SEO has been evolving and getting better with time. Google became the search engine giant not long before it launched. After realizing its position on the World Wide Web …
SEO has been evolving and getting better with time. Google became the search engine giant not long before it launched. After realizing its position on the World Wide Web and the market share in search engines used around the world, Google made it clear with its efforts that it was not going to leave the first position as a search engine. Despite the many changes that the company has made in the past several years, some SEO firms have still not understood their job and responsibility. It’s the professional SEO firms that understand modern SEO and keep away from wasting their time and effort implementing obsolete SEO practices.
- Keyword Stuffed Content
As silly as it sounds to modern search engine optimization experts, it was a thing in the past. Websites were filled with content that had no meaning and usefulness. They were using content that had high percentage of keywords in it. While it was a way to deceive search engine crawlers to rank those websites high this practice really ruined the user experience. People who were looking for some sort of information online could not find any. All they found was pages over pages of content swarming with keywords only. As Google updated its algorithms, this practice has been buried deep in the ground. Today, you can actually get your website punished if you stuff your content with keywords. The end result is content that makes sense and offers useful information to people online.
- Lots of Backlinks
Just like keywords, SEO professionals went after backlinks and the term “link juice” was coined. All their efforts were focused on getting more and more backlinks. In fact, this is what worked well in the beginning. Google had made it clear for the marketers that it was going to rank reputable websites higher. It had also given the guidelines that websites with backlinks were considered reputable and legitimate. However, this practice soon saw its dark days when websites started earning backlinks regardless of what type of sites they were getting them from.
For example, sports related websites would get backlinks from websites for women’s bras. Furthermore, backlinks from virus infected, shady and inappropriate websites were also being banked on. With updates from Google, these backlinks were punished big time. Today, backlinks have to be all about quality. If the backlinks coming to your website are coming from shady websites, you will have to pay the price by either getting ranked low or completely indexed out of the searches.
- Keywords in Meta Descriptions
Putting keywords in meta descriptions has also become obsolete. However, here is an important point to understand. If keywords don’t matter anymore in the meta descriptions, it does not mean the meta descriptions don’t matter too. You should still come up with creative meta descriptions, but your point of focus should be the readers. People love to read snippets of website descriptions before they click on a link.
- Duplicate Content
Google’s algorithms have matured a lot with time. When you look at them closely, you don’t find any illogical clauses. So, what if your website “needs” duplicate content? For example, you have a forum that talks about a niche topic and the content repeats? Google has made websites that “need” duplicate content exempt.
However, if you are not one of those websites that have to put duplicate content then this type of content will get you punished. So, make sure you avoid duplicate content on your web pages as much as possible. You can read the guidelines from Google in order to get a better understanding of which websites can use duplicate content and which cannot.