Outdated SEO Techniques You Need To Avoid For 2015

Search engine optimisation or “SEO” is a hot topic in the web design world. The reason SEO exists is so that websites can rank well in search engines for particular keywords and phrases. Some people compare SEO to a form of website marketing. One downside to search engine optimisation is when people follow outdated techniques.

The Web is full of articles on how you should perform various changes to your site, and what to do off-site. But, what many of those “helpful” guides don’t tell you is that some things are now outdated and seldom used by SEO professionals!

If you’re the kind of person that likes to have a go at things themselves, and SEO is one of them, this page is for you. That’s because I will share with you the outdated SEO techniques you need to avoid this year! Here is what you need to know:

Article submissions

You’ve probably come across a few websites where article writers can submit content. They are, in essence, directories of content written by random people all with one purpose in mind: to build backlinks to their sites!

Search engines like Google have come down pretty hard on those kinds of sites. Why? Because a lot of the content is somewhat “spammy” and useless. Websites and their pages only rank well if they offer useful, relevant content to human readers.

If you pay someone to submit those articles, you can kiss goodbye to any chances of ranking well for your desired keywords!

It’s also worth bearing in mind that you should have Google exclude “bad” links like those to your site. If you don’t, your site’s ranking could get penalised even if you’ve had nothing to do with those links!

Linking like it’s 1999

Hyperlinks, to give them their official name, are a useful and necessary part of any website. The whole concept of the Web is to link content to other, relevant sites. But is it possible to go overboard on your link strategies? “Of course, it is,” said pretty much every SEO agency on the planet!

When you devise the content for a new page on your website, you should link particular keywords or phrases to relevant content. For example, let’s say you have a page on gardening. You could link the words “grass seeds” to a page on another site that offers grass seeds for sale. Or a page on your site that offers them for sale.

What you shouldn’t do is have dozens or even hundreds of links, just for the sake of creating them! Search engines want to keep the Web simple and easy to use for everyone. They don’t want it cluttered up with spam. Nor do they want people to end up visiting irrelevant, linked content.

As you can see, there is a common theme here so far: relevance. You need to think about what value your readers would get from the links you create.

Invisible text

Last, but not least, some people in 2015 still think it’s a good idea to put lots of spammy keywords at the bottom of each page and make them “invisible”!

It doesn’t matter how you disguise text on a web page. When you disable things like CSS and font colours, you’ll still see them. And that’s exactly how search engines view content on pages!

The takeaway from that is simple: just don’t do it!