8 Outdated SEO Practices To Avoid Before its Too Late
Search engine algorithms are ever-evolving. What might work now won’t necessarily work in the future. For sure, there are a few outdated SEO techniques that you must avoid in order to achieve the best results from your marketing efforts, and doesn’t let wrong practices harm your progress.
SEO is broad, from technical to off-page to on-page SEO, and it carries a range of practices and elements to be taken care of. Consequently, there are outdated techniques that should be avoided at all costs. If you’re not an SEO expert whose sole focus is SEO, avoiding old-hat techniques should be your concern.
In this article, we’ve mentioned a comprehensive list of SEO tactics so that you can make your way to success steadily without hitting roadblocks in the process.
8 Outdated SEO Practices That Can Hurt Site Ranking
Here are 8 outdated SEO practices and techniques to avoid before they can hurt your site rank and marketing efforts.
1. Over Prioritizing Keywords
Google is prioritizing helpful content based on its new algorithm update. Keyword research is the first step in the SEO process. The keywords that your target audience is actually searching for help you rank and get more visibility. And content strategy should be based on these relevant keywords.
An outdated SEO technique is over-prioritizing keywords. Keyword stuffing is among those. Using keywords excessively could harm your page ranking. Google no longer depends on keyword density to determine whether a webpage would provide the required answer to the search query.
Using keywords in a more natural way should be your goal when creating content. So, instead of focusing too much on targeting an irrelevant keyword, prioritize user experience and create content that is informative and easy to read.
2. Creating A Landing Page Per Keyword Variation
Variations of the targeting keyword should be used when creating a web page. Creating a separate web page for each keyword variation is an outdated SEO technique that should be avoided.
Most SEO experts used to create a landing page for each of these search terms, which eventually resulted in users navigating the plethora of pages for similar keywords.
Google prioritizes pages that cater to the searcher’s intent by increasing its ranking and dominating irrelevant web pages. If you have a product-based brand, creating a single interesting, educational product page is all you need to do.
3. Spinning Content
Article spinning is often used to create quality content with the help of third-party tools and software. However, spinning content is the black hat SEO technique that should be avoided.
Basically, spinning tools use different words and phrases to create an article but end result comes out as a mess of the article with the same flow and points as of the original article. Search engine crawlers have become smarter to understand whether the content is created by humans or software. They don’t provide any value to the creators and readers as well.
Of course, there are some AI-based tools that are getting better over time at creating content but no machine can match the quality of what humans can produce i.e. more original readers-friendly content.
4. Paying to Get Backlinks
Another shady SEO tactic that you should avoid is buying links. Paying to get backlinks used to be a routine practice back in the early days of SEO.
It is no longer helpful to buy links and optimize your SEO. Backlinking is more of quality-focused practice to achieve the best results. Instead of acquiring backlinks from low-quality domains, it’s best to get high-quality links with higher domain authority pointing to your website.
The better your link building will be, the more authority you’ll gain. The quality of the backlinks decides by how relevant they are to your website. So, if you want to legitimately help boost the authority and visibility of your website, it’s better to earn those links than pay someone to build them manually.
5. Overusing Anchor Text
Anchor text is the clickable text of the link. The use of the anchor text is mostly in the internal linking to make a good site structure and user experience. This helps users to know what type of content or page they are going to open after clicking the link, helping users to navigate through the website.
Using exact keywords as the anchor text used to be standard SEO practice in the past. But ever since Google published the penguin algorithm, search engines can quickly identify over-optimized content. Thus, overusing anchor text should be avoided as Google understands this piece of content is over-optimized.
So, all you need to do is use keyword-rich anchor text while keeping the natural flow of writing. Google is prioritizing helpful content. So, the content you’ll create fosters a user-friendly experience and natural use of language.
6. Poor-Quality Guest Blogging
Guest blogging helps connect and build relations with industry experts and creators. It has become essential to content marketing strategy.
Like link-building techniques, guest blogging should be focused on quality than quantity. Most often, it is used for building links. However, accepting poor-quality guest blogs should be avoided.
It started out as an authentic SEO technique but now become a method of gaining backlinks by using the same content repetitively that Google responds with a spam penalty.
But when done correctly, guest blogging is effective in increasing a brand’s reach and driving more traffic to your website no matter whether you’re accepting blogs or offering them. Keep in mind, guest blog posts from a low-authority website could result in negatively impact your ranking.
You need to be very specific in selecting authoritative sites and industry influencers with strong reputations to make your guest blogging strategy successful.
7. Buying Exact Match Domains
Having valuable keywords that your website is targeting in the URL makes sense to some extent. However, buying exact-match domains is no longer useful. Google is stopped valuing exact match domains a long time ago.
The best practice is to keep the domain name consistent with your brand. Keep it short, concise, and meaningful. Focus on providing great user experience through quality products or services with perfect branding and Google will take care of the visibility that it deserves among the related audience.
8. Publishing Thin Content
Thin content lacks quality and doesn’t provide much value to the readers. There was a time when crappy content could rank well. Now as the digital world is evolving, there is tons of content available to be consumed with the increasing competition among creators to create content that helps readers.
Instead of creating copied, thin, keyword-stuffed, or non-credible content that isn’t worth the user’s attention and could leave your website with a high bounce rate, take time to make quality content that search engines can reward.
Searchers are looking to get the best answer to their queries. You need to be the best answer.
Start with in-depth research and competitor analysis to find the gap between the available content and how you can add more value to the same. The content on the first page of search results is considered above-average quality.
In order to outrank your competitors, you need to provide above-average quality content.
SEO Can Be Done Right
It’s best to stay familiar with the latest SEO that is helpful & worth implementing while avoiding trivial, outdated SEO practices that could harm your marketing efforts.
SEO is complicated and could take a lot of your time to actually see the results. With the help of our SEO specialist, you can fast-forward your organic online marketing progress and achieve a higher ranking, more visibility, and better engagement. Lion Bear Media has been serving top brands and small businesses for over a decade and what’s done by our industry leaders is a success to be remembered. Do you want the same success for you? Hire our experts today.
FAQs
SEO targets search visibility and domain authority which leads to increased website traffic, page ranking, and credibility. An effective SEO strategy will help deliver your web pages to a relevant audience associated with the search queries.
No. SEO is not dead and will never be. SEO has its place to make digital marketing strategy complete. SEO is ever-evolving with the changes in the existing practices or with the release of new ones based on Google updating its algorithm.