These SEO Practices Are Out Of Date – And Could Be Harming Your Rankings

These SEO Practices Are Out Of Date – And Could Be Harming Your Rankings

Each year, Google alters its algorithm between 500 and 600 times on average. In short, this means that the world of SEO is forever changing! And, if you want to ensure that your rankings remain positive, it’s up to you to keep up. In an effort to aid you on this mission, we’ve put together a list of some out-of-date SEO practices that used to be effective for SEO marketing, but which are now probably having the exact opposite effect on your SEO standing.

• Meta Data Keyword Stuffing
  

Back in the day, effective SEO marketing revolved around the sheer number of keywords you were able to stuff into your content. Nowadays, almost all of us know that quality content is the key to maintaining a good SEO ranking. However, this hasn’t stopped many of us from stuffing keywords into our meta data instead. Unfortunately, Google is now also recognizing this as a bad practice and will penalize your website accordingly. Rather use one meaningful, strong keyword in your meta description and leave it at that.

• Creating Countless Landing Pages
  

The age-old practice was to create a separate landing page for every keyword that a company wanted to rank for. Unfortunately, this led to a website having too many pages to count, which nowadays, doesn’t bode well for user experience! Instead of focusing too heavily on keywords and the like, focus your attention on making sure that any and every visitor to your website has a pleasant time doing so. Optimize navigation, keep an eye on page loading times and keep updating your content to entertain, inform, and impress.

• Buying Backlinks
  

Yes, backlinks still play a large role in SEO marketing. Unfortunately, Google now puts a lot of emphasis on these backlinks being quality links from reputable sources. Therefore, buying a multitude of backlinks from link farms or creating them yourself in any and every way possible definitely is not going to do your rankings any favors.

At the end of the day, outstanding SEO marketing and effective social media marketing relies on dedicating yourself to improving user experience. If visitors enjoy the time that they spend on your website, you’re doing a great job and Google will notice this. Over time, it will reflect in your rankings too.

Need a little bit of extra help? Let WSI New Media Marketing lend a hand. We specialize in SEO, pay per click advertising, and mobile content marketing. Contact us today to learn more.