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 This means that our knowledge can become outdated without us even realising!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!