Your rank is reliant on SEO. Unfortunately, the practices that worked a year ago aren’t always relevant now. The techniques most effective even change more frequently than that if you really think about it, considering people’s browsing habits are always changing. While you don’t necessarily need to change your SEO plan daily, you do need it to remain relevant to the last few months to optimize your site to the best of its ability.
At Awesome Website Guys, we offer web-based services, like affordable website design, WordPress management, blogging, SEO, and more. We see firsthand the power of SEO and the importance of staying relevant. We’ve seen sites that ranked highly a year ago, slowly drifting down the ranking because of outdated SEO. That’s why we encourage our clients to reevaluate their SEO tactics regularly, usually quarterly. With that said, we also encourage our clients to look for signs their strategy is no longer effective. We have some blogs posted to help you determine this, such as “Is your website outdated?”
Thinking Keyword Density Is Everything
It’s no longer effective to keyword stuff. The more times you repeat the same keywords, the lower you’ll rank in this day and age. Soon after the times of keyword stuff came a period when keyword density was the main focus. Every agency out there had a secret recipe for getting a site or blog to rank. For instance, some thought that “2.5 percent” was the magic number, while others felt it was lower. Don’t get us wrong, these sites did rank. However, this is no longer the case. There isn’t a strict number of times or density you need to achieve. Nowadays, it’s all about a blog reading well and keywords, and the right ones at that matter, appearing in the content.
Using Grammatically Incorrect Keywords
This practice stems from the fact that the general audience searching online may input “interior decorator Pasadena” when looking for an interior decorator in their area. Naturally, everyone who had a website that was trying to rank tried to use the keyword in the piece to try to beat the system. This may have worked then but certainly isn’t effective now. Unless you can find a way to put the grammatically incorrect phrase in the piece and have it read naturally, this practice isn’t effective any longer. It’s better for your keywords to be grammatically correct in a piece. This is when adding stop words comes into play and can still help you rank.
Using Irrelevant Keywords
At one point, the whole concept of SEO keywords was to rank highly. You basically swung a bat hard and hit the ball out of the park every time when you used keywords. Even if you were using words that didn’t fit the focus of your site, you could find a way to rank for them. You were gaining exposure, and that was the entire point of SEO. However, this no longer works. We hate to say that AI is getting smarter, but it is. And people need to keep up. Therefore, if you’re trying to rank for keywords that aren’t directly relevant to your business, it just won’t work in this day and age.
Writing for Robots
Those robots that determine your rank aren’t your patients, clients, or customers. And the robots are even understanding the concept that keyword placement, density, and using variations of words are for robots, not people. They’ve gotten to a point where using all these practices and writing solely for the purpose of ranking highly are no longer effective. Automatically, they look at content written for AI as spam or poor quality. Therefore, it’s vital to stop writing content for the purpose of ranking and focus on its relevance to your clients, customers, or patients.
If you’re in need of getting your SEO up-to-date contact us today. We’ll spend time researching your target market and providing you with content for your website or blog to help you get up in the search results. And besides our SEO and blogging services, we can also provide affordable website design, WordPress management, and more.
Call us today at 910-335-4348 to see how we can help your SEO plan. You may also use our online form.
