SEO is chock full of technical terms and technical tools and applications, so it is important to understand the jargon and keep an eye on how things are progressing or evolving.

However even though issues were found with old methods and coding, some people still debate whether the newer changes are as good, or better.  It is up to you to decide whether to keep to old ways or adapt to a new environment.

Technical updates

XHTML 1 + has taken over from HTML 3.2.   SEO experts expounded and web developers used simple HTML for a long time.  But it is considered archaic in today’s cyber world.  Sites designed in this code look outdated.  While coding should still be simple and easy to use, XHTML 1+ limits the size of the code naturally and makes your site simple to crawl through by search engine robots.

What was DMOZ is now Delicious Popular.  Submitting pages to DMOZ directories in order to gain authority links has left some people waiting for years.  This elitist directory system has been a failure.  Delicious has killed it.   It is suggested that you try to get listed on the Delicious homepage instead.

Even though Portals have been made obsolete by Google, there are still some sites which try to imitate those that were popular from a decade or more ago. Portals were responsible for overwhelming the visitor with information overload.  The logic because they were stuck, they would have to find something in amongst the hundreds of links to click on.  This resulted in visitors jumping ship, so to speak, looking for a less cluttered and less confusing environment.  White space and focused pages with no distractions gives them just that.  They offer a visitor one keyword per page and allow their brains to function without eye strain and headaches.

Positions and Rankings

Positions for top positions were sometimes guaranteed by SEO consultants, strange as that may sound.  Today any SEO consultant worth their salt should instead offer ROI and conversions which can be guaranteed to some extent.

Page Ranking Sculpting has made way for Making every page matter and useful.  Page Ranking Sculpting used to be the art of linking certain web pages with a ‘nofollowed’ internal link so that they would ensure more important pages got more attention from the search engine.  In essence, they cut off the search engine from doing its job of indexing and were overdone.  Page Ranking is not advisable.  It is far better to make each and every page on your website matter by according it with its own usefulness and status.

Forums

Think before your add a forum onto your site.  They are problems in the making as the people who use them are most often aggressive and use them as a place to post gripes and criticism and generally spread their venom.  While this is not true to all who post on forums it is prevalent enough to have warranted a change. Today the focus is rather on social media which encompasses social community sites.  Communities add positive enhancements as the content posted is based on how popular it is which means it is mostly of a good quality.  Communities also have their problems though with people attempting to superimpose aggressive behavior on a community site, but these problems are not as wide spread as problems encountered on a forum.

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