Do you want to know what you need to do for your website to reach the first positions in Google again this year? It is not enough to say that SEO is evolving. Since day one, Google's algorithm has evolved, but why all the fuss now? Many talk about the death of SEO, but it would be fair to say that SEO is in constant development and transformation. The beauty, but also the enormous challenge, of search engine optimization is that Google's algorithms (and not just Google's) are constantly improving – a little bit at a time. Doing good SEO marketing is increasingly difficult, but not impossible.

So, the "death" of SEO, represents the need for rapid and unprecedented change, and to optimize a site on Google, you need to know some important secrets. Search engine optimization means using SEO techniques that get results: on-page and off-page optimization. Every year brings with it a lot of SEO changes and trends that you just have to embrace if you want results. There are also outdated SEO techniques that should be left behind.

3 Outdated SEO Techniques That Will Hurt Your Site

• SEO is done just for the sake of search engine bots

Imagine that the whole Internet is like a big spider's web, where each intersection is a page, and the links between these pages are the links. To find all the documents on the Internet, Google uses programs called spiders ("spiders") or crawlers ("crawlers") with which they scan the sites on the Internet, and then organize and store all these pages on huge servers. If until now SEO agencies focused on content optimization for full and fast crawling without wasting resources, now this is practically no longer necessary. Google uses artificial intelligence (which is always improving) to provide better search results. For some time now, however, Google has introduced a new ranking factor into its algorithm – user experience, which is measured by the time people spend on the site and how they interact with the website, things that are much more important than care to save Google resources when it crawls your site. So if you add keywords to your website and focus your website content on them, just for the "eyes" of search engine robots, people will most likely be disappointed. That's why user experience is an important factor (if not the most important factor) of a site's ranking in search results.

So, even if your site's ranking was initially improved by search engine optimization techniques, and they actually only satisfy the bots, and the user experience part is missing, then you will be "backed". For example, if the content on the page is irrelevant and incoherent and you have a high bounce rate – Google will understand that something is wrong with your website. Now SEO trends are about focusing on naturalness, humanness, and transparency. This does not mean that you have to completely ignore everything you know about optimizing a website on Google, but that you have to combine the technical side with strategies to attract and retain visitors. According to analysis, pages worthy of the top 10 in Google contain an average of 1890 words, which means that long and quality content matters much more. Now you need to create engaging content for your target audience.

• Hunt for backlinks on link markets

Link building is still an important part of any successful SEO strategy. It's a great way to build authority online. But you have to be careful how you get these links. Not all links are quality. An SEO expert knows about the given fact: backlink quality matters more than quantity. Now the paradigm has changed a lot, so it would be good to forget about the old and ineffective tactics. Acquiring quality links can be achieved through a fully integrated marketing strategy with a focus on niche communication and PR efforts.

Are directories (sites created specifically for link building) good or not?

There are exceptions – niche directories, relevant to your business, but most directories are ineffective and sometimes even harmful because they are created solely for SEO. Choosing the right directories is one of the most important things to do, they help especially with local SEO.

Another way to "cheat" is to pay for links on sites that are already ranking in Google. It's an easy way, but Google doesn't appreciate it. SEO is not a pay-for-play system, so you have to get to the top organically. For example, in Japan, it is forbidden to buy backlinks. The easiest way to get to the top of the rankings is to create quality content. You can start developing press releases on authority sites, creating guest posts with unique content, etc.

• Using just protocols that have been nailed down

For a long time, the use of precise techniques: keywords in materials and anchor texts - was seen as SEO best practices. And a few years ago, doing SEO meant, first of all, doing technical optimizations. Today, more and more important is what people do after they enter your website (how long they stay there, how many pages they see, etc.). In other words, if they find what interests them.

Another technique, which was once considered a very good way to rank for specific keywords, was to purchase a domain name where your keywords can be found. But, the Google algorithm has already been updated. Now, domains that have exact keywords in the name are often seen as a bit "spammy". It is important to choose the right keywords and place them correctly in the content of your pages - in the title, in the description of the images, in the subtitles, in the texts, etc. Exact anchor text is also a "red light" for Google, being considered an over-optimization technique. It is better not to use the exact anchor text.

Google announced that Google search results would essentially be expanded to include more variants (synonyms, different wordings). So, select a larger list of keywords, add synonyms, keywords from the same lexical family, and long tail. You can even find this data in Google Suggest to find out which words have more value for your site.

This update is inconvenient for many agencies and SEO experts, but useful for sites that would like to rank for more competitive keywords. Finally, we must understand that Google's goal is to help users find the most relevant solutions in search engines. This is, in fact, the company's priority. So if there's a way that Google can return more relevant results to allow audiences to find what they're looking for, that's better for everyone.