It’s high time to change your “traditional SEO mindset.”
The age-old SEO tactics like keyword density, backlink building and stuff like that are not going to work in the future.
Like every company, Google is in a consolidation mode. It’s trying its best to serve better content to its users. It is even trying to snatch the rest 30% of search engine share from Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo etc.
Google is trying hard to reward quality content in search results without relying on the traditional methods used by the webmasters and SEOs. To some extent, it has found some ways and means also (search engine signals) to achieve its mission.
As a result, lots of SEO professionals are feeling the bluntness and inability of traditional SEO tactics to rank a web-page high in search engines.
Read More: Link Basics – SEO: Link Building in Depth
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So, what should be your SEO tactics?
Produce quality content, and let your users optimize it for higher search engine rankings. Let them consume, vote and share some links here and there.
You can call it “Stealth SEO.” An SEO tactic where you are optimizing your content by – Raising its quality, making it likable by users (searchers) and without following the traditional methods.
It means it's not visibly SEO optimized. But backed by invisible yet effective optimization tactics to rank higher in SERPs.
Ingredients of Stealth SEO
1. Quality and relevant content
2. The reputation of the content author (Google Author Rank is coming soon)
3. Natural and earned links from other authoritative sites
4. Time spent – the more the better
5. Social media sharing (likes, tweets, and stumbles)
6. Authority of the site
Bounce Rate: Will not be criteria to rank high a web-page.
If a reader lands on a page, who came from an organic search result. Spent 20 minutes or so to consume the content and bounce-back (click the back button). That doesn’t mean the quality of the web-page (article) is low. Yes, it may affect the overall site authority, but not the individual page.
Why Google likes Stealth SEO
1. Provide better user experience by empowering the users. It’s like the democratization of web-content. Let them vote and decide the winner to rank higher in search results.
2. Excessive use/abuse of traditional ranking methods (traditional SEO tactics)
Every rule set once has to go one day, due to excessive use. Or you can say abuse. People have abused all possible things like – keywords to links to anchor texts. The list is endless.
You are not late
Good news is – You are not late. Google has still not implemented all the required ranking signals in its algorithms.
It’s the perfect time to start practicing Stealth SEO to make your site proof from all sorts of frequently changing SEO rules. Just unlearn your traditional SEO skill a bit. And tune in to Stealth Mode.
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