Search Engine optimization (SEO) was the buzzword of years long ago, like, 17 years ago. One might think that because it’s been around for so long everyone knows how to leverage it for their personal use and drive hordes of potential sales leads to their website. Although there have been a few successful stories, SEO is still a science of such fluid structure that even now marketers are having difficulty taming it.

When it first gained popularity, everyone who was anyone adopted it as an online marketing strategy. Then Google released the Panda update and everyone’s efforts went back to zero. Now that almighty Google is promoting value-rich content, has SEO become a thing of the distant past? With today’s digital marketing terrain, is SEO still optimal for promoting your website?

SEO is still very much relevant, although is has taken a considerable step backwards to make room for other digital marketing strategies such as social media, email and especially content marketing. Good SEO cannot exist without equally good content, as is highlighted by Google’s algorithm. Sales leads are driven towards your site by these relevant, well-researched, reliable and authentic content.

Whether you are still using these top 3 detrimental SEO tactics or plan to use them in the future – DON’T:

Keyword Stuffing. The number one no-no for SEO and considered as spamming. Relevant content discusses topics using more than one word, so do yourself a favor and try to expand your own blogging vocabulary. Also, readers (i.e. sales leads) generally abandon a site the moment they read the same word used more than three times in a sentence. Reciprocal links and link farms. Almighty Google hates it. Period. Spreading articles through article marketing directories. These artificial link generating sites provide little benefit for your website. It’s much better to share your articles with topic-related websites that help promote your authority about your chosen keywords.

The moral of this story is that there is no holy grail for lead generation marketing. Each and every effective marketing strategy is the result of careful research and implementation where ROI is measured by carefully defined statistics. The main purpose of optimizing one’s website is still sales leads generation, so whether your digital marketing makes use of this age-old marketing model, as long as it’s not broken and is doing its purpose, there is no need to abandon it just to join the current fad.