Outdated and ineffective SEO techniques that will end up hurting you

So what gives?

Bottom line here is that all this tinkering with keywords on static pages is not going to work anymore, because reverse engineering and writing for search bots do not work anymore. There’s no way around it, quick on-site SEO with a bunch of static pages is dead.

Google is focusing on serving the best possible content for its users, it’s looking at things like click through rate, dwell time on page and bounce rate to determine how well the results are serving people.

You can’t rely on things like keyword density of content in this environment anymore.

You need to think search engines as services that provide people with answers that serve to all kinds of goals. People are looking for information to learn about different topics, they are searching ways to achieve different tasks and solutions to problems.

Instead of keywords, focus on the goals people might have when they are searching for something you are providing.

This means you need to change your point of view to that of your target audience. Think about what purpose each an every piece of your content serves from their point of view. What problems are you going to solve? What are your visitors going to learn?

You will see significant results if you take a solution oriented approach to your content creation and provide content that truly fulfills the goals of your visitors.

As you probably have already realized, your static pages wont be enough to attract some good traffic in this game. It's a pretty limited amount of ground you can cover with only having static content.

So start creating a lot of content about the things you are all about. Start now, cover as much ground as you possibly can. And keep doing it regularly, as Google likes fresh content.

Now as for keywords, you might now think that keyword research is dead too, but it's not. It's just become a lot more sophisticated.

Yes you still need to target the relevant keywords. As you'll most likely never get to the top 10 with short head terms like "Accounting Services", so be sure to target long tail keywords like "Small Business Accounting Services in Brussels".

Read more about targeting long tail keywords and strategies to outperform you competition.

4. Taking shortcuts to earning backlinks

The number of backlinks is still one of the most ranking factors for Google, but methods like blasting links to other people’s comment sections or paying for links is a recipe for disaster.

Bad quality backlinks from sketchy link farms will lead to Google penalizing you with Penguin, an update designed to fight against poor quality backlinks intended to manipulate search rankings. If Google thinks sites linking to you or your backlinks are rubbish, it will think you are rubbish too.

Today you have to work to get those backlinks, as even high quality content very rarely earns backlinks on it’s own. After doing research on 1 million articles, Buzzsumo and Moz noticed that 50 % of articles get 8 shares or less on social media and 75 % of articles earn zero links.

One effective method to get backlinks is broken link building, which means you search for sites (preferably non-commercial ones) who have broken links to similar resources that you have on your site.

You can use a tool like Semrush to check who is linking to your competition and a tool like the Screaming Frog to find broken links on these sites. When you find broken links, you politely report them to the webmasters of these sites and suggest replacing these links with your own.

It's often a good idea to offer a link to a few different resources as well to avoid appearing too opportunistic.

As researching broken links can be time consuming work, it’s also worthwhile using Buzzsumo to find out who has mentioned you without linking back to you, so you can then request them for that backlink. This should be easy enough to achieve as they have already referred to you.

But by far the best method to earning quality backlinks in my opinion is is guest posting, which means writing articles to more popular sites in your niche.

Guest posting is a useful way to raise brand awareness and establish your authority on a subject, and of course, you will be earning those high quality backlinks at the same time.

There are plenty of sites accepting guest bloggers, you can get started by doing searches with your niche related keywords and phrases such as “submit a guest post” and “guest post guidelines”. Before you approach these sites, it’s often a good idea to already have some drafts or unpublished blog posts you can offer.

Note that guest posting is not a shortcut to quick results like nothing in SEO these days is. Most sites do not accept guest posts just for the purpose of link building, so you will need content that is relevant, informative, helpful or interesting to the audience of that site. Do not add irrelevant links to your home page for example, but link to other resources on your blog or site where it’s relevant.

That is is for this article, if you are interested in learning more SEO hands-on, check out our SEO & Google Analytics course and WordPress courses.

Until next time!