Everybody knows that employing solid SEO tactics and techniques can go far in marketing a business online. But as time marches on, some SEO tactics are simply not effective anymore as they do little to improve a website’s rankings. This is why it’s important to stay on top of the latest trends in the world of SEO because it’s a big waste of time and effort to undertake SEO strategies that simply are no longer relevant. Here are three SEO tactics you can stop using immediately.
The Targeting of Single Keywords
This is something that has not been effective for quite some time even though many businesses are still chasing after the “most effective” single keywords. While the old mindset was to go after highly competitive and general single keywords as a way to gain largely irrelevant traffic, today the focus is on driving highly targeted traffic through the use of long-tail keywords which consist of two or more words. This is actually great news as long-tail phrases are less popular, making them easier to rank for so if you’re still zeroing in on single keywords, stop it and go after more targeted long-tail keywords instead!
Using PRs To Improve Your Rankings
A few years ago, business owners were writing and distributing press releases like there was no tomorrow as it was thought that PRs were are a great way to improve a website’s rankings. While a PR with included links back to your site could and still can boost your site up in the rankings, that boost is very short-lived. In other words, your site may appear near the top of the SERPs (search engine result pages) briefly once your PR has gone “live’”, but it’s just a matter of hours or even a few minutes before it drops into oblivion again.
Plus, Google has stated recently that PR links do not have any positive impact on rankings and we all know that when Google speaks, we need to sit up and take notice!
Submitting Your Site to the Search Engines for Indexing
Even though Google and the other search engines have site submission tools available, it is no longer deemed a necessity to submit a new site for indexing purposes. These days, the search engines are very advanced wherein they’re able to find all new content on their own as long as there are inbound links contained in new websites. Of course, when you develop a new site, it’s important to check to see that it has been indexed within the first week or so. If it’s not showing up, then you need to get a Google Webmaster account set up so you can check if you have any warnings telling you about problems your site is experiencing. Instead of wasting your time submitting your site to the search engines, put your efforts toward creating an XML sitemap that will assist the search engines in crawling your site more efficiently.
