Online Marketing SEO

10 SEO Myths That Time Must Start To Forget

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Written by Ian
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In the SEO world, everyone has an opinion on what works, what doesn’t and what should be avoided, but sadly, there are still so many myths flying around that if you get caught up in them, you are going to be making some critical mistakes that could lead to big issues for your SEO success.

So, we look 10 SEO myths that must be forgotten, parked away and never seen again, as SEO has changed, and so should your tactics if any of the below aspects apply to your website and SEO efforts.

Any Link Will Do

Build the links and they will come, build any old link and they will still come but so will a manual penalty from Google and you could face yourself with months, if not years, of work to try and turn the issues around. Quite simply, consider very, very carefully any link that you build and avoid patterns of link types, and where possible, do not always use anchor text that you want to rank for, as all of these things will lead you down a road that you simply do not want to head down.

A Blog Only Needs 100 Words

Your blogs have to be at least 500 – 600 words to make them have a good chance of ranking and be deemed quality enough to have some serious impact on your rankings, which is why writing one paragraph of keywords with little meaning will no longer help you, it will only hinder you. Your blogs have to be of high quality, engaging and of a decent length, which means one good blog is better than four rubbish ones.

Your Website Does Not Matter

Without a quality website that is packed full of content, well optimised and continually worked on, your SEO campaign is just not going to work, as the days of building a one-page site, buying a load of links and then seeing it hit the top ranking spot are well and truly over. These days, your website has to be your foundations for any decent campaign, as without it, your SEO efforts are going to have minimal effect to say the least.

Hidden Text Still Works

Build a page, write some text then hide a load more text in the page so that the visitor cannot see it but the search engines can read it and then sit back and watch your rankings grow. Or not as the case may be, as yes, this might have been a great black hat tactic back in the day, but now this will only land your site in seriously hot water when the manual penalty lands in your GWMT inbox.

Lists Of Locations Get You Ranking

We have all seen websites where you scroll down to the bottom and there are lists of endless locations, with some actually being truthful but most just hundreds of areas that the company could probably not even cover. These are dangerous and they offer no quality or value, so if this is a tactic your site is employing, get them removed and work on some solid location pages with decent content, not just spammy pages aimed at tricking the search engines.

Quantity Over Quality

Everything you do, from building a link to writing a blog, you must think quality and not quantity, as it is better to get everything from an SEO point of view focused on high quality than try to just to get as much out as you can. Focus on quality and the rest will follow, from finding amazing blog outreach sites through to writing an amazing guide for your own site – quality, quality and quality is the only word you need to keep in your mind.

Pointing Loads Of Domains

I am still amazed at this, where someone will buy 20 domain names, point them to their site and then wonder why they made no difference at all to either their rankings or their traffic. Unless the domain is hosted, has a good website, lots of content and it is fully optimised, then it will not help your business in the slightest, so stop buying tons of domain names and concentrate on building your main site.

Swapping Links

Swapping or exchanging links, or the technical name for it – reciprocal linking – is no longer effective and at times can even be harmful, so when you are working on your link building campaign, one way links are the only links you should be building. Link swaps used to be a major part of SEO, but then they got abused and Google now pretty much discounts them, which is why if you are getting a link building campaign in place, one way is the only way.

Duplicate Content Is OK

Using someone else’s content, re-writing your own content to make it 10% unique and scraping weak content from elsewhere and adding your extra paragraph to it is simply not effective or OK, as when the Google Panda comes knocking on your site, your penalty will be delivered shortly after. At best, duplicate content is just discounted, at worst, it can land your website with some serious issues.

Meta Can Be Forgotten

Keywords are no longer used by Google in terms of meta, but when it comes to your title tags, these are still critically important for your rankings, so you must not forget to put some serious effort into these. Your meta description whilst no longer used for ranking purposes is important from a CTR organic point of view, so do not just assume you do not need title tags and meta descriptions, as you most certainly do, and quality ones at that.

About the author

Ian

Ian owns and runs IS Digital Marketing, a Bristol based online marketing company offering SEO, PPC and full online marketing services to businesses in the South West.

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