Some SEO techniques are considered tried and true, but they are no longer valid. This is because the search engines are evolving as much as modern day technology. The techniques are not dangerous when you consider them; they are just outdated, and they do not give the site owner the ranking they may want. The methods are most common in the business, and people are losing valuable time and resources trying them over and over again only to see them fail. These techniques that should be avoided include:
Optimized Anchors
Optimized anchor is an anchor text which uses keywords to help with ranking. This method used to work a great deal in the past, but nowadays it does not and while some people may still be using it, it is risky as it can ruin a site’s SEO penalization. On the other hand, there are safe anchors available, like the use of naked URLs and branded URLs. All in all, one should look at using safe anchors other than optimized anchors.
Relying on link-backs other than content
For a long time, any people had the idea that by putting many links on a site will help boost the authority of the site as well as get higher rankings and a huge number of search traffic. While link-backs are important in SEO, they are not the only component of SEO. For an SEO to be effective, it needs to have a significant sum of several parts. That cannot be achieved by just pushing one technique to the extreme. All the parts need to be used to achieve an effective SEO. Links should not be ignored in any SEO but should be kept balanced with the entire suite of SEO.
Quantity of links over quality
Purchasing of backlinks is fast and easy as well as cheap. Some SEO agencies can build a bunch of connections in a week. The links will also be piled up and pointing to the pages one wants. However, what is not known to many is that this could easily ruin their sites. This can especially happen when; the site that links is penalized or has a low DA. A site that has a DA below 20 is considered low and can ruin the site that it links to. Also, when a site receives a large number of links in a short period, it can be ruined. Link building is used by many SEO agencies, and it has been used for quite a long time now. However, any SEO value from link building majorly depends on authority and validity of the given site. If anyone is looking at link building he or she should use sites with high DA backlinks, those are a site with DA of above 20.
Keyword Heavy Content
It is well known that keyword stuffing is not enough for any SEO as it is one of the earliest tricks that were used by people to get a high ranking. Keyword stuffing is defined as loading a webpage with keywords or numbers to try and manipulate a website’s ranking in search results. Despite the number of warnings and the consequences keyword stuffing bears, there are still people who use the same. One can avoid keyword stuffing and avoid being penalized by simply:
Adding more content to the web page instead of just adding keywords.
The other way is to stop worrying about keyword density; creation of excellent content to the readers can just as much improve the site’s ranking.
Only use relevant keywords.
Also remember that not all keywords get penalized, the kind of keyword stuffing that gets penalized is long tail keywords other than head terms.
Ignoring Social signals
While it may look a little bit outdated, there are still some sites that don’t pay attention to social networking sites. As simply put by one CEO of a certain search engine “For the first time, the search box is not searching a string…it is searching for that person that I know. Having real feedback from users is very useful for search we have a lot of those signals already, but we can always use more we can always use better relevance, and we can always use more data to generate that.” This is the primary reason why most blogs today have social sharing buttons, ignoring this will certainly work on the website.
Ignoring Design
A website can say a lot a person and the brand they are trying to put out. Many people part with much money on web designers only for the site to be delivered looking unattractive. However, most times people choose to design the sites themselves making a big mess of it; they end up having sites that do not search engine friendly. The best thing is to find a good designer and guide them on how the site should look. Never should the website design be ignored as most clients do not ignore.
Spammy Guest Blogging
Nowadays guest blogging should be practiced with great caution. Spammy SEOs have once again twisted a good thing ‘guest blogging’ into a bad technique. Since guest blogging became a dangerous trick, the algorithm will look to suppress spammy guest blogging results. Guest blogging is however still a viable option in boosting SEO ranking. Caution should not be thrown to the wind when one is using this method in building links. One need to be very careful on the way they execute their guest blogging plans as they can easily ruin a site through having irrelevant content, writing low-quality content or attempting to rank head terms in the guest posts.
Conclusion
SEO is a long-term strategy and trying to get above the queue by stuffing keywords or any other methods listed above can cause more harm than good to a site. SEO certainly is all about the newest tricks and techniques. Most importantly SEO is not dead; it has only changed and for one to have the much-desired success of the method they should simply adapt their strategy accordingly or risk being penalized and ruining their sites.