SEO isn’t what it used to be. Back in the early days of Google, there were lots of quick and dirty tricks to fool Google and other search engines into ranking your page highly. That doesn’t fly anymore. It’s time to make sure you’re doing the right thing to get your website to the top of Google.

Do: Use Relevant Links

Linking to relevant sites and articles is great for your PageRank. You’re best off having a few high-quality relevant links instead of ten low-quality links for the sake of it. The links can be both internal – to your own website, or external – to someone else’s, ideally to both.

Don’t: Link Farm

A Link Farm or Link Exchange is a group of sites who all link to every other site in the group. The idea is to exploit Google PageRank and increase the score for each of the sites, ranking them higher on Google. Links might be hidden as white text on a white background or simply off the screen using CSS trickery, all very sneaky. The bad news for this tactic is that Google can quite easily recognise this and it will result in your website getting banned or penalized. This will effectively destroy search engine traffic to your site, don’t do it!

Do: Update older Articles

When you have multiple pages which overlap on content it dilutes your rankings on Google. Suppose you have three articles on how to bake a cake (cake baking for newbies, how to cake, cake starter tips), which one does Google serve for a search? It’s much better to return to content and update it, keeping it fresh. Doing this does two things, first of all, it prevents the aforementioned dilution but it also helps build on the strength of an article. When Google sees that a page has been updated, it knows that the information is more likely to be relevant and should appear higher in results.

If you’re wanting to be slick, you can look through your analytics and build on already popular articles. Consider merging less-popular articles into relevant, yet better-performing, articles. Doing this correctly can grow your traffic, improve the quality of your content, and dispense with regurgitating content! Win-Win-Win!

Don’t: Regurgitate Content

The Best SEO Tricks of 2016! 2017: New SEO Tricks for a New Year! Eighteen SEO Tricks for 2018… you get the idea. Every year websites duplicate their own content and update them each year in an attempt of easily producing content. It’s a completely understandable thing to do. Unfortunately, to most people, it’s a fairly “spammy” thing to do and Google agrees, this tactic can harm traffic to your website. New topics year after year is a challenge, but much the rule prevails: Quality over Quantity.

Don’t: Copy Content

The temptation is to not create content from scratch, why do what’s been done before? Someone else has probably already done something similar, just copy that! Well, morality aside, this isn’t going to help your SEO. Google has already seen that page that you’re copying (you probably used Google to find it in the first place!). Google will value the original content and push copied content down in the rankings.

It’s worth noting this applies for large amounts of text, you won’t be penalized for quoting elements of other articles, and if you do need to refer to an article in its entirety (say, a press release), then consider linking directly to the relevant article.

Do: Consider Video or PodCasts

The future’s video. An increasing number of people don’t want to read an article (and if you’ve made it this far into this one, congratulations and stay strong! ?). Many more people digest their information through YouTube and PodCasts. Google knows this and ranks articles with accompanying video higher. It’s not to be taken lightly, however, as a poorly produced video may boost SEO but it could put off potential visitors, but with the rise in consumption of videos, this point can not be ignored forever!

That’s all we have for you today, feel free to share some of your tips with us and get in contact at [email protected] and happy Optimising!