheads, title tags and meta description snippets/
Structure your keywords on your website in a way that it is easily found by people and search engine.
Blog Comment Spamming – Webmasters and online marketers still aggressively drop links in blog comments as their primary tactics of Link Building. But Google introduced nofollow links tags (a signal to search engine spiders to ignore a link) and is known to devalue links in blog comments.
So what to do instead is try to produce a well written, engaging, and though provoking content is the best way to attract quality links. Good content generates editorial links – naturally occurring links from other blogs and news sources that search engine value for more than comments in blog posts.
Search Engine Submission – Google’s ability to discover and index new content is so advanced that this method is obsolete. I spent a lot of bucks on this tactics paying to search engine submission companies to submit my website and it’s just waste of money.
To ensure that your website gets discovered quickly by search engines, drop a link to your website on a social media platform like Facebook and Twitter. For example if you have a Twitter account, tweet a link to your website or add it in your profile link. High traffic and popular websites like Twitter are crawled by search engine constantly.
Meta Tag Optimization – Particularly “meta keywords” tag. These days, Google is on record as saying they pay no attention to the “meta keywords” tag. So the era of keyword stuffing meta tags is absolutely buried and dead.
To optimize your website or blog pages to rank for more keywords, use category and tag systems to better label and organize your website content.
Link Exchanges – This is the most popular and favorite method use by majority of website owners, internet marketers, and webmasters. Website owners exchange links with other websites to improve site rankings and traffics. Link exchanging in moderation are not really an issue as interlinking is glue that binds the web. The trouble occurs when website owners actively engage in link exchange schemes to intentionally influence rankings – which Google deems a violation.
What to do instead. Rather than participating in link exchange schemes, offer testimonials to business vendors you work with. Providing testimonials is an easy way to get link to your website in return for writing something favorable and sincere about your vendor.
The internet is a fast changing industry so as SEO is affected by it. Be sure to avoid these DEAD techniques. Not only will your website suffer in ranking but even worse – might be penalized for banned tactics.
*Here are my recommendations for products and services that I've personally reviewed and which I believe can help you on your personal growth journey. This is a very short list since it only includes my top picks.
If you enjoyed this post please comment and share
Post a Comment