Are you one of those people who are guilty of using the same basic traditional techniques of search engine Optimization (SEO)? Living in the past with the methods that were once tried-and-true can really be enticing, but it can also cause danger to your online business strategies. This article will provide some relevant information about the old school SEO practices that must be set aside in favour of the modern and more effective approaches.
5 Traditional SEO Practices That No Longer Work
Here listed are some of the common old SEO practices that are engaging for several SEO practitioners. Some of them did work in the past but not anymore so better change them now for the sake of your brand, company and the website.
1. The use of keywords before each click. For most SEO agency in Singapore, keyword research is a very important tool that enhances a site’s online presence.
Old school keywords stuffing which may include the word essay, essay writing, research writing or others are often used in the content or as a title element. They all worked before but not anymore. Yes, it has been an important part of SEO development for the purpose of drawing some clicks. But now, as online users search for a page and see such keywords (like the given example), they’ll now relate it as sketchy or spammy and will no longer proceed to check that site. This users’ view affects the search engine portal that uses click signals to help websites and documents rank over time.
With this kind of reader’s judgement, your website will surely fall in the ranking page. The right way is to apply a stunning wordings, a title like “The Art of Essay: Writing a Memoir for Different Levels of Celebrities”, to draw people in. Based on the mentioned title, it is trying to create a more interesting message. A message that is less focused on just SEO themed keywords but more focused on drawing the click. Obviously, this is a far more effective method than the traditional ones.
2. Creating pages for each keyword variant. This SEO practice is more about keyword targeting, which uses keywords relevant to a product or service in an ad copy and website to achieve a top listing in the search engines; a marketing strategy that allows you to connect with some audience based on words and phrases they have recently searched.
Until this day, this SEO technique is still being pursued by many folks because it has been very effective for years. The idea here is that if you have any keyword variation, you want a single page to target that since keyword targeting is such a precise technical art and science that you want to have the maximum capacity to target every keyword individually.
However, with today’s search engine updates like in terms of algorithm, it has gotten smarter. A more intent- and topic-matching model was created to get away from being penalised. The production of the same content in different pages is avoided.
Experts’ suggest that instead of making a separate page for each, you can create a single page that targets all of them. You can try to fit the keywords intelligently into the meta description, the title, the content, or maybe the headline, those kinds of things, or any good combination of these.
3. The heavy use of anchor text on internal links. The use of anchor text on internal links could have positive impacts on rankings, but this has been discounted and even punished by the major search engine provider because it is believed to be overdone, manipulative, and inappropriate or spam.
Today, in the event that the internal link is placed in the navigation of a page, may it be located in a sidebar, in the footer, or inside a content, has high usability, and is well-written and relevant, then you are safe. But if it’s the other way around, like it looks sketchy, it has low usability, or if you’re making the font small to hide it because it’s really created for search engines and not for users and searchers, then you will most probably get penalised or the likes.
4. The use of multiple microsites, or separate domains, or different domains with the same topic target or audience. This is another commonly used SEO strategy. What happens here is that one have decided to split it up and have multiple microsites, or separate domains, or different domains with the same topic target or audience to get very micro-targeted with each site. These websites are those with keyword-rich domain names that include every content from the said individual but same sites. The advantage of this method is that it’s faster and better to gain domain authority for each site. However, since you split up your efforts, the rank will not be that high and your sites will not benefit each other, may it be in terms of content or links.
It is highly recommended that you combine all your effort in one place or domain because it will have higher possibility of earning you the most rankings for all of the content you made.
5. The use of paid links, directories, etc. Each of the link acquisition or link building techniques that will be mentioned under this SEO practice has either been penalised as part of an update or directly penalised by the search engine itself. It’s better if you stay away from these dangerous things: article spinners, reciprocal link pages, comment links, forum link buys, paid link networks, private link networks, SEO directories, too much links in an article, spammy guest post, press release sites, and more. These are all social link buys that is why you should be very sceptical.
With all the details provided in this article, think about switching your old SEO strategies that don’t really work to some new techniques that will put your SEO results to a greater output. In addition, always keep track of the SEO updates or upgrades so that you can easily change the methods you are applying to your site.
