SEO Before and Now: The Truths You Should Know in SEO World

SEO before was not quite difficult.  You just to create back links into your website, as long as you follow the guidelines of search engines especially Google, surely your website will eventually rank and dominate result pages in no time.  The more quality links you have the better chance to rank your keywords. But not today! There were several updates that search engines deployed like Panda, Penguin etc. because SEO was being exploited by some claiming SEO guru. Below are some Truths about the old fashioned and ineffective strategies today that might cause tremendous havoc to your website if you still apply these.

1. Social Bookmarking and Directory Submission Sites.  These marketing avenues are the most used and prominent strategies in gaining back links.  Besides, these are so easy and take little time to submit your website.  In a matter of minutes, you already have links.  SEO Freelancer don’t even care about the Page Rank, the relevancy, how old the website they are linking, etc. they just after with the back links they will gain.  Here is the truth about social bookmarking and directory submission, frankly, these are no longer helpful in promoting a certain site. Search engines already penalized most of these sites.  So, be very careful to where you are submitting because you might know that your site is already in the black list of search engines.  Still, there are some sites that are effective such as Reddit, Slashdot.org, Google Submit URL, Yahoo Directory, Dmoz.

2. Article Submission Sites.  Another effective marketing avenues before is by submitting your content in article directory sites. The more the merrier as the phrase goes. Spreading your content to different article sites with mostly a back link in their author’s bio is the key to acquire back links. However, by submitting it continuously (duplicate content) will hurt your website as well as your ranking.   This is now a super big NO in SEO world. To learn more about this read the article: “Matt Cutts: Using Article Directories for Links? Just No".

3.  Forum Participation.  Several years ago, forum posting and commenting is one of the best avenues that most SEO Freelancers do when optimizing a website.  This by registering in a forum site, once you already gain the trust of the webmaster you can now add your signature (with link redirecting to your site). The main objective of forum is to participate in a thread and offer an informative and factual comments as you build relationship among members.  Due to exploitation of many SEO specialists, search engines devalued the links coming from forum sites especially those that are not relevant to your niche. Most of them are not making valuable information to the reader and they are just after with the link they gained.

4.   Blog Commenting.  Doing intensive blog comments in your website is a waste of time.  More and more websites today are closing their comment section due to spam comments.   In addition, this strategy will also make your website punished if you commented to those sites that are not related to your topic and have tons of spam comments already.  So be very careful in doing this, you should filter where to comment and set some standards.

I hope that these truths about SEO will help you decide what to choose in optimizing your website.  Always remember, “Quality Over Quantity”.  We should be very vigilant in picking where we put our link to other’s site.  It takes time and a lot of hardship of searching the right back links.  We should be very patience and be keener. But, in the long run once you do it right, in SEO manner, I am sure that your site will rank and potential traffic will come across. If you have any queries feel free to comment or email me.