Are you trying to figure out why old  SEO tricks like Link SPAM, Geo-coded landing pages and Vanity URLs don’t work as well as they use to? Maybe you lucked out recently and found your “optimized” site top-ranked in Google for your valued keyword, but now can’t find your corporate website anywhere? Part of the mission to “make the world’s information accessible and useful” is to filter out the relevant from the irrelevant. To fulfill that Mission, Google and other search engines are getting really good at plugging the holes in their search algorithms. Here are three things to avoid and why:

Directory Submissions Can Cause More Harm Than Good

Search engine crawlers like Google consider quality and quantity of links to your site to help determine ranking in the search engines. There are a number of SEOs relying on automated tools to submit your site to thousands of directories to generate links. Search engines track these patterns, including SPAM Traps. You may find yourself in a Sandbox, wondering what happened to your listing. What’s more, if you change your address, you may find outdated address information proliferated on hundreds of sites. This issue can be resolved with  Webmaster tools, Google Places and lots of patience.

Geo-Coded Landing Pages and Duplicate Content

When a search engine crawler navigates your sitemap to find and index pages, some SEOs use tools to generate hundreds of pages on your site by adding a zip code tag into each page to make it unique. This trick may no longer work; in fact, you may be penalized for duplicate content. Duplicate content should not be confused with properly attributed Syndicated Content. To fix this issue, you should remove those pages (or the plugin that creates them), re-index your site and re-submit to Google.

Vanity URLS Have Lost Their Glamour

In the past you may have been lucky with a keyword-based URL that quickly attracted traffic.  Today, copious content is required to earn top ranking. Think about how hard you would need to work to displace Microsoft, Google and Amazon for a top-ranked listing for a popular keyword like Cloud Services.

On-Page SEO is Critical

Google your company name to find out how easy it is to find your corporate website.  Does it appear on the first page? If so, is there a clear, clean title for your business?  Does it include your company phone number? Is there a well-written description appearing below the title, or is there default gibberish? Are there multiple pages below the listing (e.g. Contact Us, About Us, Services)? Depending on how you answered these questions, you may need help with your On-Page SEO.

At ClikCloud we review websites for MSPs, CSPs and Telco Agents weekly. We have helped countless business owners clean up their sites and get properly indexed in the Google search engine. Many times the proud owners of a brand new website find these details have been overlooked by their webmaster. It takes time to resolve these issues, so do not delay. If you are still doing SEO like it’s 1999, contact us today. If you are not sure, sign up for a complimentary website evaluation (click here) and we will let you know what we think.