Myths surrounding the world of SEO

Search engine optimization is constantly changing and staying up to speed can be very difficult for many websites. One of the main problems many SEO marketers run into is falling into trends. Years ago one of the trends was building backlinks to the site, regardless of where they came from. Directories, link farms, resource pages, anything was a go, as long as it pointed back to your site. Now we know this isn’t best practice. Site owners must realize to improve rankings for their site, they must not follow trends that can have negative effects in the future.

Search engine optimization is obsolete

This phrase is one of the most common for anyone who deals with marketing websites. Google is constantly making changes and updates to their search engine, but how does a site keep up? Can it keep up? Is paid advertising my only choice? Before you decide to completely abandon SEO, lets consider what percentage of traffic comes from organic search. Depending on a site 40-60% of a site’s traffic comes from organic searches. Curious what percentage of your traffic comes from organic search? If you have analytics installed, which every site should, login in and click on the Acquisition tab, then the overview. A pie chart will show what percentage of your traffic comes from organic searches. Once seeing this graph many people will decide organic search is something your site can’t afford to quit on.Now we know organic traffic is a must, but how does SEO influence organic search? One area where SEO practices will never change is title and meta description tags. Everyone knows keyword stuffing is a major no no, but many people don’t consider the impact title and descriptions add. When a search is done the first thing a user sees is the title tag to a landing page, next is the URL, then the description. This influence whether a user will click or not, based on what they are searching for. By having intriguing title and description tags this can help you gain more clicks over your competitors. Many SEO practices have become obsolete over the years, but the practice is still just as important.

All I need is backlinks

When it comes to backlinks everyone wants more more more. For years it didn’t matter where they were coming from, as long as it pointed to my site. This couldn’t be more inaccurate. Backlinks are still incredibly important, but they must be obtained the proper way. Links must come from sites that are relevant to your industry, placed on well established pages, and have a low number of links on the page. There are much more to consider when searching for backlinks, but these are a few points to really consider. Search engines look at quality and relevancy over quantity. One great link on a relevant site can carry much more weight than 1,000 from poor sites.

Paid search will help me in organic rankings

This is a huge misconception when it comes to SEO. This has never been proven, however there are correlations. For instance, a landing page may have more paid search focused on the page which will decrease bounce rate, increase views, and increase time on page. This can help the page’s numbers, however, simply just adding a ppc campaign to certain keywords won’t see those keywords increase in rankings.

Old backlinks won’t affect my site

So you got sucked into some shady SEO practices a few years ago and have some bad links pointing to your site? No big deal right? Wrong! These poor backlinks from low quality sites can have huge negative impacts on your site. Google Panda updates are released periodically and are designed to penalize sites with poor backlinks and award sites who have followed the “Google Rules”. If your site has a number of poor backlinks Google takes notice of these and will penalize the site, and we all know how costly it can be to lose rankings from search engines. Not sure if you have poor backlinks? Run an audit of your site and get your bad links removed. Removing bad links can be a time consuming process, but the rewards are crucial.

All I need is content

Many people believe adding a few blogs to their site will get people linking to their content. Although it is important to regularly add new content to the your site, it is vital to get your content in front of eyes in your industry. For instance, you can create the most amazing, informative infographic, but unless you share the infographic readers won’t see it. Quality content can help build excellent backlinks to a site, but it has to be content people have not seen before and find useful. Simply duplicating content into your own words will not yield Likes, Shares, and backlinks.

The search engine optimization game has changed over the last 10 years, but it’s not going anywhere. It is important for sites to follow Google’s rules and stay away from the spam. By building good, quality, relevant backlinks sites can see ranking improvements. If sites continue down the path of directories and link farms a Google update is bound to catch up with them. Overall, play by the rules, if it looks of bad quality avoid it, if you’re not sure, do some research. SEO is here to stay and every website needs to utilize it.