Common SEO Myths You Thought Were Facts

When the concept of SEO was new, it was pretty much in its raw form and highly prone to manipulation. There were trickier ways of doing SEO in the past than there were ri…

When the concept of SEO was new, it was pretty much in its raw form and highly prone to manipulation. There were trickier ways of doing SEO in the past than there were right ways. However, Google got a tight grip of its reins later and started rolling out big updates namely Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird. With the rollout of these updates much of what used to be useful 4 years ago became useless or harmful for websites later. Unfortunately, many of the things that worked in the past are still sticking around as myths even though they have been proven false over and over. Here are the most common ones.

  • More Keywords Better Ranking

Yes, maybe a half a decade ago that was probably the only strategy available for you to rank your website higher. It even gave rise to black hat SEO practices where companies would hide keywords behind images and other secret places to rank their websites higher for those keywords. With minor improvements, they started overstuffing the content with keywords. This practice started being punished by Google and today, SEO is in its excellent form where keywords are used only naturally and where needed. The wise SEO experts have adjusted the changed rules whereas non-professional SEO entities still seem to be complaining about them.

  • The Backlinks Overkill

This practice was pretty much similar to keyword stuffing, only that in this case they were spamming backlinks. Since Google ranked websites with more backlinks higher in its search results businesses starting spamming backlinks. They would collaborate with certain websites and obtain hundreds and thousands of backlinks from those sites. Today, it is all about the quality of backlinks. More backlinks mean nothing today. In fact, with a great number of backlinks you risk the rankings of your website as any low quality backlinks are punished by Google.

  • Mobile SEO Will Take Time

If you are one of the many business owners who believe it is still not time for mobile SEO, you might want to spend some time exploring some information about the subject. There are more mobile devices in the world today than desktop devices with more people accessing the internet on mobile devices. These figures are increasing day by day and local SEO has become a reality. All the large businesses have already optimized their websites for mobile users. If your website is not optimized for them, you are disconnected from literally billions of people.

  • SEO and Website Designing Are Two Different Things

It used to be the case but not anymore. Today, the SEO process starts as soon as your website starts being designed. Websites that are designed with SEO in mind perform much better than websites that aren’t. From coding to putting images on the website, everything needs to comply with the best SEO practices. When websites are optimized for SEO right from the beginning, your pages load fast and the overall user experience of your website results in increased visitor retention. So, when you hire your website designers, make sure to ask them if they make SEO a part of their development process.

  • Social Media Sharing Does Not Contribute to SEO

There is still no direct connection between search engine optimization and social media marketing. The connection is indirect but the impacts can be greatly benefitting for your website. When you share something on social media, it gets the attention of business reviewers and famous bloggers. If they like the content you shared, they share it on their platforms. Mentioning your website with your content creates a backlink for you on a reputable platform. These reputable links are high quality backlinks that Google really considers when ranking a website.