Just as search engines update their algorithms from time to time, SEO as a marketing tool is constantly evolving. Practices that were both effective and encouraged five years ago are likely not the same ones you’d want to use on a website today.
But old habits can die hard, and sometimes you can find yourself hanging on to tactics that are ineffective at best, and bordering on illegal at worst. Keeping your SEO knowledge and sites updated is one of the best ways you can ensure that your rankings stay high, and that you don’t risk getting your sites penalized.
One of the outdated techniques still seen frequently on all kinds of websites is keyword over-saturation. Not only is this a technique that your visitors will find annoying, search engines will see right through it, as well. In fact, over-using keywords hasn’t worked for improving ranking in several years, and some search engines even penalize for it.
Nonetheless, some people are still hanging onto the idea that “more is more” when it comes to saturating an article or blog post with certain terms. Your content should be useful and informative first, and keyword-specific second. If it reads bizarrely because of the number of times you’ve inserted the keyword terms, you need to back off.
Hiding keyword over-saturation isn’t any better. If you’re rationalizing keyword over-saturation by inserting keywords into text that is just outside the visible margins of the page, where your readers can’t see it but search engines can, that’s no better. It can be considered spam. Likewise if you’re using text that’s the same color as your background, or text that’s hidden using JavaScript. These are all practices that should be avoided at all costs.
Another tactic you need to be careful about is link building. There’s nothing inherently wrong with link building itself, and in fact one of the best ways to get your site ranked highly is to have a lot of well-respected and popular sites linking back to yours.
There’s a right way and a wrong way to go about it, though. If you have ever given money to a site in exchange for a link back to your site, not only have you acted unethically, you are violating Google’s terms of service (as well as just about every other search engine). Getting yourself removed from the Google index is not worth the small amount of traffic or ranking boost that buying a link will get you. It’s just not worth the risk.
