Search Engine Optimization
By Barkha |
4 Old School SEO Practices to leave behind in 2017

4 Old School SEO Practices to leave behind in 2017

No matter how old school or traditional you are with your ways, you should keep up with the new ways of working by staying up-to-date with new practices and leave the old ones in the past. Haven’t we all heard that leaving old habits is a tough job? Nevertheless, we have to get rid of some of them to make a tremendous progress in what we do. Similarly, you must keep the old SEO strategies aside and look forward to new and innovative techniques to drive not only more but the relevant traffic to your website.

Gone are the days when you used to practise the same SEO activities all over again in hope of getting the top rank in Google’s search engine results. It’s time to revamp the ways you optimize your website for search engines. But before that, do you know what are the old SEO practices that you must stop doing right now? If not, here’s a list of 5 old school Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices you should definitely leave behind in 2017:

  • Excessive keyword stuffing

Stuffing excessive keywords have started to backfire now as search engines have started to penalize the websites, although it was majorly practiced earlier. You must abide by the rule of quality over quantity. Using just two useful keywords rather than multiple useless keywords can save you and your website from Google penalty. You can’t feed excessive and useless keywords in the hope of ranking your website to the top list of the searched results. A person uses SEO to control the traffic on the search portal and not to create more with the excessive use of keywords. Since the excessive use of keywords may land up user on your portal for a completely different query. For instance,the user might be searching for the uses of hair pins but because you have used hair pins as a keyword in your website of beauty products, your portal will be displayed in the searched results. You don’t want irrelevant traffic on your site, do you? Here’s an example of excessive keyword stuffing: “Free home delivery for packed food to deliver food at your doorstep. Pay no additional charges to get food delivered at home.”

  • Poor backlinking

The very common practice of building more and more links to your website on third-party websites is an outdated SEO practice. Backlinking is referred to linking your website to more other websites to build audience and drive traffic. The act of backlinking should be relevant and qualitative. You should not focus on reaching to a lot of people but the focus should be on the correct audience. If you link your e-clothing website with an e-books website or blog, it would not make any sense. The connecting dot between the two sites should be valid and relevant for the user to visit your portal. There are even cases of spammy websites linking their sites on directories, yet a reputed directory would not link any spammy site with its information to maintain its honor.

For instance, if you happen to visit an ill-reputed directory and look up for some information, you might come across some irrelevant links on it. You could be searching for food joints near your place but the comment section might provide you with links of irrelevant adult websites. But that’s not the case with the reputed websites and directories which offers the space for quality backlinking. If you visit any reputed and well-known directory, it wouldn’t accept any irrelevant links to their provided information.

  • Poor content

How often have you heard that it is the insides that matters the most? Pretty sure that you would have heard it as a motivational thing but it is the same with your website. Your content is the essence of your website therefore, the quality of the content should not be compromised. Even if the keywords are rightly used and precise to the content, the user will not become your customer if the content doesn’t feed him with the information he needs about you and your offerings. Your portal should make the user stay and explore your website entirely to gain more and more information. If the users are quickly exiting your website unsatisfactorily increasing its exit rate, then great possibilities are there that your content is not up to the quality mark.

“The need to optimize the website is necessary. Your website would rank in the top 5 searched results as you optimize it with relevant keywords. As you optimize your website to index it, you should be specific with your keywords. You can rank your website with various methods and bring it to the top results.”

The stated paragraph is an example of poor and thin content without the adequate information for the reader.

  • Sitewide links

Sitewide links should be nominal. Such are the links that are inserted on the footer or the blogroll section of the website which have least to do with the relevancy for the user. The links to internal pages of a single website, or the other third-party website which is not related to the root website are counted as sitewide or unnatural links. A well designed website has a limited number of sitewide links whereas a poorly designed website has an unlimited number of sitewide links which are irrelevant and invalid as per the criteria of the website. It’s possible that people would get to know about your website through the blogroll or the links provided in the footer section but it is ethically incorrect to provide multiple sitewide links to your website.

Therefore, these tactics are good examples of black-hat SEO which you must forget in 2018. You should avoid these practices for your website to be human friendly and not robot friendly. Using these tricks may rank your website high in the SERPs for a short period but for the long run, this would not provide you a loyal audience or customers and also, would not maintain your rank in the SERPs.