7 SEO Myths
There is no getting around SEO for a business that chooses to market online. Search engine optimization has changed a lot over the years, and with everyone having a collection of tips and tricks for the “best” results, it’s easy to lose track of the facts. The end result is that you now have just as many SEO myths as you do viable tactics. Let’s clear up a few of the basic misconceptions:
- More keywords means better ranking: This is absolutely not true, and in actuality, if you are stuffing keywords into your content it will adversely affect your rankings. A density of 2-3 percent works just fine.
- Having an Adwords campaign improves your ranking: This is always a source of debate, and the only people who know the real answer are those at Google. The truth is, if you ask 10 people how running Google Adwords will affect their rankings, five will say it helps and five will say it hurts. That should tell you all you need to know about why this is among SEO myths. If there was valid evidence that it helped, wouldn’t everyone be using it?
- Duplicate content is severely penalized by Google: Duplicate content can be a negative thing, but only sometimes. With various syndications methods and the popularity of RSS, duplication is becoming less of a product of spamming, and algorithms are adjusting to take this into account. Simply put, duplicate can certainly hurt your overall rankings.
- The more links you have, the better the ranking: This is a case of quality over quantity. Having quality links that lead back to your site is a good thing, but linking just to achieve a quantitative effect will bring your site down.
- Success can be guaranteed: There are no guarantees with SEO. Yes, when done correctly, SEO can and will help your organic search rankings. However, never fall for anyone who is telling you that they can “guarantee” results on your behalf. There are far too many factors and variables involved for anything to be assured.
- My website’s SEO is done: This is one of the many common SEO myths and mistakes. People think they have completed the SEO tasks for their site and are wondering what to do next. SEO is never complete! It has to be an ongoing process that continually adds fresh and valuable content for the search engines (and your customers) to look for.
- Search engines only read text, so videos and images are useless: False! Sites with videos and images are considered content rich and these aspects of your site can be optimized as well, by adding ALT tags in the description, images and titles to describe your images and videos. With the right SEO, any video or image can be understood by search engines.
Lastly, it would be unfair not to mention one of the worst SEO myths of all; that SEO is dead! That is just wishful thinking, and you can believe that one at your own peril!
