Search engine optimization, often referred to as SEO, is not as difficult as some people make it look. A lot of confusion is mainly due to the myths about SEO that people seem to believe. Without much ado, let us bust these myths for you.
You Must Be on the Top
One of the most widely believed myth is that you need to be in the top 3 search results for you to consider your website SEO a success. This myth is totally wrong. As per the latest data, links that are below ten also receive a huge number of clicks, quite often more than the first few links. Not all users blindly click the first few links, they read the META description and/or title to decide which link they should go to.
URLs without Keywords Are Useless
You’d be surprised to know the number of people who believe this myth to be true. There are many people who forcefully squeeze keywords in URLs thinking that such a move will have a positive impact on their SEO. This notion is completely false as Google has changed its policies and uses latest techniques to gauge the importance of a website which does not depend on the URL alone but on the information found on the internet. However, this does not mean that URLs should not be relevant to the topic; however, forcefully squeezing in keywords is not the right thing to do.
You Need to Have Identical Keywords
Thanks to the picture keyword related software sketch, many people believe that keywords have to exactly match the result for them to be useful. Quite often keywords are really weird and make no sense if used in a sentence. However, many people forcefully put them in sentences thinking that such a move will result in more visitors and make the crawlers search the pages better. By doing this they actually often end up destroying their website’s reputation as keywords that look forced destroy a page’s credibility and distract visitors. You can play a little with keywords and they will still get searched by search engines.
Quantity is What Matters
There was a time when fooling search engines was easy, but now bots and crawlers have turned intelligent and can differentiate between a valuable and worthless page. It does not matter how well you stuff a page with keywords or how apt META descriptions are, the results will not be good unless a page has valuable information that the crawlers deem useful. It is important to provide quantity and not just quality. Instead of stuffing keywords and blindly following SEO tricks one should build a website by providing valuable content.
SEO Is Not For the User
Many webmasters tend to think that SEO does not help users and is merely a way to increase a website’s ranking. This idea is wrong as nicely handled SEO can be very useful as it provides valuable information to users and help them decide if they should click on a page. Keywords, description, URLs and titles are not only used by search engines but also by users. This is why it should be done wisely as it helps users make an impression about a website.
Now that you know the myths we are hopeful that you will find it easier to handle your website’s SEO.
