Stone Age SEO you shouldn’t be using

 

Search Engines have come a long way since their creation and have been evolving very fast indeed. Google’s algorithm changes slightly everyday and once in a while Google manages a huge leap that changes search dramatically meaning the old caveman practices stop working completely. While a lot of SEO’s change their strategies to keep up with the forever changing Google, many lag behind using irrelevant and sometimes harmful techniques.

This can happen easily as new SEO’s and website owners can stumble across outdated SEO advice, which in all fairness is all over the internet.

Here are some Stone Age SEO practices that you should avoid:

Creating content for Search Engines not users

This practice used to work very well for a lot of websites but after Google’s Panda update many websites saw their rankings drop dramatically.

Content that has been written well may be considered unworthy. This is because a huge amount of content online has been written for the sake of having more content.

Google claims to be able to measure how relevant the content is and if the content grabs the user’s attention. They do this by measuring things like the click-through rates and the amount of time that is spent on the web page.

Reciprocal Links (Link Exchange)

Getting links from another website will definitely help your website go up the rankings but there are ways to do it right and ways to do it wrong.

Reciprocal links is where you say to someone “You link to my website and I will link to your website”. This sounds like a win-win situation for both of you. However Google’s algorithm has discovered a way to detect this sort of link building, giving the link less or no value at all.

Meta Keywords

Many SEO’s still count this as an important factor to ranking well within Search Engines. However Google has let everyone know that Meta keywords have no effect on how well you rank and neither does Meta Descriptions for that matter. Although Meta Descriptions still need to be included to help make your website stand out in the search results.

Even though this has been publicly announced by Google, many SEO still use this practice...

Relying solely on H1 tags

H1 tags are relevant and make it easy for the search engines to see what words are important to the page but it’s only one factor which can help you achieve good ranking.

The likelihood of ranking well from just your H1 tags is very slim.

Focusing on PageRank

PageRank once upon a time was a very important factor in Google’s algorithm, now Google say its only one factor of the hundreds of Signals that are in Google’s algorithm. So try not to obsess too much over PageRank.

Submitting to Search Engines

This is a very dated SEO technique and if somebody promises to submit your website to hundreds of search engines for a small fee don’t fall for it. Think about this logically, in the UK Google dominate 92% of the search market, the other 8% is mostly controlled by Bing and Yahoo. All three search engines can find your website without it being submitted to them and it is also free to submit it.

Instead focus on getting links from other indexed websites, this will help the Search Engines find you faster.

By Luke Stanley

SEO Consultant