The SEO Blog - Traffic Generation Techniques

Outdated And Obsolete Search Engine Optimization Techniques

In the world of search engine optimization, there tends to be a lot of misinformation out there as well as a lot of outdated info. Part of the reason is because things tend to change quickly in the world of SEO, and people don’t take the time to update what they wrote.

Today, I want to cover some of those outdated techniques that used be important when optimizing your website but are nearly obsolete today. So if you run across this info somewhere, you know that what you’re reading is out of date or the author is misinformed.

The first thing I want to cover is meta tags. Meta tags go in the head of your web page and they’re used to provide information about your web page to the search engines. Now the two that are most commonly associated with search engine optimization are the keyword tag and the description tag. You’d place the keywords you want to rank highly for in the keywords tag, and you’d write what your web page was about in the description tag. And back in the old days, this had a strong correlation to your search engine ranking. However, it didn’t take too long before search engines realized how easy it was to abuse meta tags by stuffing them full of keywords, sometimes unrelated keywords just to get good search engine rankings.

Nowadays, search engines tend to ignore the keywords tag or give it minimal weight. The description tag can still be useful because some search engines will use your description as their description of your site when you show up in the search engine results pages – also called SERPs. But from a search engine optimization point of view, they’re not important, so don’t expect a big boost in ranking just by including meta tags, and ignore anyone who tells you otherwise.

Next up, I want to cover search engine submissions. This one I never really understood in the first place. But several years ago, there was a lot of software and services out there that would submit your website to thousands of search engines and thousands of free for all pages on a weekly or monthly basis. Apparently, they thought that if you submitted your website to a search engine often enough, they’d not only index you, but rank you higher. These days, submitting your site to search engines is not necessary. All the major search engines will find you by finding a link to your website from another site. So if you really want to get your website in the search engines, just get links from websites already indexed by that search engine. It’s that simple. And there’s no reason to ever pay anyone for search engine submission. You’re just getting ripped off if you do.

Okay, and finally I want to cover keyword density. This one is a bit more controversial, since for years, there’s been a magic keyword density that will help you website rank best with the search engines. The only problem is that its varied by each search engine, and the search engines kept adjusting it too, so it was really hard to keep up with. Now keyword density isn’t as dead meta tags or search engine submissions, there is still some evidence that it matters to Yahoo. However, it’s unimportant as far as Google is concerned. And even with Yahoo, keyword density is likely to be less important in the future. You see, rather than keyword density, the search engines, especially Google, are using Latent Semantic Analysis. Basically, it is a way for software to do what humans do without even thinking about it – it allows the search engines to figure out what the theme of a website is. So if your site is about dogs, a search engine using latent semantic indexing would expect to find words like pets, canine, and breeders. And the better you cover the theme of your website, in this case dogs, the better you’ll rank in the search engines.

So forget about keyword density, just write your site’s naturally, and you’ll likely get better rankings from the search engines, not to mention your site will sound a heck of a lot better to your visitors, which is what you want anyway, right.

That covers todays’ SEO lesson on obsolete search engine optimization techniques.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 18th, 2007 at 1:33 am and is filed under SEO Lessons, SEO Videos, Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.