The world of inbound marketing moves fast and tactics that were used in the past, can hurt you now.
Online marketing is something that hasn’t been around very long. The Internet itself in its current form isn’t that old. What exactly does this mean? It means that if you are using inbound marketing for your brand, that you need to keep up with how online marketing is changing. What worked only a few years ago no longer works today. In fact, there are some older inbound marketing tactics that can actually hurt you. The following are a few outdated inbound marketing methods that you should avoid using.
Keyword Stuffing
Odds are you’re familiar with the use of keywords and how they can help to increase your website’s ranking. By using specific keywords, search engines such as Google will increase your web ranking, thereby attracting more visitors.
The problem was that this was a relatively easy tactic to take advantage of. Websites would fill their pages with keywords to the point where the content suffered because of it – yet their site would be bumped up the web page rankings.
Google has fixed this with its updated algorithms, which means that if you’re overusing keywords, you could be punished for it. Only use relevant keywords for your content, and don’t go out of your way to fit them into your content where it isn’t natural.
Using Invisible Text
This was another clever tactic used by websites in order to fool search engines into ranking them higher than they deserved. Invisible text is very similar to keyword stuffing – in fact, it is keyword stuffing.
Basically, the strategy involves repeating keywords over and over at the bottom of a webpage – but displaying it as the same color as the background. This way, the content wouldn’t seem spammy to readers, but the search engines would still notice the keywords. Remember, new search engine algorithms will punish you for keyword stuffing, no matter how you do it since you are basically cheating the system.
Using too Many Links
Linking to other websites is another easy way to increase the perception of quality for your website. Or it was. Google realized that people were using hundreds or thousands of links on their website without providing any content of worth.
For years, Google would penalize websites that used over 100 different links as a result. However, they no longer do this. You can use as many links as you want to as long as Google finds your use reasonable. They are able to do this because their search engine ranking is more heavily focused on the content you produce. So if you have very little quality content but hundreds of links, you’ll probably be penalized.
Buying Backlinks
Backlinks are basically links from other websites that are displaying your links. Having good quality backlinks can help increase your web page ranking. However, one of the strategies that was used in order to take advantage of this fact was to buy backlinks.
This means that a website with three pages of incredibly poor content could have thousands of backlinks, resulting in a high ranking. While backlinks are still important – they need to be of high quality. Search engine algorithms are much smarter than before, and they’ll be able to tell if a website has 5,000 backlinks but only one or two pages or poor content – and those websites will be penalized.
Using Duplicate Content
Duplicating content on your website was another way to trick search engines. They can now spot duplicate content and will punish you for it. This has scared some websites, as duplicate content can be used without being spammy or without trying to manipulate your search engine ranking.
In fact, Google has even stated that for the most part you shouldn’t be concerned with not using duplicate content unless you’re using it for those purposes. However, it’s best if you limit the use of duplicate content on your site. If you do need to use it, use no index meta tags as these will help tell search engines not to look at the page your duplicate content is on, thereby avoiding being penalized.
These are all strategies that were heavily employed by websites that were trying to trick search engines in order to rank their websites higher. Because search engines only want the highest quality websites to be ranked highly, they’ve cracked down on these strategies over the past few years, making it increasingly difficult to trick them. So don’t!
Google is more focused on the content you produce. Their algorithms judge a number of different factors in order to figure out whether you are producing high quality content for your readers, and they will provide you with higher rankings based on that. So what’s the solution? Focus on creating good content!
