If you want to boost your online exposure, it’s imperative to rank high in search engine results. Great SEO can help you tremendously. There can be a lot of outdated SEO techniques used unknowingly, since the SEO world keeps changing and expanding. Which brings the question, what bad and outdated SEO techniques should be avoided? Let’s find out!
Focusing on domain authority
It’s critical to have backlinks in order to build your domain authority because search engines will consider your domain more powerful and relevant for your industry. It is obvious that focusing on domain authority is bound to be a problem. There are many other factors you need to take into consideration.
Ideally, you want the backlinks to come from within your niche, otherwise it won’t be very helpful. Buying backlinks is another ineffective SEO idea that can have catastrophic results from time to time.
To determine a website’s domain authority, enter its URL into the Moz Domain SEO Analysis Tool:
You target multiple keywords, complete with variations
It’s appealing to try and target many different keywords and synonyms at once. This is one of those outdated SEO techniques that can end up being problematic. The main issue with this tactic is that you end up compromising the quality of your content. It might sound great that you’re adding a lot of keywords to your content. However, if those keywords are crammed, the content is unnatural, and it won’t rank high either.
The thing is, search engines are capable of spotting keyword synonyms. Low-quality content can also be detected by search engines. For this reason, you should not use old SEO techniques. Focus on a single keyword and write adequate, high quality content. It better use of your time and website real estate. Having the right search intent is paramount, not cramming as much as you can and seeing what sticks.
Taking mobile SEO for granted
When we talk about SEO, we’re not focusing solely on desktop computers. Mobile SEO is just as critical. In fact, more than half the internet users come from mobile devices these days. Which is why it is a smart idea to optimize your website for mobile SEO too. Some great practices include having a responsive website design, avoiding popups on mobile devices, using Google AMP and also having touchable elements that work the way they were intended.
Focus only on Google
Yes, Google is extremely important, but one of the most outdated SEO techniques is to ignore other search engines. There are others that receive a lot of users, like Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Ecosia and DuckDuckGo. All of these are significant, and if you market your business there, you might generate lots of sales and leads. It’s helpful to know that you can generate lots of leads from multiple search engines. Therefore, limiting yourself to Google is not ok. Bing for example has its own Bing Places, which is similar to Google My Business.
The anchor text is overly optimized
Anchor text is important if you want to guide your users towards certain types of text. The thing you need to realize is that adding random keywords in the anchor text doesn’t work. It’s one of those outdated SEO techniques that can bring in problems instead of ranking. Writing content that’s high quality and professional as anchor text is exactly what you want to pursue, and the benefits can indeed be very impressive all the time.
Spinning articles/content
Google and all other search engine expect you to have high quality, high-quality content. If you just spin articles with the idea that they will rank high, that’s a mistake. It is easy for search engines to spot content that does not appear to be handwritten. If you try to use one of the outdated SEO techniques like content spinning, that will not work. What you want to do is to write high quality content. If you strive to deliver high-quality content, it makes a huge difference. That’s what will impress users and search engines alike.
Writing for search engines, not your visitors
Your idea of writing for search engines and ranking high might sound great to you. Nonetheless, writing just for search engines is not really appropriate. You want to provide your readers with valuable information. If the content ranks high, and it doesn’t generate sales, it doesn’t really matter, does it? Which is why you want to create high quality content that actively helps people. Randomly writing content for search engines is bad for your business and can damage your reputation in the long run. Even though it may not seem like much, it’s something you should take care of as soon as possible.
Misuse of keywords
Some people think that outdated SEO techniques like keyword stuffing still work. That’s not the case, stuffing keywords will only get you penalized by search engines. You don’t want to design your content solely around keywords. What you want to do is to use just a few keywords within the text, naturally. That’s how you get much better results, and the value itself will shine if you do it right. Remember, your focus is to provide a great experience to users and an amazing content quality, without stuffing keywords or using techniques that will end up damaging your reputation.
Conclusion
All these bad and outdated SEO techniques are something that you want to avoid. Even if it might sound like a great idea to use them in the beginning, the truth is that most of them will end up causing a lot of harm. Use white hat SEO techniques and make sure that you always focus on user intent and content quality. It’s a great idea to take your time, create the best content and integrate only the best SEO techniques as you can. Stuffing keywords and using all kinds of unwanted, bad techniques will only cause problems in the long term!
Featured image by storyset / freepik.com
