Jet Digital Marketing

Search engine optimization has undergone drastic changes since the earliest days of the Internet. Practices that once were commonly used to garner high search engine rankings are now considered to be outdated, if not dinosaurs of the SEO world.

When you want your website to achieve the ranking it deserves, it is important that you transform yourself into the Jurassic Park Chris Pratt of SEO and tackle these dinosaurs before they put your site at risk. By avoiding these now irrelevant SEO practices, you can create a competitive and lucrative site that will perform well against your competitors.

Meta Keywords

Meta keywords once were held in great regard as a factor that could make or break your site's ranking. Webmasters used this tactic to indicate what keywords related to their sites and for what keywords the sites should be ranked in search engines.

However, spammers figured out how to take advantage of this system and began overusing keywords to get their sites ranked over legitimate websites. Google and other search engines changes their algorithms and switched the focus from keywords to links. This switch was designed to make it more difficult for spammers to manipulate rankings. With that, meta keywords have lost relevance when it comes to search engine optimization.

Cloaking and Doorway Pages

The use of cloaking and doorway pages also invite spammers to take over a website and manipulate rankings. In fact, this tactic now stands out as a key sign that a website may have been taken over by a hacker, although at first the website's owner may not realize it.

Nonetheless, cloaking and doorway pages violate Google's Webmaster Guidelines because they in essence give searchers different results than they were looking for and expecting. A common example of cloaking or using doorway pages involves inserting HTML text for a search engine while using Flash or images for users. 

Another example involves inserting text or keywords into a page searched by a search engine rather than an actual person. Because of the ease of which hackers have been able to use this strategy, cloaking and doorway pages are now considered to be dinosaurs of SEO.

Keyword Focused Content

Also referred to as keyword heavy content, this strategy utilizes what is known as keyword stuffing. Simply put, the content on a website is so loaded with keywords that it once led to higher rankings in search engines. Many times the keywords are used in illogical ways, resulting in the content making no sense and not being readable by users.

Now, however, this dinosaur SEO tactic can result in your website being ranked lower than your competitors. It causes your users to have a negative experience when visiting your site and hurts your website more than it helps.

Site Wide or Run of Site Backlinks

Before the recent changes, you could improve your website's ranking by getting dozens of links from another website back to your page. In fact, your ranking improved as the number of links you included to your site increased.

As with other dinosaur SEO strategies, however, spammers found a way to take advantage of this system and began building hundreds of links from the same site to get their websites ranked higher than legitimate site owners'. Now the number of links from an individual website has little to no affect on your own site's ranking. A couple of links from a site has the same impact as including hundreds of links, and too many links from an individual website can cause a drop in your search engine rankings.

This same impact applies to footer links. It used to be that people could improve their sites' rankings by including multitudes of links at the foot of their websites. Now, footer links have no influence on how high your website is ranked in a search engine, and too many footer links could also have a negative impact on search engine rankings.

Blog Links and Forum Commenting

This strategy, although largely irrelevant now, is still used by many website owners today. Unfortunately, as they try to improve their rankings by including links in blog or forum comments their efforts are usually wasted, simply because blog links and forum comments now have little impact on SEO and rankings.

Moreover, because spammers are always on the lookout for an easy opportunity to infiltrate search engine rankings blog links and forum comments invite them to manipulate your website and put your own ranking in jeopardy. Many spammers use bots to include links in your forum or blog comments, for example.

Bots are difficult to detect and even more difficult to remove from your website. If you want to achieve your ranking through legitimate and legal ways that avoid violating the webmaster guidelines in place, you should avoid using blog links and forum comments as an SEO strategy.

SEO strategies continue to change and evolve for the better, letting your site achieve the rankings it deserves. Choosing the best strategies for SEO today requires that you know which ones are ideal for today's competitive online market and which ones are best left to become fossilized novelties of yesteryear. If you hire a digital marketing agency, you should be certain that they offer SEO service packages that only use current best practices. By avoiding these five dinosaur SEO tactics, you can keep your site relevant, fresh, and competitive.