Search engine optimization can be a tricky beast to tackle. What’s a good practice? What will have your site dropping in the ranks like a rock? The answers aren’t always as obvious as they seem!
A good SEO digital marketing agency can be a game changer here: they stay on top of the good, the bad, and the ugly of SEO so you don’t have to!
Search engine guidelines are updated frequently to filter out low-quality content and spam. If you’re not keeping up with these, you may inadvertently be following some old SEO practices. Here are some outdated SEO techniques for you steer clear from.
Keyword Stuffing
Keywords are treated – rightfully – as the golden ticket to visibility on search engines. While they are undoubtedly important, it’s also easy to misunderstand their role and use in SEO strategies.
Keywords cannot be used arbitrarily, for the sole sake of visibility and a high search engine result page rank. If the keywords you are using aren’t actually aligned with your content, you will lose readers, regardless of how good the content actually is.
It’s worth ensuring, therefore, that your keywords are relevant and remain aligned with your target audience’s search intent.
Keyword stuffing, i.e., the practice of using keywords – especially the high-value ones – in great numbers to rank higher on SERPs, is particularly frowned upon by search engines.
A good rule of thumb is to remember that you are writing for the humans: keep your keyword usage natural and relevant; high-quality content is the best way to rank highly when it comes to SEO.
Buying High Volume Backlinking
It was once possible to climb the hallowed ranks of search engine results by getting a large number of pages to backlink to your site. This may seem like an easy fix to a complex problem, but it’s not.
Backlink pages must be authentic and meet minimum quality standards set by search engines. Thus, if a lot of backlinks to your site come from low-quality pages, it’s going to ding your ranking on search engines.
In today’s day and age, backlinks are best earned rather than bought. Mechanical – rather than authentic – boosts to your SEO ranking are inevitably going to fall flat in the long run.
Too Many Anchors in Your Text
Once upon a time, not that long time ago, SEO when it came to links was simple: linking exactly used keywords as anchor texts was an excellent SEO strategy.
However, today, not all anchor texts are equal. Context matters, and some kinds of anchor text have become more favored than others, and using too much anchoring in your content will set off the alarm bells with search engines.
Instead, keep your content linked and anchored as naturally as possible to offer good user experiences to your readers.
Buying Domains with Popular Keywords
It may seem like an obviously good idea to buy up domain names with keywords that pertain to your business. Hold your horses, though: it’s not.
If search engines find that these domain names are leading to bad user experiences, i.e., being misleading or promising one thing and delivering others, it will affect your ranking.
The best thing to do when it comes to your domain names and URLs is to ensure that they are in keeping with your brand – natural, concise, and if possible, memorable.
If you’re able to offer high-quality content or services on your domain, using keywords in it becomes irrelevant: search engines will ensure that your website is reaching the people who are looking for it.
Conclusion
Search engine optimization techniques reward high-quality content that leads to effective and good user experiences, and frown upon attempts to game the system.
When it comes to best practices for SEO techniques, an SEO digital marketing agency like AdLift can help you find the strategies would work best for your business. You can focus on creating rich and compelling content, and leave talking to the search engines to them.
