As the web evolves, certain traffic-building tactics are going to fall by the wayside, while others will rise to prominence.

Yet many webmasters will still continue to employ old traffic-building-tactics even once they stop working. Why? Because Google doesn’t announce when they change their algorithm.

Here are three previously popular traffic-building tactics that are now dead. If you’re using any of these tactics, it’s time to pick a different approach and move on.

Marketing with Low Quality Articles

Article marketing used to be one of the most popular tactics on the internet.

Webmasters would write articles on just about any topic, whether they had expertise or not, and hope they could get that article to rank.

Once the article was ranked, they’d point a link to their website and get traffic from people who click through.

This tactic is very definitely dead today. Sites like EzineArticles and Article Alley have taken huge hits in traffic since the Panda update. Even eHow.com, a relatively high quality website, took a hit.

If you must use this tactic, stick to higher quality content directories like Medium or LinkedIn Pulse that have community verification of content quality.

Link Wheels, Linking Schemes and Structures

Linking schemes have existed ever since Google introduced PageRank. It started out with simple reciprocal linking, where webmasters linked to one another to boost rankings. Then it moved to three-way linking and soon into fully-fledged link wheels.

Today, Google has pretty much shut down all these linking schemes. Even the most complicated linking structures involving many layers of link juice flows simply isn’t going to do the job.

Google has implemented sophisticated detection technologies that make this tactic more or less null.

Directory Submissions

In the past, getting your website into various internet directories could be an easy way to boost PageRank and increase rankings. Today this tactic doesn’t really work at all.

There are still a few directories that can pull some weight. The DMOZ community sourced directory and the Yahoo! directory can still lend you some link juice.

That said, the amount of effort and money it takes to get into a quality directory just isn’t worth the effort. The same time and money could be put into other tactics that result in a much higher ROI.

Basically…

Basically, the overall search engine scheme is changing. Low quality links are being phased out more and more, to the point where they have virtually no impact.

The best way to get your name out there online today is to actually put out high quality content, then build links using connections with real people.

This takes longer than using instant gratification tactics. But it’s what works. It’s been said that in business, the one who wins is the person who’s willing to do what his competitors aren’t willing to do.

In SEO, creating high quality content with high quality backlinks is what it takes. If you spend your time and energy doing this while your competitors are looking for shortcuts, you’ll come out ahead in the end.

Today, with over 200 million smartphones in circulation, mobile SEO is more important than ever before.

Ever since smartphones began taking off, mobile SEO has been getting more and more attention.

Throw in the Apple 6S and the Siri, which pulls the majority of its results from local searches, and the picture becomes quite clear: if you operate a local business, you can no longer afford to ignore mobile SEO.

What exactly does mobile SEO entail? How can you improve your mobile SEO?

Traditional Factors Matter

Mobile SEO utilizes some of the traditional SEO factors, as well as quite a few non-traditional ones.

To start with, you need to get a lot of backlinks to your website. These backlinks should be from well-established websites that already have solid reputations.

Unlike regular websites, however, you want to get backlinks from websites that are also based in your geographical area. This tells Google (and Apple) that you really are a local reputable business.

Citations and Google Places

Local searches don’t just depend on backlinks. They also depend on citations and your Google Places results.

A citation is the information contained on other web directories like the Yellow Pages or CitySearch. Your address, phone number, website information and so on should be the same across all these websites. This helps Google verify that you are who you say you are.

You should have a very complete Google Places listing. Make sure you have photos, descriptions, times of operation and as many positive reviews as possible.

The Keywords Are Different

The keywords you want to optimize for on mobiles are quite different than traditional SEO.

In traditional SEO, you’re typically targeting broader keywords that get more volume. On mobile SEO, however, your traffic will come mostly from short keywords that people come up with on the fly.

For an Italian restaurant, you might get searches like “Italian food,” “Pasta,” “Italian Restaurant” and on a Siri device “Good Italian food.”

The Mobile Website

Having an easy to navigate mobile website is a crucial part of a good mobile strategy.

Your mobile website should be simple and easy to use on any mobile screen, big or small. Break up large segments of information and try to provide just bite-sized bits of information on each page.

Make sure all the buttons on your site are big enough to be “clicked” on by a finger on a touch screen.

Is “Mobile SEO” the Same as “Local SEO?”

By and large, yes. Mobile SEO and local SEO are very similar, with the exception that mobile SEO also requires a user-friendly mobile website. Apart from that, the core techniques of ranking for local results and mobile results are the same.

As smartphones get more prevalent, mobile SEO is only going to get more competitive. If you own a local business, now is the time to get in the arena and take the edge before your competitors get in the game.

In recent years, SEO has gone through many tumultuous changes.

From the Panda update which uprooted many sites to the implementation of social metrics, it’s clear that SEO ranking factors aren’t staying stagnant. However, in spite of all these changes, the underlying fundamentals of SEO haven’t changed.

These immutable fundamentals have been the same from the early days of SEO until now. In fact, they’ve only become more and more important as search engines have gotten smarter and smarter.

These are the four immutable laws of SEO.

Law #1: Content Is King

Google’s goal since day one has been to help the best content on the web find its way to the top of the search engines. As Google gets smarter, it’s only going to do this better and better.

Trying to game the system is not a very good long-term strategy. It’s extremely, extremely rare for people to be able to game search engines for any real length of time.

Instead, the best way to get ranked in the long run is to provide content that people genuinely like and want to share. This will generate organic backlinks, which Google loves.

Law #2: Think Long Term

Short-term SEO thinking is not only ineffective, it’s also extremely unhealthy.

People who try to get ranked in weeks rather than months inevitably get burned.

The methods you employ when you’re thinking long term versus short term are different. In the long run, you’ll lay much more solid foundations with long-term thinking than if you were just trying to get ranked as fast as possible.

Get in the habit of thinking in six months to a year in terms of your SEO goals.

Law #3: Understand the 80/20 of On-Page SEO

It’s easy to get sucked into on-page SEO. When it comes to on-page SEO, it really comes down to doing the 20% of work that’ll give you 80% of the results.

Webmasters can get fixated on many of the little things on their websites. Should you use bold or strong tags? How much effort do you need to put into your alt tags? The list goes on and on.

Realistically, there are really just a handful of on-page factors that will make most of the impact. Your keyword selection, your title tag, your H1 and H2 tags and your internal linking structures make up that 20%.

Understand the best practices for each of these things and implement them. That’ll take care of 80% of your on-page SEO.

Law #4: Have a Scheduled Link-Building Plan

Don’t just build links when you feel like it, or when you want to boost your rankings. Instead, keep building links all the time.

You don’t have to spend a lot of time on it. A couple hours a week is enough. Keeping your link-building engine up and running at all times will help you look more organic in your link building. The results also add up very quickly.

Create a weekly action plan for link building. Use the plan to keep up your link building, even when you have other things going on.

These are the four immutable laws of SEO. Follow these laws and you stand a strong chance of winning the search engine contest in the long run.

What’s all the uproar with HTML 5 about?

While releases of new versions of code typically don’t make much of a splash, HTML 5 is different. It introduces many new features, some of which can drastically change the way websites are built.

These are some of the main features that HTML 5 brings to the table.

Defining Page Structures

HTML 5 gives the webmaster the ability to define different areas of a website. For example, you can use the <nav> tag to define the navigation area and the <footer> tag to tag your footer.

Before there was no way to associate captions with an image. Now you can associate it with the <figcaption> tag.

Why would you want to do this? Primarily for SEO reasons. Using these tags allows you to “tell” search engines which parts of your website are important and which ones aren’t.

Asynchronous Loading

The <async> tag allows you to tell browsers to load a particular part of a website separately.

This is especially useful for sites with heavy code. If you have a big JavaScript app loading for example, you can make the browser load the rest of the site first while it’s loading the JavaScript code.

This prevents the loading of code from slowing down the entire page load.

Simple Audio and Video Integration

In the past, to add video or audio to your site you had to embed some sort of video or audio player. This could be quite a hassle, especially for webmasters who aren’t extremely tech savvy.

In HTML 5, adding audio or video is as simple as using the <audio> or <video> tag.

Build Graphs, Draw on Screen and Add Images on the Fly

Using a combination of HTML 5 and JavaScript, you can now create whole canvases on the fly on your website.

The <canvas> tag allows you to bring graphs, drawing on screen and many other graphical features to life.

Offline Browsing

With HTML 5, you can store files on your reader’s computer, making offline browsing possible.

Admittedly, this feature is still in its infancy and is still technically complex. But just opening this door is a big step towards a previously impossible task.

Offline browsing is especially big for mobiles. Giving browsers the ability to browse offline on a phone makes it possible for your customers to access your site even in zero reception areas.

Built-In Email Validation

In the past, to validate form data you had to use JavaScript. Now you can just do it in HTML.

HTML 5 can “recognize” what a proper email is supposed to look like and make sure that email field inputs conform to that template.

HTML 5 brings a lot of unique features to the table. Some of them are big, some are small. One thing you can be sure of: HTML 5 will enable some very advanced websites to emerge that just wouldn’t have been possible before.