SEO is an evolving area and webmasters need to be updated all the time to know relevant changes. SEO mainly helps websites to get more visibility and increases the number of visitors.
Outdated SEO Strategies:
But there are few webmasters who still follow outdated SEO strategies which are not at all useful for their website growth. At the same time, it can lead to many problems also. So, when you are trying to make your website optimized for the search engine, it is better to avoid such old mistakes. In this article, we are going to discuss some outdated SEO strategies you can avoid if you are still following them.
Keyword Stuffing:
There are many parts where keywords can be included. Also, there are many misconceptions regarding keyword selection for a topic. In this section, you will see various aspects of keyword stuffing
Irrelevant keywords:
Keywords are very important for a website to get good visibility. At the same time, you should only use it in the correct way. Using any keyword in your article cannot help it to get a good ranking position. You should only use the most relevant keywords in your article. Google algorithms are specially designed to make sure that users are getting the exact results as they want. By including unwanted keywords, you are misleading the readers and the search engine at the same time. Google takes it as a black hat technique and can affect your website credibility and ranking at the same time. So, always try to include relevant keywords while optimizing your content.
Keyword density:
This was an old concept that including more keywords in content can increase its visibility. A marketing strategy that mainly focuses on keywords won’t work anymore. You need to produce good content with only relevant words so that the reader gets what they want. The search engine does a much more detailed analysis about a website than simply crawling it. This can help to provide a more relevant search result for users. Quality and relevance are the two important factors for website success.
Keyword stuffing:
Are you writing contents for search engines? Then you are doing it wrong. Keyword stuffing was an old strategy which webmasters used to write contents. They only included keywords in their contents without much detailing about the topic. This was a very bad strategy which just offered them more visitors at that time. If you are looking for good ranking and a greater number of visitors now, you should avoid stuffing your content with keywords. It can’t help your content anyways at the same time Google now penalizes website which overdoes keywords. So, better be safe than sorry when you include keywords in your content.
Paid links:
Link building is considered as one of the most important SEO techniques nowadays. But there was a time when webmasters used to buy paid links in order to get a good ranking. But now Google considers it as a black hat SEO technique. Anyone can get paid links to improve their website visibility. But if they cannot provide better quality content, then that is not at all useful. So, it is better to avoid the black hat techniques such as paid links, exchanging of links, link forums, etc that can affect your credibility and follow the right way of optimizing your website. Use link building campaigns and try to get good backlinks organically. Quality contents are the key to get good backlinks.
Writing for machines:
There was a wrong concept back then that a website will get more visibility if they wrote for machines. That time webmasters only included different versions of keywords and sentence in order to get a good position in the SERP. But the condition is not as same as that time now. The search engine algorithm is smart, and it can filter out unwanted contents from the search results. It takes an effort to provide good quality content for their users. So, it is better to write for humans than machines always.
Using article marketing:
Article marketing was an old technique by which website owners used to get a greater number of visitors. There were many article directories which offered more visitors for websites. But after the introduction of Panda things got changed. Now search engine is concentrating more on listing websites only with quality content that is useful for their audience. Panda filters out content that is bad and irrelevant to search engine users. So, it is better to write quality content that can be useful for readers than using any form of advertisement to get more visitors. If the quality and content are better, then no one can stop your website from getting a good ranking.
Article spinning:
There are websites and application for spinning articles. Many website owners use such techniques to publish articles on their website. They don’t even read the content and see whether it has some good information for their audience, spinning of the article makes it worthless and meaningless. The search engine takes extra care to avoid such type of articles when they list search results. Good quality original contents can get good ranking and acceptance than others in search results. So, it is better to write original informative content than copying or spinning the contents.
Anchor text optimization:
Anchor text is the links that tell the users about the content they can find in the article. Website owners used to match the anchor text with keywords to get more visitors to a website. This will not work anymore. By the introduction of Penguin Google finds such irrelevant websites and avoid them from the search result. You cannot stuff keywords and create an anchor text for your content. When you write anchor text it should exactly tell them what the content is and then only users will go into the links and read the article more. It is best to keep the anchor text relevant to the content with moderate keywords than stuffing them. It will mislead your readers and they won’t come back to your website again if they cannot find what they want.
Irrelevant guest post:
Guest posts are always popular for a website’s growth. It can increase the number of visitors to the website and at the same time, it can increase popularity. Irrelevant guest posts cannot save your website but can affect your credibility. When someone wants to write an article on your website make sure the topic they are writing about is relevant to your niche before publishing it. Just like you are managing to post relevant contents on your website, keep an eye on guest posting and see whether they are writing relevant topics. It can help to save your website from losing its credibility among users and search engine at the same time.
Avoiding Mobile optimization:
Mobile optimization is a very important factor for every website nowadays. Most users make use of mobile devices for surfing. You need to make sure to create a website which can be easily loaded in a mobile device to get more visitors. Many webmasters ignore the fact and continue the old practices for their website. There are tools to check whether your website is optimized for a mobile device or not. You can check your website and see whether it is optimized or not. If it is not, then try to do that as this is one of the most important factors to get a good ranking.
Outdated keyword researching statistics:
There are many keyword researching tools available now. But when you use one, make sure that it shows the trending keywords related to your niche. You can also try using multiple keyword research toll to make sure of this fact. The best tool is to use Google search analytics as this is the one which shows you the exact list of more relevant keywords for your topic. But the result it shows will be based on paid competition and traffic, if you want to build an organic search strategy then there is a tool like Moz keyword explorer, SEMs keyword tool, etc. To measure the competition of keywords you can also check Google Trends.
Pages for all keyword variation:
This was used before to get more visibility online. Webmasters used to focus on building credibility and more traffic by using various versions of keywords in the content. Google considers it a bad technique and then developed an algorithm to find out the website which uses these techniques. Hummingbird and RankBarin are specially designed to find out keyword variations used on a website. To avoid negative experience for users, it is better to stay away from using such unethical techniques. To make your website more popular, the best way is to focus on the content quality and detailing of information useful for your audience.
Targeting on exact search queries:
While creating a topic the webmasters used to give the exact search query as the user to get more visibility. But the content might not be related to the topic name sometimes. This is a bad technique to follow. If you want to give your website a good reputation, you should use the exact title to your content. But you can use keywords related to users queries in your content because the search engine can use this information while listing website. Google knowledge graph now got a better place and no one can beat its position by including exact search queries.
Inconsistency in the domain name:
You can follow good practice by using a more relevant short domain name which matches with your content. But there was an old practice of stuffing keywords in the domain name and making it very hard to interpret. Sometimes the domain name not even reflects the exact content. This can cause a bad experience for users as well can affect your website reputation. You don’t have to spend the time on making it exactly matching with the content. Use only relevant keywords and Google will do the job for you in listing it whenever needed. The quality and credibility of your content are more valuable than anything else.
XML sitemap manipulation:
This is another factor that used to be very popular back. Webmasters used to give priority number to the webpages using 0.0 to 1.0 to indicate the priority of pages. But this will not work anymore. An XML sitemap is a very popular way you can use to help the search engine to index your webpages. But when you do that no need to use these numbers to prioritize the website anymore. After they found out the wrong usage of these frequencies, search engine stopped considering this as a factor while indexing your website.
Bad Quality content:
Quality of content is something which can give you more visibility and traffic to your website. Google values quality more than anything else. If you are looking for more organic traffic, then focus on writing more relevant and informative content. Bad quality contents will not have a place in Google search engine result page. If you are looking for genuine followers, write contents based on what they want and include more facts in it. Avoid stolen, irrelevant or worthless contents in your website to save it from losing credibility
Conclusion:
Now you might have got a clear idea of making your website more acceptable for the machine as well as users. The outdated SEO strategies discussed above are not at all useful to make your content popular. They will only help you to lose the credibility of your website. So, it is better to avoid such bad techniques. Only follow good practices which can help your website to get better visibility and rank.