Three prehistoric SEO tactics to avoid like the plague

Search engine optimization is one of those things that can get away from you if you aren’t paying close enough attention to it. SEO has been around since the first websites were indexed back in the ’90s. As you can guess, it has since been updated with equal advancements in search engine algorithms.

Back then, things were much simpler. Search engine algorithms ranked websites with the most keyword appearances highest, so you can imagine the type of rules that governed SEO at the time. Today, we’re here to lay rest to some of these outdated SEO tactics because they have no place on the Internet today.

SEO Don’t's

1. Keyword Stuffing: You won’t find an article about defunct SEO tactics that doesn’t mention keyword stuffing in one way or another. This is an ugly practice that was created out of sheer need to forcibly grab the attention of search engines and increase rankings. Stuffing content with keyword takes away its human/personal appeal. It immediately makes it look like something written by a bot, and neither Internet users nor search engines finds this particularly interesting.

It has been mentioned and reiterated that you should write for your audience, not around a keyword. Keywords can be inserted naturally within the content to enrich the article for search engines, but this should not be the main focus when writing a blog, for instance. It diminishes the value of the content, not to mention the readability factor.

2. Ultimate Guides: Initially, content creators were obsessed with writing single keyword phrase articles. They figured that writing entire articles for each keyword would nab them all the traffic they wanted. While they weren’t completely off their marbles, this tactic soon had to change after experts showed that the Google algorithm preferred topics to keywords. This led to the “Ultimate Guide” fever, a period in content creation that was characterized by the generation of 30,000-word definitive guides that had all these keywords cleverly placed within them. This was a good strategy except for one thing: no one was looking for a definitive guide to anything. People just wanted answers to their questions, and that was all. In light of these changes, grabbing a niche by the collar required some ingenuity. Today, the best way to go about this is to identify the audiences that are best served by each keyword and creating articles that highlight the main point in the headlines.

To illustrate, let’s say that the keyword to be used is “the best way to travel internationally.” An article that provides travel tips such as these can be titled, “5 Ways to Make Your International Flights More Comfortable” or “3 Things That Are Ruining Your International Travel Experience”. You will be touching on the pain points of traveling internationally in a way that travelers can relate to while using the right keywords to give you a topic authority in that particular niche.

3. Blog Commenting for Backlinks: Commenting on blog posts is an excellent way to let the author know that you enjoyed the read or support their ideas. This is the intended use of commentary on blog posts, but sadly, it fell victim to misuse along the way. The problem started when blog comments started leaving links to their sites on posts that allowed “do-follow” links. The “do-follow” feature would instruct Google to follow the links in the comments back to their sites. This illegitimate way of building backlinks saw blog “commenters” voraciously taking advantage of bloggers, forcing their innocent victims to resort to spam-blocking tools like Akismet to separate them from legitimate comments.

Algorithms today rate your topic authority based on whether you occasionally link back to relevant thought leaders and authority sites. It is not a matter of link quantity; it’s a matter of quality.

Being Progressive

SEO is changing every single day. Old methods lose steam and are replaced by others. For instance, no one today would advise you to list in multiple article databases to appease algorithms, although this was the norm a while ago. This is not the right way to do it anymore. Today’s best practices favor authentic, helpful and evergreen content whenever possible. Steer clear of shortcut methods and easy fixes — these do more than just waste your time (they put you in bad standing with search engine algorithms). Focus on fulfilling your website’s mission instead by providing as much value as possible in your respective niche.