Search engine optimization (or SEO) is the backbone of every successful online marketing strategy. You’ve got no hope in hell of running a good campaign if your website is poorly optimized for search engines. That being said, a topic like this will always come with misinformation and myths, so this post is dedicated to debunking the biggest ones around.
Search engine optimization and search engine marketing may sound similar, but they relate to different things. If you invest in improving your SEO, you’re doing things to improve the organic search engine performance of your website. It mainly looks at putting your site in the best position to rank. SEM refers to PPC marketing campaigns and strategies geared towards promoting your company using paid ads.
There’s no need to spend money developing separate strategies for all the different search engines. Digital marketing agencies that provide SEO services will set you up with campaigns that lead to good results across Google, Bing and everything else. More to the point, Google has such a dominant share of search engine activity that it’s completely pointless to dedicate resources to Bing-specific SEO strategies. Good SEO will mean you perform well on all search engines.
Again, this is simply untrue. Link building has always worked as the most effective off-page SEO technique. Search engines love it when you generate lots of high-quality backlinks because it’s basically lighting a beacon that says your website is a credible source of information. This myth stems from certain link-building practices no longer being effective - like link spamming on different websites. It’s also likely that some website owners gained low-quality links and didn’t see positive results, so they assumed that link-building as a whole was ineffective.
Back in the day, keyword frequency was a big thing for SEO. You needed to incorporate your keywords 5-7 times to see results, but that’s no longer necessary. Google has updated its algorithm many times to reflect a shift towards keyword placement over frequency. As Neil Patel notes, you need to add keywords to your page title, URL, subheaders, image descriptions, and meta descriptions. It’s easier for search engines to find keywords when they’re in these important places, which will help you rank for searches that include them. You don’t need to stuff multiple keywords into a piece of content anymore, so move away from those huge keyword lists of the past.
We’ve seen countless businesses fall into this trap, and it’s one of the biggest myths out there. You may think that your SEO is good right now because you’re ranking well, but that doesn’t mean it’ll stay that way. Changes to algorithms - along with rivals improving their SEO - can mean that a winning SEO campaign quickly turns into a losing one. Especially when you consider that fresh content matters a huge deal, which means you should constantly update your site to stay ahead.
So, those are the top five SEO myths, but how many are you guilty of falling for? Discount these myths and use facts to help improve your search engine optimization strategy and move your website up the rankings.
