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| 5 SEO Signals That Don't Matter Anymore |
SEO signals, or metrics, are a way of quantifying a website's usefulness in a variety of areas. The (late) Google PageRank is a common example. Others include Moz Domain and Page Authority.
These are the most common ones, and there are hundreds of others as
well that allow us to quickly analyze patterns and trends. Not very
signal is useful however, and some have been phased out with changes in SEO over the years. Surprisingly, people still use some of them. Here are the top 5 SEO pointers you need to stop looking at! SEO is not evergreen. What was a widely popular practice yesterday is
today's malpractice and tomorrow's crime. Some SEO signals were widely
used before, but are not as useful today. Here are give such signals
that are very common.
Social media following
Does having a large social media presence help? Of course, but not with
website ranking. The number of followers does not have any direct affect
on rankings.
However, social media can help indirectly. The more you engage with your
social followers, the more traffic you get and the more the likelihood
of getting links, which in turn help somewhat with SEO. So it isn't
about how many social followers you have, it is about how many are you
able to engage!
Keyword Density
Keyword density is simply the percentage of times a given keyword
appears in text on a page. This metric was talked about a lot a few
years back in context of helping websites rank. But today, it has more
of a counter-productive effect. Now it is only used in a high level
comparative sense when trying to identify content that might have
manipulative patterns, i.e. spamming to get a search bot's attention.
Competitors Backlinks
There are tonnes of SEO tools out there that let you do competitive
analysis to see how well you're doing against your competitors. A common
metric used in this context is the number of backlinks your competitors
have.
It is important to note that this number does not reflect on a coherent
understanding of a site's performance. A larger number than yours
doesn't mean your competitor will always rank better than you, because
the quality of backlinks has a greater weightage. And not to mention
that the more backlinks you have, the higher your risk of having a
negative backlink profile.
Rank for specific keywords
Many
site owners tend to focus only on one or two keywords. As a result they
miss the bigger picture and fail to see trends that they should be
paying attention to. While it is true that you should target a specific
niche, you shouldn't restrict yourself to a particular keyword.
Such site owners look at how well their website is performing for those
specific keywords, and consider it to be a success. What they don't
realize is, you need horizontal coverage to withstand search engine
updates and penalties in the future. Google and other search engines
roll out updates frequently, and these updates target search queries.
AdWords Spending
A popular SEO myth
has it that Google favors your site if you spend money on AdWords. Some
'consultants' will tell you that the more you spend, the better your
standing and the more organic traffic you receive.
That is of course not true. Check out the following post where I have discussed the matter in greater detail.
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