SEO That You Need To Stop Using
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an ever-changing field, with plenty of techniques coming and going. Some techniques that were used in the early days are now considered black hat and should never be used on a website now. If you do, you risk your website getting blacklisted and not ranking for anything at all. Once you get blacklisted, it’s almost impossible to get back in the good books of the likes of Google.
However, this article isn’t about those black hat techniques.
It’s about those techniques that are still acceptable and won’t get your website penalized. They’re just considered old-school and won’t do anything positive for your rankings. There’s no point in pouring time, effort and money into techniques that simply do nothing for your website or your brand.
Let’s take a look at the biggest culprits:
Creating A Separate Landing Page Per Keyword Variation
About 10 years ago, the trend was to get as many keyword variations into your website as possible. You also wanted to rank for as many of these variations as possible, which meant creating a page on your website for each one of those variations. The idea was, you would rank regardless of what people searched for because you had all the variations and options covered.
Examples of these keyword variations could be: secondhand furniture, secondhand furniture for sale, secondhand furniture in Los Angeles, excellent secondhand furniture for sale.
You now can include all these keywords in one page that covers all of the information that the user could want, as well as providing a good user experience. Google will rank this page a lot higher than a whole lot of individual pages.
Publishing Content For The Sake Of Publishing New Content
Content may be king and producing plenty of fresh content might be one of the best ways to get the search engine bots to come back to your website again and again. However, Google and the other search engines are putting far more emphasis on what the actual content is – meaning it needs to be high-quality and useful to your reader.
The old technique of constantly spinning out blog posts and landing pages to cover longtail keywords without focusing on what those pages are saying has to go. You won’t necessarily get penalized for churning out lots of poor-quality blog posts. However, you won’t be getting any benefit from them because the search engines will not rank them or give you any boost on those keywords.
Getting Backlinks Without Worrying About The Quality Of The Site
Backlinks is another tricky one. Link farms are definitely out and will get your website penalized if you use them to try and boost your SEO. However, there are plenty of websites where you can seed articles or get affiliate links from that won’t do anything for your rankings. In the last few years, there has been a strong focus on ensuring that you get backlinks from high-quality websites.
It’s vital that you research the credibility and the quality of the website that you want to put backlinks on. It should have a high authority in your industry, and it should be well regarded by its readers. Google is looking for a reason behind the backlink and a reason that makes sense for your brand and your website. The best way to tell if you are happy with the backlink on a particular website is to decide if you would be happy to link to the website on your pages and in your social media. If not, it probably isn’t worth it.
We’re a team of SEO experts that have been in the field for over a decade. We understand all the do’s and don’t of SEO so that you don’t have to. Just like you are an expert in your field, we are experts in ours.
Not sure where to start when it comes to ranking on the Google Search monster? Start by dropping us an email on hello@letsgomedia.io or for instant Whatsapp Communication ping us on +27 83 9555 891 and we will guide the way!