SEO ain’t easy, we all know that. It’s commonly known to be the Internet’s “dark science,” hence so many people quitting trying to promote their websites and making it to the first page.

You can often find articles like “SEO isn’t relevant anymore” springing here and there. However, this statement can’t be further from the truth. The truth is that SEO is doing very well and is a defining growth factor in many successful businesses over the world.

The most common reason people get irritated with SEO is that their backlinks aren’t as effective as they estimated, forgetting that there is a considerable number of things that can go wrong with your them, which will hinder your company’s growth. Here are the most important things you need to take care of.

“Nofollow”?

Nofollow links are backlinks that carry no straightforward SEO value from the page they are posted on to the pages that they reference. So many things can go wrong with your links in terms of their nofollow status. You may have too many of them, and you may have none at all, both scenarios will mess up your ranking big time. Why?

The first case is rather simple. Imagine that half of your backlinks don’t actually do what they’re supposed to do — bring you SEO value.

However, not having any nofollow links at all is suggestive of the fact that you’re “meddling with the system.” To say the least, it’s an unnatural backlink profile. Evidence suggests that having at least 5-10% of nofollow links is going to benefit you greatly.

Many successful websites on the web have amassed up to 30% of nofollow links to their site, which doesn’t stop them from taking the first position in the search results for highly popular keywords, such as “backlinks” or “diet pills.”

Where you get them from?

Just amassing backlinks doesn’t ensure success in rankings. Another issue you might be facing with your links is the poor quality of the backlinks to your site. Let’s put it this way, there could be a site that features 1000 links to other websites, another one that has a total of 10 links to external sources, and the last one that has over 100.000, and doesn’t have any traffic at all.

It’s evident straight off the bat which site will provide you with better value for your SEO efforts. Generally speaking, there are different types of sites that don’t really provide with quality links. It’s preferable not to build the bulk of your link profile on sites like these:

1. Link of forums with little domain authority
2. Blog comments on little with small domain authority
3. Basically any directories out there
4. Affiliate sites
5. Scraper sites
6. Links from irrelevant sites and content pages
7. Foreign links
8. Links with lousy, duplicated content
9. Links with overly optimized anchors
10. Links that come from so-called content farms
11. Links from social bookmarking websites
12. Links with very little to no content

That does not, by any means suggest that you should not place any links on sites like these. However, if you decide to focus your efforts on placing links on “unfavorable” websites like these, you may shoot yourself in the foot by doing so.

The reason why these sites aren’t excellent to build your link profile is that they’re pretty much low-hanging fruit. They’ve most certainly been ruthlessly bombarded with spammy links throughout the years so you won’t be able to extract any essential value from them. But again, you need to have a couple of backlinks on places like these to maintain a “healthy” link ratio.

How relevant are your links?

If you’re not familiar with the lingo, the anchor is the clickable text that a hyperlink. Their essential function in terms of SEO is to provide context to the nature of the link. It lets the search engine classify the reviewer’s opinion on the site that they are referencing.

A well-crafted anchor text is crucial to high rankings. Plus, the search engine’s algorithm uses the text in the link along with the text “around” it, to better understand the social barometer on how good the site actually is.

To get a better kick out of using the anchors, the anchor text needs to be relevant to the niche that your site is part of. Plus, the anchor text itself needs to be relevant to its context.

Poor on-site optimization

When speaking of on-site and off-site SEO efforts, you’ll often hear the “Car and Fuel” analogy often used. Your on-site optimization, in this case, is the vehicle, which is fueled by backlinks. There should be a concordance in the quality of the both since a bad car won’t perform well on good gas, it’s still a lousy car.

So one of the more interesting reasons why your backlinks aren’t providing you with a visible effect is that your site just isn’t up to a particular search engine standards. This issue alone will make your off-page efforts useless.

Have you checked on them recently?

There are quite a few things that can happen to your links over time, so keeping an eye on them is essential. Losing too many backlinks can severely damage your growth pretty quickly. What could have gone wrong?

A referral’s site has changed ownership

There is a widespread practice of taking advantage of domains that have just expired and claiming ownership. This would naturally suppose that the said website can no longer provide ranking value to your site, since there is no content or link related to your site.

The content could have disappeared

Writing new articles and blogs for your site is an onerous task, so maybe the site’s owners decided to stop publishing new pieces to the website. In order not to make the site seem dumped and out-of-date they’ve decided to remove content altogether.

Too many pop-ups

The original backlink may as well be there, but if the site owners decided to start using too much advertisement or pop-ups, chances are the search engine algorithms just lumps it all as spam. Your link included.

These sites are objectively user unfriendly and typically don’t satisfy the modern quality standards. So it’s most probably the case that you shouldn’t even opt to place links on sites like these.

 The link comes from content that isn’t relevant

The problem isn’t necessarily that your link has gone missing, but often if the content the link is in features outdated and old topics that aren’t too relevant today, there may be little to no value from a backlink like that.

Conclusion

Backlinks are a vital component of a healthy SEO strategy and not keeping them in check will be detrimental to your ranking efforts. There is a host of reasons why they can go wrong or not work at all, and this article pretty much sums it all up.

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There are a lot of SEO strategies going about and many of them don’t actually work. Some are outdated. Others have simply been made up and are in common use because they sound good. Both of those categories can end up hurting your ranking. Be it because you can only use so many strategies or because Google and the other search engines now actually penalize you for using them.

For that reason, it always helps to take a look at the common strategies that are being used out there and which ones might actually end up being counterproductive. After all, we don’t want all that hard work we’ve put in to be rendered useless because of a few small mistakes!

To that end, here we’ll explore the things you shouldn’t do. In that way, the effective strategies you’ve already embraced will be rendered more effective and you can twist that tap of organic traffic open that little bit more.

Focusing exclusively on getting them to your page

Yes, of course, if people aren’t coming to your page then you’re not going to be able to keep them there. At the same time, once you’re drawing traffic to your website it becomes important to make sure that you actually keep them on your page as best you can. After all, though Google hasn’t admitted it as such there is some evidence that engagement rate matters.

Even if it didn’t, people bouncing from your site is ultimately no use to you as you can’t sell anything to people who don’t stick around.

For that reason, it’s important that we spend time making sure people stick around as long as possible. There are a lot of strategies that will help you with that, but some are more effective than others:

• The inverted pyramid. This style was originally developed for newspaper articles. The idea is that you start with the information people actually want to know. Then you give them the important details and caveats and only at the end do you give the background information and the nitty-gritty details that those who are deeply interested care about.
• Reader-friendly formatting. The layouts you see online have a very little resemblance to that of long-form published writing such as books and magazines. There’s a good reason for that. According to Amy Griggs, senior SEO specialist at Essay Supply, “Audiences scan much more than they read online. This tendency increases greatly on mobile. SEO-optimized pages use bullet points, have highly readable fonts, and make use of positive and negative space.” Give visitors the information they can use at a glance.
• Clear call to actions. The great thing about well-designed calls to action isn’t just that they pull people deeper into the website, but also that they reduce the bounce rate by getting people to click on.

Really, these are just the tip of the iceberg. Any strategy that keeps people on your page for longer is going to help the bottom line as well as your SEO ranking.

Focusing exclusively on high-traffic keywords

It’s an easy rule of thumb. The more traffic a keyword gets, the more interesting it is for your company. Perhaps at some level that is indeed true. But the relationship between those two points is weak at best.

Jared Rolloff is an experienced SEO Analyst at Resumes Centre. He says, “High-traffic keywords are often too competitive to be worthwhile. Worse, they don’t draw quality traffic to your site. By focusing on long tail keywords you eliminate that problem. Better yet, you tend to draw traffic that progresses through the funnel at a faster rate.”

Even if we ignore that and you manage to get lucky and find keywords which have very little competition, that still doesn’t mean they’re going to be the best keywords for you.

There are a number of reasons why keywords might not be useful:

• They’re not actually strongly related to what you’re trying to sell or promote. Some search terms might seem related to what you’re doing but aren’t for most people. As this means you’ll get lower engagement from those people who were looking for something else and engagement matters for ranking, that’s something you’ll want to avoid.
• They catch people at the wrong part in their sales cycle. If people are still gathering information, for example, and your page goes straight to pushing one specific product at them, this will be ineffective. Sure, you might be able to convince some people to jump straight to a purchasing decision but most are just going to click away.

A much better strategy is to go for more specific keywords which match more closely with what you’re actually selling. Not only will there be less competition here, which means you’ll be able to get to that coveted first page more easily and you’ll also have a higher likelihood that customers actually convert as the page you’ve sent them to is more likely to match what they’re looking for.

Aligning existing pages with trending keywords

Another common strategy is to find a new keyword that is suddenly getting a big boost in traffic and then going all in for that keyword and leaving other phrases that you previously managed to rank for in the dust.

The most common way this is done is to reconfigure pages that already existed to more closely match the new keyword that you’ve discovered. The problem with this strategy is that in so doing, whatever keywords the page was already ranking for end up getting left behind.

Senior Content Specialist Michael Evans of Flash Essay says, “It simply doesn’t make sense to sacrifice keywords that are working for you with one that happens to be trending. It’s also a risky bet to hyperfocus on keywords at all. Focus on creating relevant content that your audience needs. Then think about keywords.”

Really, that whole keyword thing

The truth is that keywords are really a proxy. They’re not really what people are after when they search for information. What they’re after is an answer to the question that they’re posing. Google and websites just use keywords as they get pretty close to giving people what they’re after. But they’re far from perfect.

And so, Google is in the process of moving beyond individual words. Instead, they’re working on inferring meaning from the searches that people make and then offering them websites that satisfy that meaning.

And so, it is becoming more and more important that we don’t focus on including individual keywords but instead focus on actual topics. In effect, this is already what we’re doing when we talk about semantically related keywords. But it’s bigger than that. As Google’s AIs get better at understanding what we’re talking about, focusing on individual keywords will become less and less important. Instead, what will matter is that the topic is dealt with well, clearly and effectively.

Link outreach programs

Ever since 2012 and Google created the Penguin update, traditional link building has been rendered ineffective as a strategy for SEO. That’s because since then Google has been hard at work ferreting out which links ended up coming into existence organically and which ones are the result of link buying or link outreach programs. And with each new update, they’ve become more effective at figuring out what the tell-tale signs are.

There are a lot of links that hurt SEO. Some examples include:

• Links from low-quality websites. Google cares far more about quality than quantity now. There are even some pretty good indicators that low-quality links hurt your rating if they occur often enough as you’ll get assigned to a ‘bad neighborhood’.
• Paid links. Through statistical analysis, it is very easy to analyze who will put up links for pay. Even websites who will put up links in exchange for social media mention are going to be pretty easy to figure out. And as these are specific strategies that try to game the system, they will, therefore, be punished.

“Link building may seem like a slow process. It should be! The best way forward is to simply create the kind of content that deserves to be linked to. Then, build good relationships with influencers. You simply cannot rush this process. You most certainly can’t buy your way out of it.” – Christopher Mercer, digital marketer and founder of Citatior.

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