Dated SEO Strategies That No Longer Work

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Dated SEO Strategies That No Longer Work

 

SEO is a forever changing game where nothing stays the same for very long. If you don’t follow SEO closely you may find yourself using worthless or even risky SEO strategies that could harm your SEO efforts. To help you avoid wasting your time with pointless strategies, we will have a look at some of the once very popular SEO tactics that now have little to no value at all.

1) Focusing on Meta Data

Despite the practice of keyword heavy Meta Data having no value in the eyes of Google for over 10 years, we still hear a lot of estate agents talking about Meta Data for SEO.

Meta Descriptions are the only part of Meta Data that have any value these days, and the value isn’t for SEO. These descriptions are used on the search engine results pages so if well written you can entice users to click on your website, however they have no value for SEO.

2) Using exact keywords

Exact match keywords used to be an effective way to raise up the search results. Even exact match domains were very popular; however, Google saw this as a manipulation of their algorithm so now values exact match a lot less.

3) Blogging for the sake of it

Writing articles can be a very powerful marketing strategy and is a crucial part of any content marketing. However, articles shouldn’t just be used if they have been hashed out in hopes you will get a boost in your SEO.

Blog posts should only be created with a purpose, full of useful and interesting information and written with the user in mind. If they are well written and interesting they are likely to generate value for SEO.

4) Writing very little content

Creating articles that are under 300 words long, holds very little value. Short articles don’t tend to rank well or help boost your SEO.

When it comes to article writing the search engines tend to prefer longer, informative articles that will be of value to the readers.

5) Forcing keywords

Forcing your keywords into titles was once a mandatory practice, these days not so much. Google likes natural content, so never write content solely for the search engines, always keep the readers in mind.

You should focus on titles that use enticing, bold wording that embodies the value of the pages content instead.

6) Focusing on quantity over quality

This goes for almost everything in terms of SEO. Once upon a time, websites would turn out tons of poor-quality content and achieve high rankings results. Also having thousands of links was once seen as a crucial part of SEO no matter where they came from.  

Google ranks quality over quantity, and scraping content and buying links will no longer boost your SEO. In fact, it is likely to land you in hot water with Google dishing out some heavy penalisations to offenders. 

 

Luke Stanley