If you’re a blogger, it’s likely that you don’t stay up to date with all the latest SEO/marketing trends and best tactics. Most of us dabble in what are the best practices to get more traffic and how to be found in Google search, but we don’t keep up with the latest in the industry. This means that our knowledge can become outdated without us even realising!
So let’s look at some of those SEO tactics that were used and recommended in the past that you now need to put in the bin.
Old SEO Tactics you should ignore.
Keyword stuffing.
It’s often tempting to stuff all your images with the same alt text keywords and have them in your title, meta description and URL to up that keyword density. These days Google sees keyword stuffing as an indication of a low-quality website and prefers using other methods to determine quality instead.
Exact anchor text matching.
Rather than cram your posts and links with the same keywords, ensure your content is readable and use similar or relatable words rather than the same keywords over and over again. It’s really obvious when you keyword stuff and over optimise, to both Google and your readers! So use different variations of ideas and words. Google crawlers see lots of exact matches as a red flag and can interpret variations!
Remember to write for humans and not robots!
Ignoring mobile.
More and more people search on their phones and get to websites and blogs on their mobile rather than a computer, this means how your website is optimised for phones and tablets is really important!
Ensure your site is speedy and functional on mobile to rank higher! Click here to find out how to improve your mobile site speed.
Only focusing on On-Site SEO.
SEO used to be more about coding and what was on your actual webpage, but now there is more focus on social media. Get sharing your blog posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Pinterest. On the Yoast SEO plugin, you can set posts to auto-post to social media as soon as a blog post is published.
Buying links.
This is an old strategy which I guess most bloggers don’t do, but a lot of websites will buy links from other sites to boost their rankings. This can lead to being penalised by Google or being completely removed from Google search!
These are great tips. You’re right. These days it is more about social media handles than about the site and the content itself….too bad I don’t like using social media.
Great tips! Definitely important to make the content speak and not just do SEO. Talk to humans and not robots, totally right!
Really interesting and helpful, thanks for sharing!
Kisses, Paola.
Expressyourself
My Instagram
Wonderful tips and suggestions! I agree that optimising websites to phones and tablets is important.
xoxo
Lovely
http://www.mynameislovely.com
You are so right about over optimise witih keywords. I actually stopped reading a food blog because she was repeating the name of the dish, in bold, about 20 times before it got to the actual recipe. It was too much for me. Readers can tell and it’s not pleasant. Even if google shows the blog, it’s unlikely many will stick for a long time, since the reading is not engaging or useful.
Great post!
This was such a helpful post, thanks for these tips xx
http://www.dellalovesnutella.co.uk/
Whilst I don’t do any of this SEO stuff, I do find it interesting to read about!
These are very useful tips for beginners like me. Thank you so much for putting out good content here.
I’m glad to see we don’t do any off these things… Keeping up with all these things it’s a full time job!
It really is!