TOP-5 Oldschool SEO Tricks You Should Stop Using
We’ve come a long way since the beginning of Interweb. During these years we’ve seen many waves of different trends and practises to shape the outlook of websites, their technical structure, and the environment in middst they exist.
Search engines have become uber-intelligent and evolved multiple times even after that. Social media in form of Facebook and Instagram has eaten market from traditional web pages, and the new social media hit service may already be waiting to slip into mainstream.
After all this evolution it should be no surprise that the prevailed effective search engine optimization (SEO) tricks have undergone radical changes. Now it is time to shake the dust off your SEO expert suit and eliminate the top five SEO practises that have been outdated. You seriously should stop wasting time on these!
1. Shitty Back Links
The fact used to be the more links your page has the better score it gain in the eyes of search engines. This lead to major spam of any kind of crap links you could possibly get your hands on. Including comments on other blogs, forum profiles with no posts, and likes on various social media website clones.
A nasty bluehat could boost her ranking in a quite lucrative way by spawning millions of these weak links. Not everyone did it, and if you do, you should finally stop today.
Why? Because you are simply wasting your time, resources, and cash by obtaining this links. They surely have still some impact but in the end the spam it can even harm the ranking of your site. They are unpredictable and their function is being mitigated by search engines. Focus on your content that is so compelling it attracts natural backlinks.
2. Exact Word And Phrase Matches
It used to be true that by including the exact phrases the customer is searching with resulted in your page to rank top of the SERPs if competition for that specific term was low. You probably tried to count in as many different synonyms and phrases as possible to maximize the SERP visibility.
Those times are over. Stop wasting time on entering calculated synonyms and phrases in your articles. Especially if they don’t fit the text naturally. Today the search engines use “latent semantic indexing” to give points to all content that relates to search at hand.
Keep on writing your articles for the human reader instead of a search engine. However, repetition is always boring and varying the terms you use will surely bring more freshness to your lingo.
3. Lots of Pages With Zero Value Content
Having a large website with lots of pages used to bring you authority on the field of search engine ranking. This resulted in adding all the tag archives, category pages, and all possible gobbledygook into your site structure and sitemaps.
The same policy applies now here also - zero value pages are not reputable anymore - the content is the new king. For example, drop the spammy tag and category archive pages from the sitemaps of your blogs, list only the ham of your site by using noindex robot meta tag for the no-value content.
If you offer only the diamonds to search engines they shall respect you.
4. Keywords in Internal Links
Keywords in links are of course essential. You could focus your targeted word and phrase by using a lot of the desired phrase in the anchor links withing your own site.
Today the anchor text of links inside your own site is devalued. Make sure the links exists but devoting energy to optimize the link texts that point to your subsites is not worth the extra mile anymore.
5. Long Articles Without Substance
The mere length of your web page used to weight quite a lot in the ranking process. If the content was keyword-rich and there was a lot of words, about one thousand for starters, the page gained authority compared to more wrapped up short content that might as well contain the same information.
Here again the quality is galloping past the (word) quantity. Search engines analyze visitor actions and if your content is full of irrelevant filling the visitor will just glance over it and hit the back button faster than you can pronounce the name of your analytics service.
I would suggest you write your articles in a comprehensive manner, and this way reach a nice word count naturally but avoid writing content only for the sakes of length.
Summary
As we’ve come through the TOP-5 list one aspect has come clear. In every point of your work on your website, one should focus on creating great quality and offering it in most convient way possible.
Search engines strive to deliver quality for they customers and if you play by the same book you too will reach the SERP success.
All kind of cheating in an old-fashioned manner has become hard if not impossible, and is now waste of time. Let’s revise the great wisdom of the modern SEO trick book you will eventually stumble upon: “If anything else won’t work - try fair play.”
