Over the years SEO has been constantly changing. With all the changes it is hard to keep up and many companies will sell you using outdated or even black-hat practices that can get you banned. This article will go over some common myths and bust the heck out of them. Hope you find it useful!
Myth #1: You can do SEO with no outside help
SEO can be complex and touches many areas such as online marketing, coding, technical aspects along with PR skills. Most businesses simply do not have everything required to do a great job at SEO.
Myth #2: Good content is all you need
Having good content and nothing else is not enough. The whole point of SEO is to gain traffic and get people to stay on your site so they buy your products and services. Good content goes hand in hand with design. If your site is hard to use or navigate, it is very easy for people to go to the next search result.
Myth #3: Only the top rank matters
People often look at other results and they will scroll down through the page. Also, search ranking is only one part of the puzzle. Google places other results on the page like social recommendations and local results as well.
Myth #4: META tags are important
META tags used to be important in order to rank well. Both Google and Bing stopped caring about them in order to index sites. However, they are not useless. For example, your description tag will be the text that often appears next to the link that shows up on the search result.
Myth #5: Keyword-rich domain names rank higher
It used to be that the URL you used was important. However now, the indexing process only looks at the actual content of your pages, and not the domain name.
Myth #6: You have to submit your site to Google or other search engines
All search engines used to have URL submission forms where you could send your site to Google and others. They still do, but that process is unnecessary.
Myth #7: Linking to other highly ranked sites helps your ranking
Some sites try to link to many other high authority sites in order to help their rankings, but that does not help at all. Your rank is based on how useful your site is to others, and as such it will only look at how many other people link to you.
Myth #8: SEO is based on the quantity of links a site has
The belief used to be that the success of a SEO campaign is to have the most possible back-links. This is a misunderstanding in how ranking works. Often, a single link from a popular news site talking about your product will be much more valuable than spamming hundreds of links to unknown blog sites.
Myth #9: PPC will give you preferential treatment
AdWords is a very useful program by Google where you can place an ad on other sites to advertise your own. PPC by itself does not help boost your rankings. On a typical search page, you can easily see that organic results are separated from paid advertisements.
Myth #10: SEO companies can get guaranteed results
Complete bull. Unless it is a money back guarantee if they do not produce a top ranking on a relevant search term then run fast and far.
Myth #11: Buying links, likes or tweets will help your site rank better
There are a lot of sites selling Facebook likes, followers, and so on. In most cases these are not worth the money. They are not real people, which means no one will see those social signals, and as a result they will not increase your ranking. Many sites forbid these types of acts and you could be delisted.
Way to bust all the SEO myths…