5 SEO Signals That Don't Matter Anymore

Monday, 15 September 2014

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 Page rank 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 are widely used before,but are not 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 doesnot have any direct affect on website ranking.

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 is not about how many social followers do you have,it is about how many you are able to engage.

Keyword Density :-

Keyword density is simply the percentage of times a keyword appears in text on a page.This metric is talked about a lot a few years back in context of helping websites rank.But today,it has most of a counter-productive effect.Now it is only used in a high level comparative sense when trying to identify content that have manipulative patterns,i.e spamming to get a search bot's attention.

Competitor Backlinks :-

There are tonnes of SEO tools out there that let you do competitive analysis to see how well you are doing against your competitors.A common metric used in this context is the number of backlinks your competitors have.

It is an important 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 have 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 the result they miss the big 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 should not restrict yourself to a particular keyword.

Such site owners look how well there site 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 the 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 the more organic traffic will you get.

What about you ??? Do you put any stock into these SEO signals ???

Also stay tuned with us for more information.Happy Blogging :P :)