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Everyone wants to rank more highly in search engine results, especially Google. However, that doesn’t mean every strategy or suggestion on how to optimize your website works as promised.
There are a lot of strategies that used to be widely accepted and even successful that no longer work today. Sometimes this is because standards change, and other times it’s because Google began to detect websites using unethical practices and punish them.
Let’s take a look at 5 SEO strategies that simply don’t work so you can avoid them!
Keyword stuffing is a technique used to improve a website’s ranking in search engine results pages. This is achieved by adding keywords to the website’s content, which is then read by the search engine crawlers. The idea behind this technique is that the more keywords that are included on a page, the more likely it is to be found and ranked by the search engine.
However, keyword stuffing is no longer an effective technique, as search engines have become smarter at detecting this type of manipulation. As a result, websites that use this technique are likely to be penalized by the search engine, which can result in a decrease in traffic and ranking.
Instead of using keyword stuffing, focus on creating quality content that is informative and relevant to your target audience. These SEO strategies will help to improve the ranking of your website without the risk of being penalized.
Article spinning is a technique whereby the same article is rewritten but with different words and phrases, in order to create several unique versions of the same article. The aim of this technique is to produce articles that are not only original but also have a high keyword density, in order to rank higher in search engine results pages.
However, it doesn’t actually work because Google — and your users — can tell that the articles are all the same. Nobody wants to waste their time reading the same thing over and over, so even if you do rank highly your traffic won’t become customers.
So, is article spinning a waste of time? In short, yes. While it may help you produce articles that are original and have high keyword density, the benefits are negligible compared to the amount of time and effort you would need to put in to make the articles readable and interesting. In the long run, it’s probably best to just write your articles the old-fashioned way – from scratch.
Cloaking is a technique used in search engine optimization (SEO) to present different content to human users and search engine crawlers. Cloaking can be used to improve the ranking of a website by making it appear more relevant to search engines or to disguise spammy or low-quality content.
For example, a page with mostly human-readable text might be served to users, while a page with mostly keyword-rich text might be served to Google’s crawlers. Other webmasters cloak content by using hidden text and links. This involves adding keywords and links to a page’s HTML code that are invisible to users but can be seen by search engines.
It’s a bad idea to use this strategy because cloaking can lead to your website being penalized by search engines. In fact, cloaking is one of the many black-hat SEO techniques that can result in a manual action against your website, which is very hard to recover from.
Skip the masking and simply create the content that Google and your website visitors are looking for!
When you write content for the sole purpose of boosting your SEO, you’re making a mistake. While it’s important to optimize your content for search engines, writing in a way that’s unnatural and stilted will turn readers off. In the end, this will do more harm than good to your website’s ranking.
Remember, one of the things Google looks for when ranking websites is relevance to visitors, and if your content is unnatural you’ll have a low time-per-visit, which will flag your website as irrelevant. That means your ranking will drop instead of improve.
So what’s the best way to optimize your content without sacrificing quality? By writing for your readers. Write in a friendly, engaging tone, and use keywords and phrases naturally throughout your article. This will help you rank higher while keeping your readers interested and engaged.
At one time, the more inbound links you had, the better you ranked. It didn’t matter where the links came from, you just wanted links to your website.
That was a long, long time ago. Today Google pays much more attention to the quality of your inbound links. If the vast majority of your links are from low-quality websites, you’re going to have a hard time ranking well.
In order to get high-quality links, you need to focus on building relationships with other high-quality websites. Figure out which websites are in your niche and reach out to them. Share your content with them and let them know why you think it’s worth linking to.
In this article, we’ve covered 5 SEO strategies that don’t work. You definitely want to avoid techniques like keyword stuffing, article spinning, cloaking, and more. However, you should also take advantage of the SEO strategies that will work for your company.
If you’d like to work with a partner who has the proven ability to help small businesses succeed with SEO, why not reach out to us today? We’d love to talk about what we can do for you. Set up your free consultation now!
