New Year. New Tactics?
The New Year is a good time to try new things. It is also a great time to evaluate what you’re doing right and abandon those practices that are no longer working or not good enough anymore. This isn’t just a time to evaluate your budget. You need to review your digital marketing campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation strategy, as well.
With that in mind, here are five SEO tactics to leave behind in 2018!
Keyword Abuse
There are several ways keyword abuse can backfire on your website, even though it contributed to success before. Keyword stuffing will get your content downgraded by search engines automatically. Repeating keywords excessively at the start of the content alienates readers, but it also gets the page downgraded for poor readability, as well.
You can achieve similar results by varying the key search term throughout the content while taking care not to use it in every sentence. Just don’t do this too much since repeating the singular and plural versions of a term too often can lead to a penalty as well.
Irrelevant Keywords
You can’t rank well by throwing in heavily searched but irrelevant keywords in your content anymore. In fact, you need to take care to make sure search engines recognise that your content is relevant to a keyword so that your content ranks well. For example, an article on routers needs to make certain it references either woodworking or internet networking hardware. You can avoid problems by spelling out and explain acronyms so that your content comes up in relation to searches for both the abbreviation and the full term.
Article Spinning
Article spinning hurts you in several ways. Search engines are generally smart enough to recognise that the same article is being used on twenty different sites, though a few words have been altered in each version.
Another problem with article spinning is how bad many of the resulting articles are. The poor-quality content is downgraded by search engines while having all of these poorly scored articles pointing at your website ends up pulling down the ranking for the page you’re trying to promote. The impact is even worse if you’re posting these spun articles on article directories.
Article directories have been given a low score by search engines since 2011, and a bunch of articles on these sites pointing to your page leads causes a negative association with your website. Yes, their low trust score ends up pulling down your domain’s trust score with search engines. If you utilised article directories in the past, research your backlink profile and take down the old articles that may be undermining your SEO strategy today.
On a related note, search engines are smart enough to recognise when you’ve created slightly different articles that are optimised for variations of the same search phrase; that will lead to a penalty for your website, too.
Buying Links
The Artificial Intelligence behind search engines is smart enough to identify the most obvious cases of bought links. They downgrade your website the moment they see it. You also have to avoid marketing tactics that generate that same negative levy. Don’t use comment spam to create backlinks. Be careful referencing your company website in online forums since too many signature blocks with the same company link can be mistaken for this black hat SEO strategy. Encourage social media sharing of your content instead.
Bad Content
Search engines give extra weight to unique, high-quality content. You could see your site hurt inadvertently if you use the exact same product description across the board or post a widely distributed press release on your website. Content with bad grammar will be downgraded by search engines. Thin content could be penalised, though that doesn’t mean you have to add a lot of text to an image-rich page. Poorly translated content can incur a penalty, as well.
We’ve identified the five worst SEO tactics that you need to abandon immediately. Your first action for the New Year should be reversing the damage the legacy of prior years’ SEO strategy is still causing your brand.
If you’re looking for help with your SEO and Digital Marketing then contact NECL to learn how our team can help accelerate your business website up the search engine rankings!
