3 SEO Techniques You Can Completely Forget About
Posted August 15, 2011 – 2:20 pm
We are pleased to publish a guest post by Ashvin Sawmynaden with a new take on SEO. Ashvin is a web marketing specialist currently working on the ACCESS Formation Surete Aeroportuaire website.
The search engine optimization world is one that can literally scare people out of their skin. With the number of unrepentant scammers running around, the speed at which things keep changing and the tons of things to learn, it is often frustrating to most people. Small businesses and blog owners are particularly at risk as they may not have the required knowledge for more advanced and effective SEO techniques and are often left chasing tips and hints that will eventually enable them to boost the visibility of their website.
However, the complex world of search engine optimization comes at a cost. There are techniques that are no longer very effective and can even downright hurt your website, but that are nevertheless being used by a lot of webmasters. Worse yet, even some shady agencies actually recommend these burnt out techniques, thereby ensuring that more people keep wasting their time implementing things that will never help their website visibility. This article lists the most popular three SEO techniques you can stop worrying about.
Tons of links in your footer
The idea of putting tons of links in your website’s footer is one that is done even by huge websites. However, having so many links in your footer only makes it look extremely spammy. Moreover, it increases the total number of links on your pages for no reason. Most of the time, this is made worse by the fact that all these links are actually already prominently displayed in the main navigation menu.
The bottom line is that your footer should only include a few of your most important links, along with those typical links you expect to see, such as your contact and privacy policy pages. You can also forget about having your entire sitemap in your footer. Keep in mind that search engines are now also taking a page’s load time into consideration, and you will understand that it’s a good idea to keep your number of internal links to a reasonable amount.
Two-way link exchanges
Two-way link exchanges were a very popular practice before Google caught on to it and began ignoring them, much to the dismay of many webmasters around the world. The practice involves putting a link on your website and in return obtaining a link from that same website you just linked to. However, this strategy, known as a two-way link exchange, is no longer effective and constitutes a big waste of time.
The truth is that Google can detect such obvious link exchanges and no longer considers them a factor in rankings. Such traditional link exchanges merely indicate that you are actively trying to obtain higher rankings, which, ironically, is frowned upon by Google.
The Keywords Meta tag
Google, along with the other search engines not many people care about, has clearly stated that it no longer takes the Keywords Mega tag into consideration. This should not be surprising when one considers how much they were abused by spammers back when Yahoo was still the leading search engine. While many people have acknowledged the fact that these keywords are not effective, they nevertheless keep using them as their belief is that it does not actually hurt to do so.
However, you do run the risk of your competitors scraping your Keywords Meta tag to know which keywords you are targeting. Obviously, once they’ve done so, they will very likely attempt to outrank you in search engines, thereby effectively taking your hard-earned traffic away.
Doing things rights
Instead of wasting your time on these techniques, you should focus on implementing things that may not look important but are nevertheless extremely effective in increasing your website’s visibility. These include ensuring that all your images are properly optimized with relevant names and ALT attributes, making sure your content is visually appealing (by using headers, images or even both), and having great Meta Descriptions that will make search engine users actually want to visit your website.
Author’s Bio: Ashvin Sawmynaden is a web marketing specialist currently working on the ACCESS Formation Surete Aeroportuaire website.
2 Comments
It’s hard to notice all for beginners. However, it is a good notes to be taken into consideration!!
I do agree with the 3 techniques mentioned here. Glad to read about it. Thank you for the so worthy sharing.