8 Outdated SEO Methods
Keep up to date with the SEO Algorithms
SEO is changing all the time and just when you feel like you’re finally ahead of the curve – BAM! Another algorithm update.
While this can be entertaining as it keeps the game fresh, it can also be a royal pain in the backside as it means you have to totally revamp your practices. Unfortunately, some bad practices can take a bit of time to adjust to, here are 8 outdated practices that you definitely should NOT be doing for your search engine marketing.
#1 Neglecting User Experience
It’s 2016, user experience and SEO go together like a burger and fries, yes they are separate things and can exist on their own, but when you put them together it’s so good! Stop neglecting UX and you should see huge improvements across your SEO.
#2 Thin Content
Not only is this bad practice, it is extremely annoying to read. Scrolling through the whole thing looking for the answer to your question only to be cut off when the answer should be just th…
#3 Link Farming
Yes, link building is good but it shouldn’t be the sole goal. Links don’t equal rankings, good links, good content and good user experience equal ranking. The days of trying to scatter thin content across the web for the sake of a few poor DA links is over, pack up your stuff and move on.
#4 Duplicate Content
Going hand in hand with thin content and link farming, writing one generic bit of content and trying to get it posted on every WordPress and blog around isn’t going to work. You’ll get no value from this and you’re utterly wasting your time. It won’t help your keywords increase or rank higher.
#5 Keyword Stuffing
Avoid stuffing your keywords into content. Write like you normally would and stop trying to force them in! Your content should be written in a way thats easy to read and makes sense, not obvious that keywords are being put in to help you rank higher. Google will also notice this and give you no favours! Write normally and be topical, its the way forward.
#6 Heavy Use of Anchor Text
While brand terms should definitely take up the bulk of your list, trying to get all your anchor texts to be the same search term just looks spammy.
#7 Heavy Focus on Keywords
Like the two above points, trying to use pages to target every variation of your keyword is just nonsense. You don’t have to create a bunch of new pages with direct match URLs just to grab the attention.
#8 Ignoring Social Media
social rankings are becoming more and more relevant for SEO, so you should start paying attention to it. Use it to push out your content, to drive engagement and find out more about your target audience. This is a huge resource that can help to generate a wealth of content which can potentially increase the amount of transactions you make – ignore it at your peril!
If you need some help with SEO or just some advice, get in touch with us!