Outdated content marketing practices you need to stop applying right now

by Helen Sheplyakova Blogger

Content marketing is a great tool many businesses and brands use to ensure online exposure to their prospective clients, as well as boost the popularity of their services and make them stand out among other providers. Content marketing is the self-proclaimed king of SEO, the driving force that moves certain platforms up the rankings, increases traffic and draws leads to their businesses. It’s a marketing tool even small business owners who’ve established a website for their company have started using not too long ago.

However, a lot of inexperienced and uninformed people, who don’t know too much about SEO or beneficial content marketing practices attempt creating and distributing content online. As they don’t really understand how to direct content marketing practices toward conforming to the online ranking mechanisms and don’t manage to keep up with the evolving strategies and search engine changes, they often fail to reach their marketing goals. Moreover, they often fall into using ‘proven’ content marketing practices that worked a couple of years ago but were demolished after the recent Google update rollout.

If you’re a beginning copywriter/online marketing pro willing to master the magic of content marketing, stay away from these outdated practices. They may not just slow down your progress and turn out to be not too effective when it comes to achieving certain marketing goals. They may also damage your online reputation and lead to bans and penalties.

Content marketing practices you need to stop now

Guest blogging just for links

Writing guest posts on reputable online resources is one of the most successful link/lead building practices that boost online ranks. It’s the way to get your new business noticed by a wider audience and improve the visibility of your website at the same time. Getting your high-quality guest posts featured on top networks with the prevailing domestic traffic and high Alexa traffic ranking indicators is the way to go. However, you need to discard these poor guest blogging practices to reach higher content marketing results and avoid penalties from Google:

writing on resources willing to accept low-quality guest posts;
guest blogging for link building purposes only - it was a wonderful thing to do back in the day, but now Google watches the number of backlinks appearing on different websites and leading to the same network and imposes penalties when tracks down any suspicious activities; additionally, the quality of platforms the backlink is posed on matters a lot these days.
submitting link-stuffed articles to article directories;
cooperating with networks that can’t offer too much when it comes to traffic and authority;
duplicating someone’s content;
including links with improper anchor text – for instance, linking to your hairdressing website when using ‘hair tutorials’ anchor instead of ‘hairdressing services’ anchor;
writing poor content – small (less than 700 words), keyword stuffed articles not relevant to the problems and the interests of the audience you create them for.

When writing guest posts, make them as engaging, helpful and appealing to the audience of the website it will be published on as possible to encourage them to click on the link you include in the article and visit your website. This way you’ll kill two birds with one stone.

Keyword stuffing

A while ago, Google didn’t care too much about the quality of content you post on your website or share on other platforms to build links and gain online exposure. You could stuff a post with as many keywords as possible, put poorly structured keywords into sentences without making too much grammatical or logical sense and even use computer-generated content, and it will still drive traffic to your website.

However, these content marketing practices will not only make your website and business appear less reputable and professional, but may also lead to Google penalties. Therefore, make sure that the content you post features proper grammar, provides useful information to the visitors and includes a moderate number of different keywords, which are spread evenly throughout the article and are related to its main topic.

If you're an owner of a small business (like a hair salon, a moving crew or a cleaning company) and you want to invest in content marketing, hire an experienced professional instead of wasting money on DIY methods.

Overdoing it with the link networks

Just as the content marketing practices mentioned above, building backlinks through link networks was one of the popular and quite effective SEO tactics back in the day. These networks were highly demanded just a few years ago, as the only thing website owners had to do to receive an enormous amount of backlinks posted on different websites and boost their website’s ranks is to pay those networks. It’s way faster, easier and cheaper that guest blogging, for instance.

However, there’re certain problems with these networks that should keep you away from spending too much money on their services and acquiring too many backlinks through them. The first issue is that backlinks they provide often come from questionable and/or irrelevant websites, which lowers their quality. Getting too many links to your website posted on spam platforms will make you no good as well. Lastly, Google started paying more attention to the sites your backlinks are posted on and categorizing websites that have too many backlinks, especially low-quality ones, as spam. That means – penalties, the decline in traffic and ranks, the waste of money…

Therefore, this content marketing practice needs to stop. If you still choose to rely on link networks, be quite selective about them and don’t order too many backlinks not to make your website look too suspicious to Google.