SEO Dinosaur: How Content Marketing is Replacing Extinct SEO Tactics

Are you wasting time and money on old SEO tactics that no longer work?

We live in an algorithmic world, where computer codes are scanning the internet like never before to “decide” what gets shared online. Marketing strategy, tactics, and technology must evolve and adapt to this new world – to create likeable and shareable content that supports the brand’s marketing objectives.

You can pay to have your link placed at the top of Google’s search results through PPC ad bids, but in order to dominate the top of the organic results, you need to make your website more accessible and relevant to search engines. This includes getting rid of outdated SEO tactics and finding a new strategy to increase traffic and visibility online.

Due to Google’s algorithm updates in the last 5 years or so (“Panda,” “Penguin,” “Hummingbird”), SEO rankings are increasingly based on a creating and sharing great content. This idea of optimizing the internet for people and user benefit is new, but not going away. Since the algorithm updates, businesses have been scrambling to improve their search engine rankings. The quick SEO fixes of the past just aren’t working anymore.

What used to be the biggest and best SEO practices are now as dead as the dinosaurs. It takes more time and effort now, but the effects will be a lot longer lasting. Google will always reward original, high-quality content. Your efforts will be well spent on an SEO strategy that focuses on high-quality content over everything else. What year is it anyway, 2005?

5 Extinct SEO Strategies

Here are 5 once loved SEO tactics that are now extinct, yet it is amazing how many websites and SEO companies still use them:

Keyword Stuffing

In the quest to end spammy, irrelevant, and poor quality sites, algorithms that detect keyword stuffing will severely penalize your ranking or completely erase the result from search engine index. Keyword stuffing used to be great for ranking high in search engines, but now that algorithms are scanning for quality over anything else, you need to change your approach now.

Rather than stuffing your content with as many keywords as possible, try to find relevant information and research related to that keyword and transform it into engaging, shareable content, such as videos, infographics, blog entries, and pictures. Shortcuts just aren’t cutting it anymore!

Poor Design

When was the last time you updated your website? If it’s been over a year, you are already falling far behind. Hiring a web designer and developer is more important than ever to make sure your website has clean code and adheres to best practices according to the standards of authoritative institutions like Google and W3Schools.

Poor Content

Great content is the most important part of any website. No matter how well it is coded and designed, if there is nothing useful or informative on your site, it has no purpose. Design and content go hand-in-hand. When hiring a web developer, make sure that they have a skilled writer on their team. Grammar mistakes, repeated words/phrases, complicated sentences, and sales-pitchy content are being highly scrutinized and risk forfeiture from page rankings.

Outdated Link Building

Old and damaging link building schemes include paid links, link farms, automated programs, article marketing, link exchanges, text-link ads, and press release abuse. These are just some of the manipulative SEO techniques that used to be the norm. In fact, if you weren’t playing this SEO game just a few years ago, you’d automatically be on the losing team.

“Too many times companies hop around and never settle in to find out what really works and what doesn’t.” #marketing http://t.co/XzHwT1i0IJ

— VitalStorm (@vitalstorm) January 15, 2015

Although links from relevant and trustworthy sites are critical for rankings and referrals, they must be achieved the good old-fashioned way – by creating content that people WANT to share. Creating quality back-links from relevant sites at a natural rate will take time, but will pay off in the long run.

Behind-the-scenes deals and spammy, low-quality links, however, will get your site penalized. Black-hat (unethical) link schemes are already a thing of the past, for the benefit of all except for businesses looking for cheap and fast SEO optimization.

Hiring the wrong SEO company could result in the types of tactics described above. You may be able to outsmart Google a couple of times, but take a lesson from J.C. Penney, whose rankings plummeted after Google found out about their black-hat link schemes.

Spamming Blogs, Forums, and Articles

Although posting topical comments on relevant blogs, forums, and articles is fine, and even encouraged, if your main link building strategy is spamming other people’s sites and content, like leaving links in comment feeds, it will most likely be noticed by Google as a black-hat link building scheme. If the majority of your backlinks are created using blog comments, you need to change your strategy before it raises a red flag with Google and other search engines.

Search Engine Optimization is a misleading term. How do you optimize a search engine? You don’t! You optimize online content. A better term for SEO would be “Content Optimization.”

We recommend having a social media manager/content manager generate new and original content to push out on social media sites. Create a blog with the same domain/subdomain as your website in order to rank higher in Google’s organic search results and establish your brand as a trusted industry leader. Search engines love quality content and they reward you for it. That will never change!

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