Is SEO Dead or Alive is a common question among digital marketers at present. Several bloggers and organisations have been trying to rank their websites for a long time but weren’t able to get their results on the Search Engine page. As a result, many of them started thinking that including SEO in their business will not help in their growth. Even some of them believe that SEO doesn’t exist anymore.

If you are a business owner or a fresher to SEO, then this blog is for you. Here we are gonna talk Is SEO Dead or Alive?.

Before moving to the topic let’s know What is SEO?

Search engine optimization is the practice of bringing targeted traffic to a website from search engines organically. 

You must be knowing that around 66% of the entire world’s population has access to the internet. and according to a survey 81% of retail shoppers conduct online research before purchasing or taking any service. 

Looking at those numbers it is difficult to judge if SEO doesn’t exist. 

There are several SEO techniques to improve the ranking of your website. But here discussing useful SEO techniques are of no use when you are having confusion about its existence. 

Before going to the point it’s important to know about those SEO techniques, which no longer work or are outdated.

Let’s begin:

Article Directories:

There was a time when we submitted articles in cloud article directories. Essentially, article directories are short bios with links. So, whoever chooses the article for republishing must include the same bio and the link on their website as well.

Google began to identify article directories as link farms that contained low-quality content after a certain period of time. Hence, it is a waste of time to include this in your SEO tactic.

Article spinning: 

Article spinning is a tactic of creating a huge amount of low-quality content using the software. 

A spinning software can rewrite a single content piece at a time in multiple ways, which helps in creating multiple numbers of new articles. Although they have slight variations in the writing style all of these have similar content.

The content is usually generated by software, so it may not always read well or make sense. So it’s better to avoid this technique.

Keyword Misuse:

Keyword usage in a piece of content is quite useful but some of those usages are outdated at present. 

In many cases, the marketer does not focus on users while ranking for high-volume keywords. Rather they focus on how to rank higher on search engines. As a result, the user doesn’t find anything relevant information in the content and leaves the site. Which later on increases the bounce rate. 

Another such case is keyword stuffing. Here marketers tend to add high search-volume keywords to a website, wherever is possible. However, this is an old school SEO technique as search engines have started preferring natural text combinations. If keyword stuffing is included in your SEO techniques, then it is better to stop it and start focusing on high-quality content, along with the target keywords, to rank your website.

Gone are those days, when keyword density plays an important role in ranking a website in search engine result pages. Now Google doesn’t depend on it. At present, Google keeps a check on the content quality and whether the information available on the web page is relevant to the user or not.

Guest blogging/Guest commenting:

Definitely, guest blogging has a lot of advantages. This can help you get more exposure, build your brand, demonstrate your skills and expertise, and establish credibility, authority, and trust.

Don’t worry Guest blogging is not obsolete. It is still there, but the thing is a lot of people make the mistake of taking whatever is available when it comes to guest blogging opportunities. They don’t bother where they post. As a result, they get penalised by Google when they are caught.

Let’s take an example, if your niche is related to travel, and you get a guest blogging opportunity on a fashion-related website. It doesn’t make any sense in your post. So it’s better to check the website niche or blog niche before you comment as a guest.

Exact Match Domains:

Exact Match Domains are the domain name that includes the exact keywords you are trying to rank on the search engine result page. Some examples are birthdaygifts.com and fesitalcakes.com.

 In the beginning, exact match keywords were on-trend and were ranking quickly. Seeing that google soon changed its algorithm which affected their power to rank. 

Let’s take a scenario,

If you have a website with an exact match domain with poor content. Will that add any value to users? Even google will take necessary actions on your website. So it’s better to focus on the quality of the content.

Use of Anchor text:

Anchor text is especially used in internal links. It’s a technique that is used to have a positive impact on the SEO ranking of your landing page.

Anyhow, in the past few years, it has been seen that Google is not prioritising anchor text and has even personalised the sites, where anchor text appears to be spammy or inappropriate.

Your anchor text is safe, if it is in the navigation or footer and is well-written, relevant, and has high usability. In case, If your anchor text has low usability and is not appropriate, it makes your site skimpy. Your site may be penalised by google. 

Use of Metadata:

The use of metadata is now outdated. However before, it was advised to add targeted keywords into the meta tags and meta descriptions. It was assumed that the bots would crawl the meta description and rank the website based on this information.

Now Google has officially announced that meta descriptions do not affect page rankings, though that might not be completely true either. It may not matter what the text of the meta descriptions is, but Google takes into account the number of people who click through to your website. 

If the meta description made a user click your link then that’s great!. It indirectly supports SEO and increases the overall ranking of your web page.

Use of Linkbait:

Linkbait is the process of creating catchy titles to attract backlinks. Before marketers used to think that the backlink to your website mattered the most. 

A catchy title on a website leads to irrelevant content on another website, which was a big disappointment for users. At present, many search engines including Google have started discarding such links. 

However, it is important to keep in mind that you need to keep the content that matches the title and adds value to the reader.

Comment Spamming:

There was a time when SEO executives and bloggers used to post comments on several relevant blogs and articles to create a backlink to their website. 

However, today this has become an outdated technique that no longer works and even more chances are considered spam by search engines.

The best way to avoid being scammed is to try posting relevant and rich-content blogs. In this way, you can not only attract targeted audiences but would also be able to build relationships with other bloggers.

Short-tail Keywords Usage:

There was a belief that short-tail keywords attract more audiences. But it’s going the opposite in today’s digital world. According to a survey, around 70% of searches on google are made up of long-tail keywords. So it’s better to avoid using short keywords or phrases. 

As long-tail keywords tend to have less competition and a higher conversion rate. To stay ahead of the competition you need to start focusing on long-tail keywords instead of short keywords.

So above are the few SEO techniques, which are completely obsolete. If you are using any of those above techniques then it’s a complete waste of time to expect for ranking of your website. And on top of that many chances are there your site may get banned from search engines.

Now let’s come to our topic.

Is SEO Dead or Alive?

The simple answer is “No”. SEO still exists in the digital world. The reason why I explained those outdated SEO techniques is to make you understand that there are certain techniques, which are no longer validated but SEO is still there.

 If you are trying to rank your website but didn’t get any results that means you must be following any techniques that might not be giving results in today’s time.

It’s better to follow up with those techniques that will bring results for you on the search engines page.

Conclusion:

I think you must have got your answer now. If someone asks you about SEO’s existence, I am sure your answer will be no. Like technological advancement, SEO even has transformed itself and is trying to give users relevant information. It might be possible that at present, whatever techniques are available may not give you results tomorrow. 

To keep updating your website and business with SEO techniques, you need to contact a company where clients’ business development and growth are a top priority.

Why don’t you contact gloify? Here we are updated with the latest SEO trends and successfully give results in SEO and marketing activities for our clients.