SEO Tactics To Abandon in 2018
In today’s demanding marketplace of digitalisation and globalisation, it’s crucial for firms to employ online strategies and techniques that increase their exposure to customers that are proactively searching for their products or services. Search Engines are undeniably the most influential programs that will affect your online exposure, and hence your website traffic, conversion rates, and ultimately success. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), therefore, is used widely by most websites to enhance their Search Engine rankings, otherwise known as ‘Search Engine Results Pages’ (SERPs).
SEO can be an excellent investment that will boost your visibility and conversion rates, or if used incorrectly, can damage your rankings and exposure, thus having the opposite effect. The predicament with SEO is that its algorithm is continually changing, and most website owners don’t keep up to date with the most recent SEO trends. SEO techniques that worked last year may not necessarily be effective this year, and well-known SEO techniques from 5 years ago may result in your website being penalised today.
Instead of discussing the top SEO techniques that website owners should be committing to, we’re instead going to examine the top SEO techniques that will actually penalise your website and therefore should be entirely forgotten in 2018.
- Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is a simple mistake that many website owners make to try to increase their SERP results. Keyword stuffing is ultimately the same as it sounds – adding as many keywords/phrases to a websites content or meta tags by any means possible. Search Engine spiders or crawlers can instantly determine how many times a keyword has been used and will penalise websites for excess keyword stuffing. Rather than keyword stuffing, website owners should fixate their efforts on the sub-topics and related information behind the keywords/phrases themselves.
- Aggressive Link Building
Link building has been a popular SEO tactic since the inception of SEO, and its effectiveness as an SEO technique has advanced rather quickly since then. While link building remains among the top three SEO tactics in 2018, aggressive link building will undoubtedly result in your website being penalised. Google weighs links genuinely as a ranking indicator since links are a public recommendation which correlates with beneficial information on a website.
Aggressive link building happens where links are garnered in a fabricated way. Examples of this is where links are positioned in poor link directories, purchasing links, link schemes, and other spammy tactics. This SEO technique will result in penalties for a website and should be discontinued, instead being substituted with a link building strategy that is more user-focused and marketing based.
- Excessive Internal Links
One obsolete SEO tactic that lots of folks still perceive to be effective is excessive internal links. There is a frequent misconception where websites which contain a large quantity of links to other pages within the website will assist their SERP results. The purpose in doing this is to boost a website’s backlink profile. This is certainly not accurate, as excessive internal links within your website will do more damage than good.
- Not Identifying Technical Problems
The backend of a website plays an important role in SEO, so it’s important not only to identify any technical problems that may hurt your SERP rankings, but also keep up to date with the latest best practices. For instance, Google has just published an update regarding SSL encryption, so if a website doesn’t obey this update now, it will be penalised. The most popular technical problems that affect most websites today are:
Slow loading page times
Mobile errors
Duplicate content
Improper redirects
Unintentional blocked pages
- Not Optimising Images
One of the most neglected SEO technique that will enhance your SERP rankings are related to the images within a website. Optimising your website for image search is a terrific way to strengthen your SEO, and this can be done largely with the image filename and alt attribute. As an example, rather than providing an image with a filename of home1.jpg, website owners should instead try to use a keyword that characterises the image. Additionally, a basic mistake with images is keyword stuffing the alt attribute.
There’s no question that an effective SEO strategy will improve a website’s SERP rankings and exposure, however due to many websites abusing SEO tactics in years gone by, Search Engine’s SEO algorithms are regularly changing and it’s paramount to keep up with these changes to thrive in today’s online marketplace. If you need any advice with your SEO strategy, or simply haven’t updated your strategy in the last several years, get in contact with Internet Marketing Experts Sydney on 1300 595 013, or visit our website for additional information: http://www.internetmarketingexpertssydney.com.au
