SEO is a vague question which has baffled many and yet the SEO industry continues to thrive. As a result, for many, it gives birth to numerous misconceptions, which slows down the process of effective SEO. Reputation in SEO is a huge indicator of someone’s ability to perform well. Search Engines don’t tell us exactly what is good SEO and what is bad? SEO practices are a result of careful analysis and experimentation, which many SEO professionals rely on to improve SERP rankings. Every day new myths are born. Partially because people misinterpret things easily, as Matt Cutts recently said about guest blogging, “Stick a fork in it“, where he really meant to avoid spammy guest blogging for which you cannot personally vouch. There is a huge outcry across the web that ALL guest blogging is bad, which is not necessarily true. Like everything else in business and life, only trust the trustworthy and you should be alright. A very basic premise to remember in SEO is, ‘Don’t just do it for the search engines, pay more attention to your audience”. SEO as a profession is rife with misconceptions and disinformation. Here is my attempt to demystify 5 of the most common SEO myths.
1. Great Content Gets you Great Rankings: Not True! I don’t mean to say that you shouldn’t write good content for your audience but just the content on it’s own is not enough. Promotion, optimisation, branding and many other factors are equally important, in fact a bit more important than just producing the content.
2. Automated SEO is Bad: Not always! If it was bad and spammy, it would make it almost impossible for big corporates to effectively manage their content and SEO campaigns across so many different platforms on the web. As with any other element of SEO, automation should be carefully planned and each aspect of it meticulously executed.
3. Page Rank is a Good Indictor of Rankings: If that was really the case, the job of SEO would be much easier that what it is. It’s a tiny tiny drop in the ocean of indicators signalling good ranking for a particular webpage (PageRank is for a page NOT for the whole domain!).
4. Social Media Activity Boosts Rankings: This notion is very popular within the SEO community. Not to get confused, it is not the activity which increases (If at all) your ranking on search engines. Being actively involved in social media marketing gives you a better chance of engaging with your audiences and hence, a better chance that they will talk about you and give you some earned links and increase your brand reputation. So it’s not the social media activity itself, but the resulting engagement that helps.
5. Quantity of Indexed Pages Ranks you Higher: No! It is mostly the quality and relevance of content that helps rank a website higher (Remember myth 1 above). The Google Panda update cemented this belief as even sites with fewer pages are ranking higher than sites that might have thousands of pages.
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