Five Obsolete SEO Techniques that are No Longer Effective

It is much easier to double your business by doubling your conversion rate than by doubling your traffic. -Jeff Eisenberg

It is no question that with proper utilization and execution of Search Engine Optimization (SEO for brevity), you can drive traffic by the volumes into your website. However, as of late, there have been assertions from strategists that SEO is dead. This could not be further from the truth. SEO is still very much alive, but it is dead for those who have failed to adapt to modern and updated techniques. SEO has dynamic rules, and it would require enhanced knowledge, tools, skills as well as resilient patience in order for it to continue working.

As a competitive SEO company, it is your duty to be flexible with these changes and keep up with the updated techniques. After all, what worked so well yesterday might not be as effective tomorrow—SEO is a dynamic strategy that requires a fine tuning day in and day out after all. The updates from Google are steadily growing, and you are likely to contend with that. So, do not be complacent with website traffic that would suddenly spike today, as they could easily be going down by tomorrow or the next three days.

With this in mind, it is imperative to be aware of SEO obsolete and antiquated tactics that do not necessarily work well today. Persistent utilization of these strategies and techniques will only result in a stagnation in traffic or worse, cause it to drop. Here are some of the tactics you should no longer be focusing on if you want to improve SEO:

1.) More links means higher rankings

Back in the day, higher rankings were usually associated with more backlinks. However, this is not the case nowadays. In these days, you would no longer notice new sites filling their websites to the brim with links. Instead, you will only see a few or a handful of links which as a result would outrank old authoritative sites. This is because their backlinks are more relevant which according to Google's Penguin algorithm update, is much more important than quantity alone. From this, we can assume that focus needs to be centered on quality links which are relevant to the content of your website instead of backlink quantity.

2.) Writing keyword-rich content

In the world of SEO, content is king which is why most content writers would stuff their content with as many keywords as they possibly can. However, it is much better to write content that is user-friendly rather than keyword-rich nowadays. This means that you are putting your users first and writing what you think is appropriate for them. Eventually, this would help you in ranking. Besides, nobody wants to read a word mentioned several times (which is what you do when you want a particular keyword to rank). Doing so might actually hurt your rankings.

3.) SEO is plainly code, links, and content

About eight years ago, SEO was all about codes, links, and content. However, content was hardly compelling, was mediocre at best and was stuffed with tons of link. In order for it to rank well, good on-page optimization was utilized. While this was well and well several years ago, these days that technique would not do so well as websites nowadays are mostly connected to social media and would have a large social following. Furthermore, social media has a significant impact on rankings as the more recognition you get on social media platforms, the more likely you are going to get attention. Which means, you will likely have more backlinks. With this in mind, it is crucial that you do not just exert your efforts into building links, but your social profiles as well.

4.) More pages means more traffic

While more pages would naturally mean more traffic, this is hardly the case if the pages you put out are not high in quality. In fact, this would be counterintuitive to your goal as if you are adding too much mediocre content; you will see your traffic noticeably drop. Do not focus on creating websites with a myriad of pages. Instead, concentrate on creating pages that are of high-quality content. Remember, quality not quantity.

5.) To rank well, you need a lot of text

In the past, you need to write a minimum requirement of words in order for your web page to rank well. But this has been proven to be wrong as certain websites have minimal content do rank (and even outrank) web pages that have a higher word count. This means you would need to load up on images, infographics as well as videos on your content. After all, if you want to keep the attention span of your audiences, you need to incorporate visually stimulating elements into your content.