Sometimes, even despite warnings from search engines, poor SEO practices just won’t disappear. Here are 5 archaic and potentially detrimental tactics that shouldn’t even cross your mind.
Unselective guest blogging
When approached correctly, guest blogging still has the power to contribute positively to your overall digital strategy, because it will help you to build and establish your brand, demonstrate your skills and expertise, build credibility, and boost your overall brand exposure.
Unfortunately, traditional guest blogging was co-opted by marketers who had lost sight of its true purpose, and they began placing articles on websites with no relevance to their content, solely to obtain links. This eventually lead to search engines penalising websites and businesses for engaging in underhand SEO practices. It is therefore imperative to be highly selective when utilising the power of guest blogging within your digital strategy, only placing articles on websites with a clear and demonstrable connection to your business.
Keyword stuffing
When search engines could only interpret a few key metrics, high density keyword implementation had its benefits. Now, not only is it ineffective, it can be highly detrimental to your business. Keyword stuffing results in copy that just doesn’t read very well, with lots of unnatural sentences that cannot clearly communicate that you are a knowledgeable and capable business that your audience should put their trust into.
Instead, you need to be smart with your copy. Yes, keywords are still important, but creating copy that sounds natural and can deftly communicate important pieces of information that your audience needs to know is infinitely more important.
Keyword rich anchor text
While anchor text was once an important ranking factor, securing large numbers of anchor text backlinks that are rich in keywords is now regarded as a poor SEO practice that should be avoided.
Now, the majority of your anchor text links probably won’t exactly match your target keywords, which won’t be detrimental to your efforts, because it’s no longer something that search engines deem to be an important ranking factor. Instead, relevance is key and search engines will look more closely at the quality and the number of relevant links pointing to your site from authoritative sites.
Poor quality content
Effective SEO relies on high quality content, which often requires a significant time and monetary investment. Your content must clearly communicate a message to your audience and to do that it needs to be well-written and highly engaging. Whether you need a 500 or a 5,000 word article depends on the topic being addressed, but your focus should always be on creating intelligent and intelligible content that serves a real purpose.
Paid links
Although paid-for links violate search engine guidelines, you might be surprised at just how many marketers and webmasters are taking the risk and proceeding with this underhand tactic in an attempt to get ahead in the short term.
In short, search engines know how to look for and find both link sellers and link buyers. If getting caught and penalised is an inevitability, you’ve got to ask yourself why you’re even thinking about taking the risk in the first place. It’s not worth it and your time is always going to be better invested in working to boost your strategy in other areas.