There’s a careful balance you have to maintain when optimising your site for search engines. We all know some of the more egregious practices that have been stamped out – keyword stuffing to the point where it makes the text unreadable, buying links to temporarily boost your SEO rank at the risk of Google clamping down, exact-match domains and so on. However, there are a number of methods that some SEO aficionados cling to in 2018.

Here’s some Outdated Seo Trends that need to be consigned to the dustbin:

Writing for Robots Instead of People

Many a website is focused on producing content to get eyes on their website, products or services. The relative quality, however, doesn’t seem to matter much as long as Robots.txt likes it. The problem with this approach should be fairly obvious: if people don’t find your company’s blogs worth reading, they’ll click off rapidly, giving Google the go-ahead to lower your rank. Instead, focus on something that people would want to read: something topical about your field or providing useful information or advice.

Relying on Link Farms

Some websites still cling to the pre-Google notion of using article directories or ‘link farms’ to generate strong SEO. While the practice worked in the halcyon days of the early-to-mid 2000s, Google does not take kindly to people using link farm tactics to spam its index. Google has considered the practice dead for a long time (since 2012, to be exact), so there’s very little point relying on this Outdated Seo trend.

Exact-match Anchor Text

Another tactic that worked quite well, until it was exploited en masse by marketers. We’ve all seen blogs with links awkwardly crammed in, in turn linking to other pages much like it. This is basic link-building, a cornerstone of SEO. However, Google really doesn’t like dealing with SEO masters tinkering with organic searches, and exact-match anchor texts are a massive red flag for its web crawlers. If you want to rank at all, don’t use exact-match.

When it comes to outdated Seo Trends, some of them can keep going for years without realising how obsolescent they are. In the endless arms race that is SEO, you need to be consistently on the ball to take advantage of its power.

Chetaru, for example, keeps up to date with SEO best practices to make sure that we, and our clients, are consistently at the top.

The post So Last Season – Outdated SEO Trends You Should Ditch appeared first on Chetaru.