You have to keep up with the times or get left behind. That’s a simple fact that all businesses need to respect. And nowhere is that more true than marketing.
It’s not that you have to stay on the cutting edge, but even if you are lagging behind marketing trends by a few years, you could be giving up business. Here are a handful of techniques you definitely don’t want to be using anymore. Starting now!
Keyword Stuffing
There was a time when websites could raise their rankings by writing nonsense filled with keyword phrases. Those days are long gone, and they’re not coming back. As this article on Search Engine Journal advises:
”Try sprinkling your keywords around the content and use them sparingly. Worry more about your content instead of the keywords. If you’re doing your best to create worthwhile content, properly targeted at your audience, then your keywords are going to flow far more naturally.”
Spam
Buying, instead of building, a list of e-mails is a waste of money. People who voluntarily give you their e-mail addresses on your website because they are interested in your product or service are the most motivated customers you could ask for.
On the other hand, e-mailing strangers who don’t know anything about you, or what you have to offer, will often result in large numbers of readers hitting their Spam buttons. A possible consequence of that is that their e-mail services will start sending ALL of your e-mails to Spam automatically. You will then have a hard time reaching even those who want to hear from you.
Buying Links
In the spider-crawling world of search engines, it’s all about birds of a feather. Don’t worry about the quantity of your links, because that can actually hurt you. Quality links, even just a few, are what you need.
This article on marketing fails tells you how things work today.
“Remaining in the top 10 search results requires top quality content with value being placed on the number of shares your articles have achieved as opposed to the number of backlinks as in the past.”
Duplicate Content
Search engines place a very high value on originality. The more different your content is from anything else on the Internet, the more valuable it is. If you have more than one website with the same information, you may want to consider consolidating them into one strong page.
Meta Description Stuffing
Search engines treat meta descriptions differently now. Yoast explains it best:
“Search engines say there is no direct ranking benefit from the meta description – they don’t use it in their ranking algorithm. There is an indirect benefit, though: Google uses click-through-rate (CTR) as a way of determining whether you’re a good result. If more people click your result then they’d expect based on your position, they move you up. This is why optimizing the meta description is so important, as is optimizing your titles.”
If you are still doing any of these, stop wasting your time with them immediately. Redirect your resources to methods that work and help you build your business with integrity.
