5 bad SEO techniques you may still be using
Many SEO beginners fall victim to a common misconception that there must be some easy magical SEO tricks that will bring your website on top in no time. Alas, many of seemingly easy and effective techniques prove to be useless at best and harmful at worst. In this article we will address the most popular and at the same time the most useless SEO techniques.
1. Too many keywords
Forget about keywords. No need to count how many times this exact keyword phrase comes up in the text. Including it once can be more than enough. Doing this for search engines could be justifiable if only the latter didn’t partially ditch it as a legitimate criterion for evaluating the website. There are many other things you should focus on: making high quality content, its readability, no unnatural looking phrasing and expressions that are obviously there for search engines.
2. Starting the text with key phrases
Another common practice is to start the text with the exact keyword phrase. It is often required that copywriters do it. You don’t need to care this much about, nor do copywriters. Unnatural phrasing can only scare off the visitors of your site and won’t help you gain trust of search engines.
We also recommend
3. Highlighting key words in bold or italics
You only need to highlight in bold or italics those words and sentences which you want to emphasize in the text. If for highlighting you select only key phrases, then you are likely to be penalized by search engines which will negatively affect your rankings.
4. Too many meta keywords
Some SEO experts are convinced that you need to use common keywords and separate them with a comma instead of researching and using specific keywords for every page. They think it will help to get to the top positions on Google and Yandex. But in reality meta keywords don’t play a major role in optimization and are mostly used for little-known search engines, catalogs, and ratings. You don’t lose much if you quit using them altogether. But if you use them, you should pay attention to their relevance to the content of the page.
5. The page refers to itself
A widely used and ineffective technique. Don't bother to put links from each page to itself. The effect of this "trick" is zero. Think about it, why? It’s logically implausible. And search engines are all about logic.
The most effective SEO technique is to constantly work on the improvement of the resource, create high quality content, and implement competent code and nice design. Each new situation needs exploration, experimenting, and true enthusiasm to offer visitors the experience that will leave them satisfied.
