We have always emphasized the need for right search engine optimization services to achieve success in the online world. There are a lot of crackpot theories about SEO. If someone claims that your website will be ranked on first page of Google search results in a single day, be sure to run away from their service. SEO is a continuous process and takes time in providing you results.
Today, we are talking about the SEO myths that should be forgotten in the year 2015:
1) Buying domain with a keyword in it
Those days are gone back when you feel that including keyword in the domain can rank you higher in search results. Google is focusing on original content with right usage of keywords. The website that uses right keywords in the content will rank better than the website just including keyword in the domain name.
2) SEO is all about tricks
SEO may sound like tricks to rank a website but actually it is not. Real SEO makes every part of browsing experience better. SEO aims at creating quality content, making content more discoverable, structuring data for easy understanding, optimizing for social sharing and more. On the other hand, manipulative SEO can get you penalized.
3) Meta tags have no role to play
This is one of the popular SEO myths. Meta tags are HTML tags that show the preview snippets for a webpage in search results. Matt Cutts said that Google does not use keywords Meta tag in page rankings. But, they are still relevant and it makes sense to spend time on them.
Adding Meta tags help users and search engines to get to know about your website. They make search results attractive which can bring more traffic to your website. Meta tags comprise of keywords, title tags and descriptions.
4) Google will itself index fresh content
Search engines love fresh and unique content. But at the same time, you need to ensure that the search engines discover your fresh content. Creating original content is not enough. Here comes the role of Google XML Sitemap Generator plugin that automatically generates a new XML sitemap when you publish the article and send it to major search engines and directories.
You should update your social profiles to get the fresh content indexed faster.
5) Keyword research is not essential
You just cannot afford to ignore the role of keyword research. Google never eliminated the importance of keywords and what you should avoid is over-optimization. Excessive use of keyword-rich anchor text can go against you. Google Keyword Planner is an accurate keyword research tools to research your keywords and find out the keywords your competitors are targeting.
6) Social activity does not affect SEO
It is true that Google does not use metrics like Facebook shares or Twitter followers directly in search rankings. On the other hand, social activity has significant effects on your SEO efforts. It puts you content in front of right group of users, increasing visits and brand signals. Then, the number of users searching for your website increases. With more users visiting your content, it can leads to more links and further sharing and more clicks and thus, more visits to your website. Sharing content with the right audiences, increasing traffic through links and mentions is a great plus for any type of business.
7) Did SEO Last Year
This is again among popular SEO myths of website owners. SEO is not a one-time process but is something that you should do with every content you post and with every online activity. To ensure that Google continues to crawl and index your pages in search results, SEO should be done. It is required to an on-going basis.
8) The more pages, the better
Though it is true that Google prefers big websites but it does not mean that your site needs to have lots of extra pages to become one of those websites. If you are putting up lots of pages with irrelevant or duplicate content, it is extremely bad for SEO and Google can penalize you for duplicate content.
9) Website navigation does not matter
Google wants that your website should be have easy navigation. The internal links should be easy to get around. You should create a better experience for your users so that they can more easily navigate your website. Smart navigation and internal linking from within your content makes your website easily crawlable.
10) XML Sitemap improve rankings
It is true that a clear and concise sitemap makes your website easy for Google to index. At the same time, sitemap does not actually boost your ranking. It is necessary to help search engines crawl and index fresh pages faster but does not have any impact on improving search rankings.
I hope that these 10 SEO myths will help your website cater to the target audience in the right way.
Do you know other SEO myths that site owners follow to increase rankings? Share them in the comments!