This is not a blog to tell you not to bother with some of the following techniques, as I’m sure different SEO’s will have seen different successes come from many different areas. But here at SEO Consult we optimise many sites, and through research and development there are some which don’t have the same influence as they did 18, 12 and even 6 months ago – and I’d suggest that you spend less time on these things.

With the ever changing faces of Google, i.e. caffeine, mayday and brands update it seems that the algorithm has simplified, concentrating more on key areas and less on peripherals. Here are some ideas that I’d suggest to any site owners.

W3c Validation – Although a valid web page is always going to work and display more efficiently I have not seen any evidence to suggest it has any impact on overall rankings. Therefore don’t spend a fortune in time or money trying to eradicate every last error that has probably been in your markup since inception.

Description and Keywords Meta Tags – Google have stated (in not so many words) that these are no longer used to factor a websites rankings, I’d always suggest using keywords within the description as a click through exercise as much as anything else.

Keyword Stuffing – Although content is still vitally important, gone are the days of pushing to get a keyword in every sentence, Google’s semantic indexing appears to be more accurate than ever so user friendly content is much more acceptable.

PageRank Sculpting – Through the Nofollow attribute webmasters were attempting to push PageRank to important pages, to dispel this technique Google changed the way nofollow works. Now a nofollowed link will be seen as a non-existent link and therefore sculpting is no longer possible.

Reciprocal Linking – Another one that Google has publically come out and stated their disdain for! It comes back to the old argument of usability and serving the site visitors, personally I have seen success from reciprocal linking but there were other factors that could have influenced the power of these links. General rule, don’t bother.

Paid Links – God knows how Google goes about finding these, but they do. My advice is to only pay for a link if it is from a themed site to yours, were your link will actually be of use to someone reading that site.

I hope these have been useful, as I say at the top this is just a guide from what I have personally seen. Next time I will be discussing the core factors that influence great rankings.

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