SEO has changed a lot; the new algorithms, guidelines, and tools are introduced so quickly. This regularly changing search landscape is rife with gossips and misconceptions – and here I have pointed out the most common myths and assumptions about how SEO works, and debunk them for you so you are not wasting your precious time that simply don’t matter for SEO in 2014. Let’s get began.
Myth #1: Top Position
There are n-numbers of resources that place great importance of websites being the first in SERPs. This is not actually true. Although being the first on the site allows building traffic, it does not guarantee that visitors will want to check out your website. Apart from search engines, there are so many functions that are used to give positions. This means, you need to be careful and consider other methods of advertising like social media, as you wait for search engine ranking to be the best.
Myth #2: Submit Website into Search Engine
In traditional SEO times, search engines had “submission” forms that were part of the optimization process. Webmasters and online marketers would tag their sites and webpages with keyword information, and “submit” them to the search engines. Soon after, a bot would crawl and include those resources in their index. Simple SEO!
Unfortunately, this process did not scale very well, the submissions were often spam and the exercise gradually provided way to simply crawl-based search engines. Since 2001, not only has search engine submission not been needed, but it is actually almost ineffective. The search engines all publicly not that they rarely use “submission” URLs, and that the best exercise is to get links from other sites. This will expose your content to the engines naturally.
Myth #3: Mata Keywords Improve Ranking
I’m so sick and tired of hearing about meta data. Optimizing your meta keywords is a complete pointless. Meta tag keywords help provide data to search engines about a webpage, and back in the day, were actually used by some search engines as ranking factors. But are they still used today? The answer is NO. In fact, Google’s Matt Cutts has made it publicly known that “Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking.”
Myth #4: More Links is Better than More Content
This myth can be especially risky if the focus of the link-building techniques is quantity, not quality. Focus on having appropriate and diverse sources that links to relevant pages. When you focus on content, it can be used as website pages, blog posts, lead generation offers and guest posts on other sites -- all things that will bring more links with it over time.
Myth #5: Being a Google Adwords Advertiser Helps Your Organic Rankings
This is one of the oldest misconceptions. Google search and Google AdWords, are completely separated from each other. It is essential for all of them to remain completely independent. Changing your Google AdWords budget will not have any impact on getting your site out of a penalty or change the algorithmic evaluation of your website.
Myth #6: Exact Match Domains Rank Higher
Buying exact match domains for your top keyword and key phrase (i.e. rank higher. “seonews.com”) actually used to work for a little while – until spammers started buying them up for the only objective of providing ads. Now, you can no longer get strong rankings solely based on your domain name.
Myth #7: Anchor Text is Dead
While anchor text may not be as important as it was in the past due to link spam, it is certainly not dead and is still an essential aspect for position.
Myth #8: Google PageRank is Everything
Also incorrect. Google has not updated their PageRank, a public measure of a website’s authority, yet this year. There is actually remours that the search giant is about to totally stop working this evaluate.
Myth #9: H1 Tags are an Important On-Page Element
The H1 is part of your CSS that a designer puts together to reference what font styling and size will be applied to a particular piece of content. This used to be something that was more essential, but search engines are smarter these days, and unfortunately people spammed this to death. So really, it does not matter what header tag you use as long as you present your most important concepts up front and closer to the top of the page. Don’t forget, you are optimizing your page for users first.
Myth #10: Links in Press Releases are Bad
In July 2013, Google has declared that links from press releases were considered “PAID” links and therefore, part of a “LINK SCHEME”. This creates waves of panic through the industry, as many believed they now be punished by Google for placing links in their press release.
However, this turned out to be wrong, while Google says that links in press releases should be “rel=nofollow”, they have also gone on record saying they have “identified a lot of the top Press release sites and ignores the links but does not punish those who are using them.”
Myth #11: XML Sitemaps Help in Rankings
XML sitemaps help search engines to find and index your content faster and more efficiently. But, while they are a best practice, they will not help you get higher positions.
Myth #12: Schema is a Ranking Factor
Schema markup helps search engines to better comprehend your content, whether it is video clip, or a recipe, or other type of content. However, according to Google, it will not improve your SERPs positions.
Myth #13: Hummingbird is a Game Changer
Hummingbird is a Google’s new search engine algorithm that is based on semantic searches – for example, mobile queries that as questions; “Where is the best place to get burger?” When it was rolled out, the SEO community waited with bated breathing for the expected impact on search results – but that impact never occurred. In fact, the change was hardly recognizable.
Myth #14: Update your Home Page Every Time
This is not something that should be done compulsorily. You will not rank a higher position basically by doing this at all periods.
Myth #15: SEO and Social Media Have Nothing In Common
This is never true. SEO and social media platforms work completely well together and with the best social media platform following your website can be ranked higher.
Myth #16: AuthorRank
AuthorRank is a way that Google will rank authored content by an author in search results based on their authority on a particular topic. However, the Authorship rich snippet does not currently have a very wide adoption (only 3.5% of Fortune 100 companies have adopted it) – which is required before AuthorRank can even be rolled out.
Conclusion:
So -- now that you know what the common SEO myths are. Debunking these SEO myths will make you both more effective, and more efficient with your organic search strategy.
About the Author :
Pritesh Chauhan owns a blog named SearchEngineNOS. He likes to share news about search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing etc), social media & technologies etc.
Follow him on Google+: +Pritesh Chauhan | Facebook: Pritesh Chauhan | Twitter: @searchenginenos.
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