Is your homepage SEO actually relevant in today’s world? SEO moves at such a fast pace, it’s important to keep up. Here are the outdated SEO tactics to avoid.
Homepage SEO has gone through several extensive evolutionary changes, and continue to go through these changes year in year out. While a lot of traditional marketing techniques are still there in today’s digital marketing, SEO changes have dramatically changed the landscape. Almost all these changes have managed to help improve the internet and search, in general.
A leading SEO Agency UK says some of the techniques that worked a while back may not be as effective today as they used to be. Yet, there are many small business owners and/or novice marketers that are still employing the use of some of these “zombie” SEO tactics (techniques that should have died a long time ago but isn’t)
All these are usually ineffective and hereinbelow are 9 tactics that are totally outdated for 2020 and beyond, that might potentially be dangerous to your website, brand and other digital properties.
1. Writing For Robots
It’s vital you keep in mind that writing unnatural content is, well, not natural. And you know what? Search engines can tell that too. What most people believe is that writing for the internet means subjects should be repeated by its proper name every time it’s mentioned.
This you do working in plural/non-plural versions and variations of the words so that you “cover all the bases”
These techniques don’t work anymore. Search engines have become a bit more advanced and know how to detect repeated keywords and generally bad content that provides an unfavorable experience.
2. Article Spinning
Typically done using some types of software, article-spinning is sort of a black-hat technique of trying to take quality content and recreating it using different phrases, words, and organization.
The end result is usually a garbled piece that makes the exact same points as what you’ll find in the source material.
This isn’t effective anymore and that’s no surprise. While artificial intelligence is growing every single year, anything a machine generates is still nowhere near better than what can be produced by a human.
3. Buying Links
Like most SEO techniques, if it feels shady, then you probably shouldn’t go along with it. Buying links isn’t any different. A while back, it used to be a routine practice to pay for links that point back to your website.
Now backlinks need to be optimized and maintained just like the sites you oversee. Low-quality domains that have too many backlinks that are pointing to a particular site might be detrimental to the health of that website.
Google can now identify low-quality websites very easily.
4. Keyword Stuffing
A long time ago when search engines could only interpret simple signals, things like stuffing keywords into your website pages to make them seem relevant was something everyone did and was quite the rage.
Unfortunately, this does not work anymore, and, more importantly than that, it makes your content look like it was created by drunk toddlers, which definitely won’t help inspire trust in the company.
5. Exact-Match Anchor Text
At one point, a big ranking factor was anchor texts, or the clickable texts of a particular link. For instance, if you intended on ranking for say “Tampa contractors”, you’d have to try and get as many Tampa contractors links as possible and use them as your anchor text.
This tactic was something marketers predictably abused, and Google, as well as other search engines, have tried to clamp down on it as much as possible and drop the rankings of sites they think have unnatural amounts of anchor text backlinks.
6. Article Marketing And Article Directories
In the SEO world of today, any attempt to try and play the system will often not work out as you planned it. However, that still does not stop a lot of folks from trying.
Especially when some of these techniques provide noticeable improvements to a website, its brand and/or the digital properties associated with it.
Yes, articles directories worked a long time ago but not anymore. To those in the know, article syndication was basically that low-hanging fruit. However, Google caught on and in 2011 unleashed the game-changing Panda update.
7. Obsolete Keyword Research Tactics
Over the past decade, keywords have gone through some major changes. Marketers once had a plethora of keyword-level information at their fingertips, which allowed them to see what works for their brands and what does not.
In the coming years, tools and software were created to try and replicate this keyword information.
However, to recreate them fully and correctly is basically still very impossible. This is why it’s wise to find a SEO expert to help.
8. Low-Quality Content
Effective SEO needs regular production of amazing content, and this is hard for time-strapped marketers.
Lacking resources and time will typically lead to rushed content creation, or something even worse, outsourcing this work to budget services like Upwork or Fiverr or to non-English speakers.
Ever since 2011 and the introduction of Google’s Panda update, creating copy for the sake of it just won’t work anymore. Your content should be engaging, accurate, well-written and robust. According to Sarah Walters from The Whit Group “Creating in-depth informative content that is of interest to your target audience is the most important thing you can do on your site. Google wants users to come back time and time again. The only way they can guarantee that is to deliver the best set of search results that answer a user’s query.”
9. Creating Multiple Interlinked Sites
There are 2 approaches that can be used to come up with multiple interlinked sites, and none of them is an effective SEO technique today. Instead of attempting to manage, build and market multiple sites just to get a few backlinks, concentrate on earning loads of high-quality backlinks from several other legit sites.
An additional benefit of doing this is that when those sites grow and become more authoritative, the links they’ll have directed to your website will also grow and become much more powerful as well.
Just focus on creating one quality website at a time and earn legitimate links back to your site.
What Next for Homepage SEO?
Homepage SEO can prove maddening sometimes, to be honest. Google’s algorithm always has some kind of adjustments it’s undergoing. Some of them are minor while others are major, however, constant tweaking typically leads to speculation.
These speculations lead to rumors and these said rumors will often lead to the rise of these persistent myths.
Hopefully, this article has proved enough to show you why you shouldn’t fall prey to some of these myths. They’re simply not good for both your website and your brand.