SEO is a complicated thing, and there are always suggestions of things that you must do, things that you must never do, sand things that you must do every day! Thankfully, there is no hard and fast rule regarding the best way to run an SEO campaign, but there are most certainly a few myths out there that can be cast aside right now! Below are some of the worst offenders!
Keyword density is relevant to search engine rankings.
SEO workers have focused on Keyword density for a long, long time, but you only have to understand the mantra ‘Content is King’, to understand that Keyword density cannot be an important thing to Google and other such search engines. Of course, keywords are important, but they have to come naturally. Matt Cutts has gone on record as stating that Google will pay attention to a keyword, and will give some weight. Discover the same word again and Google will realise that the page is most definitely about that particular subject, but over egg it, and you could end up with egg on your face. Keyword stuffing is now thought of as very spammy, and it could potentially harm your rankings. The solution of course is to write nice natural copy, and your keywords will come through automatically.
Meta Keywords are used by Google to help rank sites.
This might have been true once, but it is definitely, repeat definitely, not true today. Google does pay attention to the Meta description and title, but Meta tags are no longer used, so it’s thankfully one more thing you can happily forget about!
Use Adwords to get a sneaky boost in Organic rankings.
Interestingly, having an Adwords account can help you to get better organic rankings, but not in the way that most people assume. The assumption is that because you are buying a product from Google, They will do you a favour in the organic rankings too – we should be so lucky! Adwords and organic results really are totally separate. Having said this, there’s nothing to stop you running an Adwords campaign and using your newly gained knowledge about keywords to help you to improve your organic rankings.
When it comes to backlinks, Google is only interested in quantity.
Years ago everyone assumed that it was a numbers game in terms of backlinks. Surely, if ten thousand links pointed towards your site, your site must be great right? No. Google might have been easy to fool then, but these days you have to be a little smarter than that. Google is interested in seeing links from high quality and highly relevant sites. If you have good sites linking to you which are relevant to your own site, then you can safely bet that Google will recognise this relationship. However, if you have a surfing website and you have some links from a will writing website based in the centre of America, the chances are, Google is going to think that this is a strange relationship! Again, natural approaches to gaining new links are key, and will see you being rewarded.
Of course there are hundreds of these myths – we could be here all day. The important thing to remember is to approach things honestly and with integrity. If you can do this then you stand a far higher chance of running a successful site.
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