Which SEO Techniques Should be Avoided

There are tons of SEO strategies and techniques posted by a number of websites and blogs however many of those techniques are no longer in use and won't work for your website. So let's have a look at Which SEO Techniques Should be Avoided esp. when your website is new.

Article Re-Writing Tools

There have been times in the past when website owners just picked the best content from the internet and spin them (rewrite them) using article rewriting tools and post it on their websites. This would not give you any plagiarism errors however, it would not make complete sense for the readers. This is mainly because these tools use synonyms to replace terms from the original article. This is not a great technique because of 2 reasons:

1. The users don't get the best experience.
2. Google understands this since they are much more advanced now

Directory Submission

Directory submission is a process through which you submit your website into the web directories under specific categories. There are various paid and free directories available, you can get the complete list from here. This was a to-go method 10 years ago however now it's not that effective. There are 2 main reasons for it,

1. One of them is that Google is much smarter than it was 10 years ago & it does not rely on directories to get access to the newly launched websites.
2. Even a 5th-grade student can submit his website to any directory so there are no extra effort or quality standard requirements to submit your website. Many directories give you a backlink in exchange for some money.

So you should not waste your time with this process as it will yield zero to no SEO results.

Hidden Text / Text Color Same as the Website Background

This was one of the favorite methods used by SEO Spammers who used to put a lot of keywords into the web page for the Google Crawlers. These keywords would not be visible to the real visitors visiting the page as the color of the text will be the same as that of the background. This was mainly done so that the Google Crawlers feel that the website is talking about these keywords. However, this method no longer works, and in fact, your website can be penalized for using such methods. So you should avoid it under any circumstances. This method no longer works as Google Algo, & Crawlers are much smarter now.

Get Backlinks from "Backlink Spitters" Tools

There are many users on SEO Clerks and Fiverr who provide backlink services, within a few days they deliver 500 to 1000 backlinks for your website. Why do you need to avoid them?

1. These backlinks often are not from reputed websites so they don't add much value
2. These backlinks are not manually created but are created using automatic tools. This doesn't create a good reputation in the eye of the search engines.
3. Irrelevant text used. Often the contextual text (i.e. the text around the backlink) is not related to the category of the subject

Avoid Shallow Content Articles

This is something many opt to do, if not on their website, they often do this on article directory websites. This should especially be avoided since the Search Engines such as Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo give more preference to in-depth articles which answer the questions in detail. As per the Search Engine Logic, If someone is looking for something they should be presented with the websites that have the complete information so that they don't have to goose chase 100s of websites for complete information. So doesn't matter where you are posting the content but it should be in detail and answer all the potential questions the user may have.

Don't Accept Poor Guest Post Articles

A guest post is when some external author submits content on your website, since they are not a part of your team the articles they submit are termed as Guest Posts. There are many websites that accept guest posts and your site can also do that. One of the benefits is that you get more relevant content to your website, however, in the lure of getting more content don't accept poorly written articles on your website. Since that will have a negative impact on the entire website. So, while accepting the guest posts you need to ensure the articles are reviewed first before you make them live on your website.

Irrelevant Title & Alt Text

There are many who add irrelevant titles and alt text on the images just to add those keywords to their website. This is absolutely a suicidal practice since Google is smart enough to know what the image is about and spamming keywords in this way will do more harm to your reputation in the eye of Google. The purpose of the alt (alternate) text is to let people know the name of the image when the image is broken or doesn't load. So if you are using irrelevant text just to spam the keywords, it defeats the purpose of the process. The same applies to the title tags only.

Conclusion

Doing SEO is great fun however while optimizing the website we should ensure that we don't fall for the easy & non-effective methods. Since these will lead to more harm than good in the long run. So we should also ways adapt white hat SEO methods that will not penalize the website in the long run.