SEO has changed over the years, and what was once common practice has been left behind. That is probably just as well, as some of the old ways of doing things resulted in sites that were full of poorly written content and jammed full of keywords and not much else.
If you or your SEO company is still considering using the following tactics, you’d better revise your thinking.
Link Buying
In the old days, it was a common practice to pay for a lot of inbound links because of the help they would give you in the SERPs. The problem with doing this, though, is that many of the links for which you were paying went to spammy or poorly designed sites with bad reputations.
Is it an essential element of SEO to get some inbound links, Los Angeles, but only if they come from reputable sites. Google can now quickly identify sites that are sending out an inordinate amount of links, and they will take steps to shut them down. Make sure that your company doesn’t have anything to do with them. Earn your links instead.
Use of Anchor Text
Another point of emphasis for SEO is anchor text, the HTML element that lets us tell users what type of content they should expect when clicking on a link.
At one point, it was thought of as typical for businesses to come out with keyword-rich anchor text and exact-match text, since this was a guaranteed way of getting site traffic. After the Google Penguin update, though, this sort of behavior was frowned upon, and this sort of content started to be thought of as over-optimized.
This violates the notion of what Google wants most on websites. That would be naturally written content that humans will enjoy, rather than oddly worded sentences and fragments that exist for no other reason than to help a site climb the SERPs.
You have to optimize for humans now, not search engines. If you don’t, you’re bound to fail.
The ironic thing about SEO these days is that if you produce sites that feature excellent UX, well-written content, and you earn your backlinks, then you should do fine. It’s when you try to take shortcuts and mangle the English language that you usually get yourself in trouble.
Sites succeed when they are set up in ways that make sense, and the writing on them is simple, concise, and flows naturally. If you have an SEO company, Los Angeles, then that is what you need to emphasize to them as they set out to optimize your content.
