It wasn’t that long ago that it was quite simple to land your website on the first page of search engines – all you need to do was fill your webpages with repetitive keywords and backlinks and then submit your website to the search engines to be crawled. However, many of yesterday’s SEO tactics have now proven to do more harm to your website.

Here are a few of the outdated SEO tactics:

  1. meta keyword tag optimization
  2. keyword stuffing
  3. blog commenting
  4. search engine submission
  5. link exchange

In this post, we will share some tips and alternatives on the first 3 tactics.

Meta Keyword Tag Optimization

Meta keyword tag is used to provide search engines with information regarding topics and terms used throughout a website. However, website owners start flooding them with keywords and terms irrelevant to their content, in hopes that they could get ranked for keywords, even if they have nothing to offer for. As a result, search engines have paid lesser attention to meta keyword tags.

Alternative: If you want to build your pages to rank for more keywords, in addition to including website-relevant keywords in the meta keyword tag, consider using categories and tagging system to organize your website content. Structure your website so that 1) important keywords are used as category names and tags, 2) keywords pages are high up in the site structure and 3) relevant content can easily be found by both visitors and search engines.

Keyword Stuffing

In the early days of search engines, pages were ranked based on the number of time a keyword appeared on the page. Then people began flooding pages with keywords. Today, keyword-stuffed websites are immediately recognized by search engines.

Alternative: Write for your human readers, not search engines. Too many keywords used too closely together will seem unnatural and difficult to read. Use keywords on your pages wisely and along with other topic-related words so that they make sense in context and are highly relevant to your niche. You should also use keywords in your headers, titles and meta description text.

Blog Commenting

When WordPress and Blogger became really popular, someone figured out that they could get a lot of backlinks and page rank for their website by leaving comments on other people’s blog – the birth of out-of-context, promotional comments. Then Google introduced the “nofollow” tag and links within blog comments were devalued.

Alternatives: Blog commenting is still useful, but only if done right. If you wish to use comment marketing, you will need to: 1) make sure you are only commenting on blog posts that you actually have something meaningful to contribute, and 2) the blog(s) you are commenting on have the “DoFollow” tag. You might then want to get an application like Fast Blog Finder to help you search for relevant blog posts and filter only those that have the “DoFollow” tag.

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