Seattle online marketing has changed A LOT, especially in the past year with Google’s Panda Update. Many SEO strategies that worked great in the past don’t work at all anymore, and can even get your website sent into search engine obscurity. While it’s inconvenient for website owners who have put many hours of effort into these strategies, these changes actually make for a better internet. This post looks at five SEO strategies of yesterday that just don’t work today.

Link Exchanges

The search engines used to love websites that had a ton of incoming links, so link exchanges worked great. A link exchange is when you add a link on your website that points to another website – and that website adds a link on their website that points back to you. Essentially, you’re exchanging links… hence the name link exchange. Unfortunately, link exchanges don’t work anymore because the search engines realized these ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ links weren’t of any real value.

Keyword Stuffing

While using keywords is still critically important to achieving high rankings, keyword stuffing just doesn’t work anymore, and can even penalize your website. Keyword stuffing is using the same keyword repeatedly in your website copy thinking the search engines will reward your website because you have the keyword stuffed into your content more times than your competitors’ websites do. More isn’t necessarily better anymore. Not only will stuffing your content with keywords hurt your rankings, but it also doesn’t exactly make a great impression on human readers, so it’ll also hurt your sales.

Hidden Text

This goes along with keyword stuffing. Adding invisible keywords to your text (white type on a white background, for example) may fool visitors, but it won’t fool the search engines. Hidden text is a great way to get your website banned from the search engine results altogether.

Flimsy, Fluff, Filler Content

You used to be able to publish any kind of flimsy, fluff, filler content full of keywords on your website and you could still achieve high rankings (although probably few sales). Today, the search engines know how to separate the junk content from the valuable content. It takes a lot more effort to write engaging, informative content, but the search engines will reward you for it. As an added bonus, other websites may even link to your excellent content (valuable one way links), and you’ll make a much better impression on website visitors who may actually buy based upon the information contained in your content.

Meta Keyword Stuffing

The meta keywords tag used to hold a lot of value with the search engines, but spamming made it ineffective. You should still use your meta keywords tag, just don’t cram it full of keywords. Using four or so keywords per page is great – stuffing your meta keywords tag with 100 keywords per page is a quick step to no rankings.

If you’re relying on these outdated SEO strategies to improve your rankings, you’re doing a lot of work that isn’t going to produce any results. What strategies will improve your rankings? Click to schedule your free Seattle online marketing consultation with Chad Morgan to find out!