Last week I read a blog post by a leading internet marketer, Jill Whalen about some SEO practices that are a waste of time (it caused quite a lot of ‘discussion’) and it got me thinking about how much things have changed over the years.
Search engines are much more sophisticated than they were even 5 years ago, which means they deliver much better search results, and are much better at indexing sites. In the past some very large sites built on content management systems or e-commerce sites could cause headaches, but most new technology is much more search engine friendly. However, there are still some SEO practitioners out there that will charge for anything they can get away with and here are some of those things you need to look out for:
1. Submissions
You do not ever need to pay to have your site submitted to the search engines, let alone the zillions that the SEO cowboys will claim you can submit to. The major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) will index your website by following a link to it. If you launch a new site, just get another site to link to it such as your web designer’s site, and you’ll soon find it’s been picked up by the search engines.
2. ‘Content Pages’
The dreaded ‘content pages’ are still practiced by some firms, whereby pages are created around a particular keyword and added into a sitemap. These are basically keyword rich landing pages, often stuffed full of nonsense. It’s much more important to create great content on your website that not only attracts visitors and retains them, but makes your website much more link worthy. Creating keyword rich pages for the sake of rankings really doesn’t do much for your credibility nor for your wallet if you’re paying for it. These are a couple of very poorly written page on the aferry.co.uk website – guess which keywords they’re targeting!
http://www.aferry.co.uk/ferry-to-scotland-ferries-uk.htm
http://www.aferry.co.uk/p-and-o-ferry-uk.htm
3. Keyword Stuffing
This is related to point 2 above, and I still see sites with keywords stuffed onto pages, particularly in a pale grey colour at the bottom of web pages. Stuffing keywords into every possible orifice of a website is not going to help with rankings, and also give the visitor a bad experience – in my mind there’s nothing worse than visiting a site that has keywords in grey text stuffed into the bottom of each page.
Whatever you do, if you’re new to SEO, make sure you don’t fall into the trap of using these very out of date and bad practices.
