SEO Habits Worth Forgetting

Jill Kurtz, Owner, Kurtz Digital Strategy

Best practices for SEO have changed over time. So, it is not surprising that some concepts that used to be important are not so critical now.Here are several ideas that you can let go:

• You need a lot of pages. The quality of your content is more important than the number of pages that comprise your website. Search algorithms no longer assume that page volume is an indicator of a site’s authority on a topic. Quality of content is far more important than page count.
• User experience is secondary to SEO tactics. No SEO tricks are more important than a great user experience. Pay attention to your analytics for indicators of user happiness at the site. Factors like page load time, bounce rate, time on page, and page views per visit indicate a good user experience AND help your search ranking.
• Images aren’t important. Images are important to the user experience and to SEO. Search engines can’t see images on websites so it is important to give each an alt tag that lets the search crawler detect what it is about. Descriptive titles and captions are an added bonus. Further, using keywords in the image file name can help with your site rank.
• Q&A doesn’t help. Question and answer and numbered steps have risen in importance with the Google snippet feature. A featured snippet is shown on some search result pages when a question-based query is used. Since these types of queries are becoming more common, this is a great opportunity to get attention.
• Domain age matters. Hanging on to a longstanding domain so you don’t lose search engaging ranking. Don’t worry.  Factors like quality content and links to your content are more important to page rank than the age of the domain.

All of the nuances become less important if you keep this rule of thumb in mind: provide a website that is easy to use and addresses the needs of your target audience and your website will rank well for applicable searches.