5 SEO Best Practices that don't work anymore

1. Keywords tag:

The keywords tags found in web page source code were so misused that search engines quit looking at them over 12 years ago. The only thing such tags are now good for is telling your competition what words you think are important.

2. Keyword density:

Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. Historically, you wanted to have your keywords be between 4 & 7% of the total words on the page.

3. Exact match domains:

This is a fairly new change (September 29, 2012). Prior to this update, Google would give a ranking boost to sites that had a domain name that exactly matched a searcher’s query.

4. Buying links:

This has always been a bad idea, but it worked until the Google Penguin update. Links are supposed to be a vote for content from one web page to another.

5. Content spinning:

Another SEO practice that has always been a bad idea, usually only practiced by fringe “black hat” SEOs. With content spinning, a marketer would take an article, run the keywords through a thesaurus or spinning tool, and republish a “spun” article with the new words. It was possible to publish hundreds or even thousands of versions of an article that were different enough that they weren’t considered duplicates.