When you start your SEO campaign, you might be overwhelmed with all the options available. The SEO market changes rapidly, sometimes even week to week. This is because Google is always staying a step ahead, and changing the ways it ranks content. To make sure that your SEO strategies are the most effective, you need to ensure that your SEO consulting firm is up to date on the most effective SEO strategies. Using old-fashioned and outdated SEO strategies is not only ineffective, but it can actually hurt your search rankings in a major way. Unless you’re an SEO consulting firm or content marketing professional, it’s hard to know which strategies are current and which should be put to rest. Here are five outdated search engine optimization strategies that may be hurting your rankings.
- Just using short-form, thin content: Creating small little blog posts are nice for quick content updates. But if you want to create a major impact with your SEO marketing, you need to incorporate longer, high-quality content pieces. Think blogs or news posts that are in the 500-700 word length. Shorter content works well for mobile users or on social media, but longer blogs allow you opportunity to use more keywords without maxing out on your keyword density.
- Over-optimizing your internal links: It used to be that “keyword stuffing” was the norm. You could cram as many keywords in a piece as you needed. But now, Google has wised up – and this tactic of cramming in as many SEO keywords as possible actually create more harm than it does good. Since the release of Google’s Penguin update, this strategy is not only ineffective – it can result in an over-optimization penalty, which can drastically lower your score. You can still use keywords, but in a conservative way. It is not the use of keywords that Google penalizes, rather the over-optimization of them.
- Targeting a page for a single keyword: If you want to boost your ranking for your business, you want to be specific. Like if you own a SEO company in Los Angeles, you might want to rank for “seo companies Los Angeles”. But if you only try and rank for this keyword alone, you’ll risk having low-quality or thin content. Since the release of Google’s Panda, this type of “thin” content has a much lower chance of ranking highly. Instead of creating pages around a single keyword, webmasters should be creating content that covers many angles and does a great job as providing an excellent resource.
- Spam-like guest blogging: Even Google has declared that “blogging is dead”. And by that they mean, gone are the days when a business could create a bunch of low-quality spammy blogs, slap them up on a hidden section of their web site and expect Google not to notice. Now Google looks for high-quality, news-style articles and informative pieces. These pieces should read like they are not SEO at all. To the untrained eye, no one would know they are reading an SEO blog at all.
- Ignoring the power of social media: If you are not incorporating social media into your SEO strategy, you are missing out on a huge opportunity. Though Google has said that social signals from Facebook and Twitter are not currently part of their algorithm, Google+ posts are – and those posts rank highly. That being said, there are so many more benefits to using social media within your SEO campaign. Any piece of content you place on social media has the chance to “go viral” and gain organic likes, shares and re-tweets. Any content that draws a lot of attention will tend to accumulate many direct links, which results in higher search rankings.
If you are ready to create an up-to-date, comprehensive and highly effective SEO campaign, the Los Angeles SEO experts at Noxster SEO Company can guide you through this process and keep you updated on the frequent changes that Google rolls out. Learn more at NoxsterSEOCompany.com