Bad SEO Advice on Medium
Busting 5 SEO Myths
I’m always interested in reading SEO articles on Medium. When I’m not publishing game reviews or daft stories about being frightened of horses, I’m an SEO. It’s my job.
While much of the advice is spot-on, there’s an issue with well-meaning authors — and the occasional affiliate marketer — on the platform not knowing enough about a topic. A little bit of knowledge can be dangerous, or for those extolling the virtues of meta keywords, useless.
Let’s look at some titbits of wonky SEO advice that pop up, starting with those pesky meta keywords:
1. Meta Keywords
I built my first website in 1997, hard coding it in HTML, learning as I went with a book borrowed from the college library. Be grateful that you don’t have to worry about whether browsers support frames anymore.
Back then, meta keywords were best practice. Shovel an armful of them into your code, and with a bit of luck, Altavista, Excite, and Lycos would push your fantastic creation to the top of the nascent internet. Assuming you’d submitted it to them all for crawling in the first place, of course.
Where there’s a few quid to be made — and this was the time of the dot-com boom — there’ll always be people ready to game the system. So, the meta keywords tag became over-encumbered with spam, with the related sneaky technique of invisible text (white copy on a white background, for example) sending hidden search terms spiralling down pages.
These days, Google and Bing, the only search engines that will send your site any notable volume of traffic, don’t use them. Google confirmed as far back as 2009 that it no longer takes meta keywords into consideration, although they almost certainly deprecated them long before.
To those who speculate that it’s worth putting them in just in case they become ‘legal tender’ again: they won’t. Search engines are infinitely smarter these days and have more accurate ways of identifying what a page is about. The idea that meta keywords will become a ranking factor again is fanciful.
You can’t add them to your Medium posts, anyway, but it’s worth taking note if your own site’s CMS still gives the option of filling them in.
2. AI Content
I’ve only run into one post on Medium that has completely bamboozled me. Although it’s not about SEO per se, it talks about feeding copy and keywords into an AI assistant called Jasper to create blog posts in a jiffy.
See if you can guess the keyword they’re aiming for:
‘Kitchen gardens can range from a kitchen garden with a handful of small kitchen garden essentials, to a kitchen garden that is nothing less than a kitchen garden farm, with kitchen garden essentials such as fruit trees and kitchen garden flowers.’
Aside from this being the most egregious example of keyword stuffing I’ve ever seen — and it carries on throughout the article — why would you want your name associated with something so unreadable? Who would be the target market for reading this type of malfunctioning gibberish? Would a client want it anywhere near their site?
It’s web litter. Rubbish chucked out of a browser window. It highlights the worst excesses of the content farm style Google threw onto the pyre with it’s Panda algorithm update in 2011. For a great primer on Panda, check out this post on Search Engine Journal:
That the author called the software a ‘very powerful tool that makes your job as a blogger much easier’ after posting such an abysmal example takes superhuman levels of audacity.
There’s something in there, though.
From my brief experience with Jasper, it’s not bad at all. The copy it churns out is a little stilted, often over-optimised, and panics when introduced to idioms. It’s serviceable, though, as long as you don’t mind editing the content to bring it to life. Plus, it’s a technology that will improve.
The guff about kitchen gardens is from an affiliate marketer who, if we’re being charitable, hasn’t used it to its full potential. There lies the rub. To get the most out of Jasper, you’ll need to learn how to get the most out of it, proofread and edit the copy, and shell out on a subscription.
This type of AI tool could be the affiliate marketers’ best friend if used properly. For general bloggers, though? It’s not worth it. Yet.
3. Keyword Density
Related to the passage above, the optimal keyword density is a topic that won’t go away.
Keyword density is a metric that measures the number of times your primary keyword appears on a page. In other words, it’s a percentage of how often ‘kitchen gardens’ appears in the previous section.
For absolute clarity, there isn’t an optimal keyword density.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t use your keywords in smart ways…
4. LSI Keywords
There’s more than a kernel of truth about LSI keywords. LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing, and it’s just a fancy way of saying ‘words that are closely related to each other’.
The issue here is that Google doesn’t use LSI to rank pages. It has its own, much more developed equivalent that delves beyond what you’re attempting to rank for, and explores the subject as a whole.
It encourages more natural writing. Rather than shoehorning ‘kitchen garden’ a dozen times into the same paragraph, or even spraying synonyms throughout your piece like a tomcat, Google looks for a rounded understanding of the search term. A gentle authority, to quote Alan Partridge.
After all, what use is a guide to kitchen gardens if it doesn’t mention different plants, herbs, containers, and soil? Search engines don’t get it right every time, but a time-travelling SEO from the 2000s wouldn’t recognise today’s SERPs.
This ‘topical mapping’ is an important on-page rabbit hole I’ll revisit it in a future post.
5. Toxic Backlinks
If anyone on the planet knows how Google ticks, it’s John Mueller. He’s their Webmaster Trends Analyst and often shares sage nuggets of information on his Twitter feed.
His tweets can be open to interpretation, but on toxic backlinks, he couldn’t be any clearer: don’t worry about them.
Almost every site that picks up some traffic will have a barrage of random links pointing to it from low-quality sources. Whether they’re aggregators, directories, or auto-generated spam, you can’t stop them. Trying to would be akin to King Canute commanding the tide to go out.
Sure, you can use a disavow tool, but what’s the point when search engines already ignore these trashy links?
Where to find good SEO advice for beginners
The internet is awash with SEO tips, but part of the problem when you’re new to the discipline is being able to sort the good advice from the bad.
The Moz Beginner’s Guide to SEO was always a great resource, and it’s the first place I point anybody interested in learning the ropes. It’s been overhauled recently, too, so pretty much everything in there is up to date. It’ll give you a good foundation, but above all, you’ll need to get your hands dirty. Knowing the theory is fine, but putting it into action is where you gain a better understanding of how all the moving parts link up.
