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Okay, forget everything you thought you knew about SEO. Whatever you’ve heard probably doesn’t apply anymore, anyway. All that stuff about carefully choosing keywords and repeating them in heading tags and such? That’s old news. Using article marketing? Practically useless for SEO, and could even harm you.
It’s a new era in SEO, and there are so many ways that used to work that can actually get you penalized now. So before we get started on the things you should do, you’re going to learn things you should never do.
Article Marketing
This is still being passed around some circles as a valid way to build links, and it’s not a good idea!
You could use it on a limited basis to get direct traffic from those few places that still get some organic traffic, but please don’t use this for SEO purposes! This could get you penalized, because most article directories are now considered “low quality” sites and those links could do more harm than good.
Link Building & Exchanges
No. Just… no. Don’t do it! Never go out and randomly spam a link to your site in blog comments, on free-for-all link pages, or other potentially low quality sites. Never get a link just for the sake of having a link!
And never, ever even think about doing link exchanges for the purpose of building PageRank. And especially don’t think about buying them! This will do way more harm than good!
The best links are organic links you get from users who genuinely like your content. These should be one way links, not exchanges!
Thin Content
Once upon a time, the best way to get a lot of search engine traffic was to pay for tons of cheap, low-quality content and add tons of keywords to it. There were a number of ways to do this.
- Buying PLR articles and “spinning” them with automated software
- Using unedited PLR
- Outsourcing cheap content from non-English speakers
Search engines are smarter than ever, and they can recognize spun and low-quality content. They don’t like super short articles. They don’t like to see the same keywords repeated over and over. They don’t like to see content that is too similar to other content, even if it’s been spun. And they don’t like seeing content full of grammar and spelling mistakes.
It’s important for your blog to have quality, long-form content not only for the benefit of your users, but so search engines see you having unique, well-written content, which is what their users want.
Automation in Social Networking
Automation used to be the “in” thing for social networking, because it let you set a bunch of content or posts in a queue and you could just forget about it and let it do its thing.
That is no longer as beneficial as it once was. Not only can users tell your content is automated, but the search engines pay attention to “engagement”. If you and others aren’t liking, sharing, commenting, etc., then your posts are useless as far as SEO.
Keyword Research
Okay, keyword research is still helpful to a certain extent. Yes, you should use keywords in your writing. However, don’t sprinkle keywords throughout your content just because you think it will help, because it won’t. If you repeat keywords you sacrifice readability, and search engines don’t like that.
Great article Cindy…I actually used to do some of those things back in the day (like traffic exchanges) and I have completely unsubscribed to all of them over the last 2-3 years.
I am still working on my site right now, so it’s not quite ready at this time.
Ok, I am going to get back to finishing the rest of your valuable article!
Thanks