How to avoid outdated SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) encompasses all activities aimed at gaining relevant traffic to a website through unpaid search results. To ensure that your SEO is of high quality, you need to follow the basic rules:

• be search engine friendly;
• create quality and interesting content about the topics you want to be ranked in search engines;
• have credibility through links from other websites;

The most important thing is to ensure that your website is easy for search engines to find. You can do this primarily by linking all the pages of your site, automating the updating of XML sitemaps (a special list of all the pages on your site that you want search engines to index), or having a clear URL structure.

The basics of search engine optimization don't change over time. However, it's different for trends that SEO is done by. In the following overview, we'll look at the five most common myths that circulate around optimization.

Domain Ages

For Google, domain age is not a ranking criterion. Rather, older sites have the advantage of a longer time to get backlinks and therefore a higher domain rating for their site.

SEO Directories

SEO Directories are history. They still work, but are used very little these days due to their minimal effect on improving SEO. But it always depends on the industry you are in. For some catalogs, such as industry, niche or local ones, a listing is really worthwhile, even useful. But experts don't recommend massive registrations to dozens of catalogs at once. It won't give you a competitive advantage, especially with Google.

Web loading speed

Google announced back in 2018 that it doesn't care about the loading speed of the desktop version of the site. The evaluation factor is now the loading speed of the mobile version. As part of a user-friendly experience, we recommend addressing not only the loading speed of the mobile version of the site, but the speed of the site in general.

Keyword density

What is the ideal amount of keywords per page? When is more really less? When creating text, we need to think of our readers first and foremost. 

Meta title and meta description

Meta title and description are the tags that are most often found at the top of a web page. They are very important not only for users but also for robots that crawl the website. From the category of meta tags focus mainly on meta descriptions (page descriptions). Be creative! This is because both the page description and the title are visible in search results and if they are different from the others in the SERP, they will increase your CTR (click-through rate). On the other hand, you can omit filling in the meta tag keywords, which are nowadays an obsolete feature. 

If your website has been running on outdated methods, don't despair. We at Railsformers are always ready to help you. Quality SEO is the foundation for a successful website, don't underestimate its power.