I know, SEO’s never been quick or easy.
But the entire thing can seem particularly daunting as the search industry evolves.
Which of the once effective tactics no longer work?
Which of the less popular ones are actually worth it?
And what is the best SEO advice for those who can’t afford to do 10 years’ worth of reading up?
For today’s post, I asked Bill Slawski, Barry Schwartz, Eric Enge, and other SEO experts (that I personally respect and admire) these questions.
Here are the answers from the best in the industry.
Bill Slawski
Director of Search at Go Fish Digital; President and Founder at SEO by the Sea
Which SEO tactics or metrics do you think people should just leave in the past (but they won’t)?
Google never used Keyword Density, LSI Keywords, Age of Domain Registration, Site Uptime, CCTLDs, Use of Google Analytics,
Facebook likes and shares, # of Employees listed in LinkedIn as ranking signals.
I’ve seen these referred to in linkbait posts on Google Ranking Signals, and referring people to articles like those misleads and misinforms many people.
Which underrated SEO tactic do you wish people would focus on instead?
People aren’t using Structured Data markup as described at schema.org and on the Google Developers pages to earn information on rich Knowledge panels and rich snippets.
These are sources of information about how search works and where it will be growing in the future that are worth paying a lot more attention to.
If you could give a newbie version of yourself who’s just starting out in SEO one piece of SEO advice, what would it be?
Take the time to learn Python to build tools, and to experience first hand how something such as Tensorflow and machine learning works, because the future of Search and SEO probably involves more coding than it does now.
Eric Enge
Founder and CEO at Stone Temple Consulting; Author at Search Engine Land, Forbes, and Moz
Which SEO tactics or metrics do you think people should just leave in the past (but they won’t)?
Overdoing pursuit of the long tail of search.
We end up working with many companies every year that have published way too many pages, because they think that this will bring them more traffic.
And, every year, we create new case studies where we reduce a site’s page count by 50% of more, and see traffic grow from 40% to 100% or more.
Create too many pages, and you end up creating thin content, and it hurts your overall traffic.
Which underrated SEO tactic do you wish people would focus on instead?
Improving content quality.
Instead of adding pages, many of these sites should focus on improving the quality of the pages they have.
This also happens many times per year — we’ll work on the top category pages of a web site, and add new content, or replace existing content, and traffic soars, often more than doubling the traffic to the pages we work on.
It all starts by having a user focused view of what should be on the page.
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