I know this is going to be controversial, but I am ready to take the heat. If you are in SEO, it’s possible you might be working at entry positions executing activities like Profile Submissions, Classifieds, Social Bookmarking, Blog Commenting, Forum Submissions, Article submissions, etc.
Want to break it to you that these things don’t work anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I did it a lot between 2011-15 to rank my websites. It worked like a charm. But unfortunately, they don’t anymore.
Also, I have tested this almost every other year in the past few years as well, and they don’t have any value, except just showing a deliverable to a client who doesn’t understand SEO. It just helps you show you did something. Your time is much more valuable, and spend this time learning other more valuable SEO skills.
Building Links Doesn’t Work Anymore
Even people who know virtually nothing about SEO, content quality, or engagement know one thing: links are supposed to help you get noticed online. In some ways, this is true. In others, it couldn’t be more off-base.
Backlinks, however, if done correctly, will allow Google’s favorable light to shine upon you.
Yes, high-quality links can help Google determine the authority and relevance of a page. They can also provide context for your readers and help you make valuable SEO connections between the pages on your site.
All links are not created equal, so make sure you’re looking for the best ones to add to your site.
Low-quality links, however, can hurt your SEO more than they help it. And this is by design rather than by accident. So there it is. Stop all your linking and publicity-related activities. You now have one single solitary content mission.
What could you focus on?
- Learn to build a Tech SEO Backlog, and prioritize based on effort vs. impact.
- Understand how Google discover, crawl, render, index, and rank a page. Visualize this as a funnel, and how can you improve each of these stages.
- Learn keyword research, aggregated from multiple sources, map it to topics (manually/via tool), and build a content roadmap
- Map content topics to the user journey, and track how it improves UX metrics.
- Build a content production process, and learn to work with teams executing it
- Be more business-oriented, and see how it helps businesses drive measurable and impactful results.
- Learn how Google Search Console is showing the data, understand those tables, go granular, and learn how you could extract the data to improve your content or SEO strategy
- Learn SERP analysis, and how to extract the intent. It’s much harder than you think.
- Learn about SERP Snippets, and what it means for a user journey
These are just a few of the things that are top of my mind. What else would you add to improve as an SEO practitioner?
I would like to highlight the point that SEO means optimizing your website for the USERS and not for the SEARCH ENGINES. So if you focus on adding value to your target audience with your content, you automatically impress the search engine. Most “SEO individuals” focus so much on optimizing content for the search engine that they forget who their end user is.
Well, if you work with a website that’s large enough, or built with a custom stack, then optimizing the website for search engines becomes equally important.
When I say optimizing for search engines, I mean to say, making sure Bots are able to discover, crawl, render, and index the pages we want to index. A lot of things go wrong when technical implementation is not appropriate or looked after.
We need to structure the website properly so the crawlers can crawl the pages and index them. It’s like a library where different books are kept on different shelves.
I think user engagement from external sources is still an active ranking factor for Google. Therefore, along with social media, social bookmarking becomes a relevant strategy to boost your overall SEO.
However, I’ll surely concede this, the manner in which social bookmarking was carried out a few years ago is surely outdated. Now, we need to put in place strategies that are more relevant to the current times and Google rules.
I believe social bookmarking is more like being social on that platform than leaving your website link.
Additionally, I would say one thing about the Indian market which is strange even SEMrush projected the data about SEO jobs in India. Link Building is the favourite part of Indian clients. They still believe doing these activities work like magic.
Absolutely right…but the thing is if not all but most of the Indian clients want backlinks too but don’t want to pay separately for digital PR or high authority guest blogging. So, SEOs are left with these SBM, directory submissions…etc. just to fill their services.
These things used to work in the early days but since then the SEOs have also raised the bar and got into much stronger tactics to follow. And cheap SEO services are also a factor that every other one is selling!!
There are a lot of in-house and agency SEOs that do this, but the number is very limited. The in-house people show the task they have completed but the result has not arrived, and the agencies fool the clients using this method. In most cases, such work consists of tick mark tasks, tasks that are done just to tick the box.
Bottom line, link building in general is a watered-down activity. I find SEO testing works far better than links in most circumstances.
