Being in the industry for 10 years this year has allowed me to see SEO strategies come and go. For many of you who have longevity in the industry, you will understand many of my references and have most likely will have used them at some time or another for your clients’ benefits.
Remember when to get organic search placement we did:
- Keyword stuffing – loading keywords into image alt tags?
- How about when we loaded keywords into HTML comment tags?
- Or used the meta keyword tag to drive search traffic?
Keyword density is another tactic that is becoming passé as well. I still believe that good keyword density on a home page is still, at this point in time, a way to get organic traffic, but making the content readable is becoming much more important both for visitors and for search engines.
I don’t believe that search engines drop sites with strong keyword density at this time, but that day is coming. Just look at my list above of the things we used to do that really got good organic placement. 7% keyword density on web pages will soon be added to that list.
What I feel is now more important is that the overall site have Web authority, be content and information-rich, and be updated regularly. The new world of SEO is less about tricks and more about content and inbound marketing strategies.