SEO Tactics To Forget About in 2018
In today’s competitive marketplace of digitalisation and globalisation, it’s crucial for organisations to take advantage of online strategies and techniques that escalate their exposure to customers that are actively searching for their services or products. Search Engines are undeniably the most influential programs that will have a bearing on your online visibility, and therefore your website traffic, conversion rates, and ultimately success. Search Engine Optimisation (S
EO), therefore, is used extensively by most websites to enhance their Search Engine rankings, otherwise referred to as ‘Search Engine Results Pages’ (SERPs).
SEO can be an exceptional investment that will grow your exposure and conversion rates, or if used inaccurately, can harm your rankings and visibility, thus having the opposite effect. The dilemma with SEO is that its algorithm is frequently changing, and most website owners don’t keep up to date with current SEO trends. SEO techniques that worked last year may not necessarily be successful this year, and well-known SEO techniques from five years ago may result in your website being penalised today.
Instead of reviewing the top SEO techniques that website owners should be committing to, we’re instead going to inspect the top SEO tactics that will actually penalise your website and therefore should be utterly forgotten in 2018.
1. Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is a standard mistake that many website owners make to try to increase their SERP results. Keyword stuffing is fundamentally 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 promptly detect how many times a keyword has been utilised and will penalise websites for unnecessary keyword stuffing. As opposed to keyword stuffing, website owners should focus their efforts on the sub-topics and related information behind the keywords/phrases themselves.
2. Aggressive Link Building
Link building has been a common SEO tactic since the beginning of SEO, and its proficiency as an SEO tactic has advanced dramatically since then. Even though link building is still among the leading three SEO tactics in 2018, aggressive link building will certainly result in your website being penalised. Google weighs links strongly as a ranking indicator due to the fact that links are a public promotion which correlates with valuable information on a website.
Aggressive link building occurs where links are extracted in an irregular way. Examples of this is where links are stationed in poor link directories, buying links, link schemes, and other spammy tactics. This SEO technique will lead to penalties for a website and should be discontinued, instead being replaced with a link building strategy that is more user-focused and marketing based.
3. Excessive Internal Links
One outdated SEO tactic that many individuals still believe to be effective is excessive internal links. There is a frequent misconception where websites that contain a large amount of links to other pages within the website will assist their SERP results. The motive in doing this is to increase a website’s backlink profile. This is definitely not accurate, as excessive internal links within your website will do more damage than good.
4. Not Identifying Technical Issues
The backend of a website plays a critical role in SEO, so it’s important not only to ascertain any technical problems that may harm your SERP rankings, but also keep up to date with the latest best practices. For example, 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 common technical problems that impact most websites today are:
Slow loading page times
Mobile errors
Duplicate content
Improper redirects
Unintentional blocked pages
5. Not Optimising Images
One of the most ignored SEO tactic that will assist your SERP rankings relate to the images within a website. Optimising your website for image search is an effective way to enrich your SEO, and this can be done largely with the image filename and alt attribute. As an example, rather than supplying an image with a filename of home1.jpg, website owners should instead try to use a keyword that characterises the image. In addition, a typical mistake with images is keyword stuffing the alt attribute.
There’s no doubt that a competent SEO strategy will improve a website’s SERP rankings and exposure, however due to many websites abusing SEO techniques in years gone by, Search Engine’s SEO algorithms are constantly changing and it’s imperative to keep up with these changes to succeed in today’s online marketplace. If you require any guidance with your SEO strategy, or simply haven’t updated your strategy in the last several years, speak to Internet Marketing Experts on 1300 595 013, or visit our website for more information: https://internetmarketingexperts.net.au
