Search Engine Optimization best practices often change and as search engines get smarter,it’s no wonder that many SEO strategies that worked great in the past no longer help your site and can even hurt your rankings.
One of the most widely used tactics that now hurts instead of helping is called “keyword stuffing” – It used to help get your pages ranked very high for the selected term and there was even a formula of how many times to use a specific keyword in a page to get it to rank best. In addition it was widely accepted that creating a page for each keyword and variation would help your site, and it did. For example, writing one page about “SEO” and another about “Search Engine Optimization” and another about “Search Engine Marketing” was necessary to rank for each of those terms. Today however, Google and the other search engines are smart enough to know those terms mean the same thing for the most part and will infer the others when reading one.
Similar to stuffing your content with keywords, cramming as many as possible in your meta tags (behind the scenes synopsis of your page). With older technologies this worked great because meta tags were, at one point in time, the only way Google knew what your pages were about. Now, Google can literally read your page, look at your pictures and have a good idea what the page is about. In addition search engines can infer meaning based on your content and are no longer dependent on keywords.
Links from other sites used to be the number one factor in ranking a site. It was a great way for the search engines to see if other sites liked yours, essentially voting for your site to be ranked well. The more the better! Nowadays though, it’s about the quality of the link rather than the quantity. Link farms and private blog networks were great ways to share links and trick Google into thinking a lot of sites liked yours when in fact they did not and were only linking to you so they could get a link back. If you’re caught with links from a link farm your site will sink and possibly never see the light of day ever again.
One way that used to help get quality one way links to your site was guest blogging – adding content to someone’s site and in exchange you get a link to yours. As with link farms this used to work very well and was a more legitimate, non-tricky way to get links. However just like link farm, Google can now understand that the link is not an honest vote for your site but rather it’s given in exchange for content or other mutual benefit. Guest blogging may not hurt your site like link farms, but the benefit has been negated.
Duplicating content for the purposes of better rankings will not work! If that content is duplicated from someone else’s site then you’ll probably get a huge penalty and your site will be off the map. DON’T DUPLICATE CONTENT! No matter how many times I tell clients that some people do it anyway. It’s tempting and easy, which is why it’s done so often, but it’s the most detrimental thing you can do for your site. Of course there are times where you have to – maybe on an eCommerce site that has variations of the same product, the specs will be the same with a few exceptions. Google understands that and knows it’s not a trick to get better rankings.
The bottom line is the easier something is to do the less helpful or even more hurtful it will be for your site. Call us for a free evaluation and tips to get your site ranked better and of course we’re available to professionally manage your SEO efforts!