SEO is a process. It takes time, effort, and patience. If you want to see results, you need to be prepared to invest time, money, and sweat into your online presence before you start seeing returns.
If you’re new to the world of search engine optimization (SEO), it can be tempting to accept advice from every internet guru or self-proclaimed expert that crosses your path. Unfortunately, there are a lot of common SEO myths out there that can derail your efforts and cost you precious time and resources if you’re not careful.
According to ImpressiveDigital, there are the most common SEO myths floating around the web —and why they’re wrong:
1. SEO Is Dead
Source: optimizacijasajtova.com
This is one of the most common SEO myths and it’s completely false! SEO continues to be a strong driver of organic traffic, with many businesses investing in this digital marketing strategy.
2. It Takes Months to See Results From SEO
It can take time for your site to rank, but that doesn’t mean you have to wait months to see results. By using long-tail keywords as part of your content strategy, you can start seeing results almost immediately..
3. Keyword Density Is Important
Source: learn.g2.com
Keyword density used to be an important part of SEO, but that isn’t the case anymore. Using a set number of keywords per page doesn’t help your rankings anymore, but it can still have a negative effect on your site if you overdo it.
If you stuff your pages with too many keywords, search engines will see this as spam and penalize your site accordingly. Instead, focus on writing high-quality content that contains relevant keywords naturally.
4. You Need a Lot of Content for Ranking
Source: constructionexec.com
It’s true that content is an important part of search engine optimization — but not as much as you think. in fact, if you’re thinking about creating a bunch of thin content on your website, it might actually hurt your chances of ranking high in Google.
5. Content Must Be Over 2,000 Words to Rank Well
While long-form content can boost your rankings, it’s not necessary for every page on your site. In fact, some pages may even rank better with shorter content – especially if they’re targeting low volume keywords and informational queries.
6. You Can Use Exact Match Keywords Across Your Site
Fact. No longer do you need to use exact match keywords as part of your SEO strategy. In fact, Google’s Hummingbird update penalizes sites with low-quality content that include too many exact match keywords in URLs, meta descriptions, ALT tags and links in an attempt to improve their rankings.
7. Your Title Tag Is the Most Important On-Page SEO Element
Source: digitalmarketinginstitute.com
The myth: The title of your web page is very important as it tells the user what they can expect when they click through to your website. Therefore, this is one of the first things we need to optimize for SEO, right?
The fact: Your heading tags (H1, H2 etc.) are just as important as your title tag, if not more so. These headings are what tell both users and search engines what each section of your web page is about.
8. Keywords Don’t Matter Anymore
People have been saying this for years now, and it still isn’t true. Yes, Google’s algorithm has gotten more sophisticated over time, but keywords are still important — they just aren’t the only important part of your content.
The key today is making sure your content is relevant to the keywords you choose. In order to rank highly in search engines, you need to have pages that are focused on specific topics instead of trying to cover everything under the sun on one page. In other words, keywords matter more than ever before, but they must be used wisely in order to make an impact.
9. Google’s Algorithm Is a Secret
Source: searchengineland.com
There have been hundreds of studies done by companies who look at the rankings of websites and try to find connections between those websites and their SEO strategies. The result is a pretty good idea of what Google’s algorithm looks for when ranking websites.
10. More Links Are Better Than Fewer Links
The number of links pointing back to your website is important, but so is the quality of those links. A website with one link from an authoritative source will rank higher than a website with many links from unimportant sources. That’s because Google looks at trust between websites when ranking them — if a lot of people trust a website, it must be good! So, focus on getting quality links instead of quantity.
11. The More Pages I Have, The Better My Chances of Ranking
Not necessarily. The truth is that Google and other search engines only want to return the best results for each user query, so regardless of how many pages you have, if they’re not high quality and relevant for a given search query, those pages are just wasting space on your domain.
Search engine spiders are designed to crawl through websites efficiently, which means that it doesn’t matter how many pages you have — if your site isn’t structured to rank optimally and provides no value to searchers, your rankings will suffer as a result.
12. I Need to Submit My Website to Google
Not anymore. Google’s webmaster guidelines state: “If you’ve got a new website and want to tell us about it, add it to our index.”
In other words, since Google’s bots are constantly crawling the web, they’ll find your site soon enough — there’s no need to submit it. In fact, most websites don’t need any special action in order for their pages to be included in Google’s index (or other search engines).
