DEV_LEIS
September 6, 2019
6 Minutes Read
SEO is an area in our life which is flooded with so many myths and misconceptions every day due to the ignorance, fear and the hunt for quick results. People are more prone to choosing quicker methods with the long-term results. However, the damage sometimes leads them to some false perceptions and myths to follow.
Here is the compilation of the popular 5 myths about SEO in the present technological era –
1st Myth
The Fraud SEO
According to this myth, people believe that SEO is a fraud technique and the organizations will promise you to bring you on the top of SERP’s for some specified amount for some specified duration of time but all this is a big fat lie.
SEO is Actually Not Fraud
Just like one person does not characterize the whole nations, similarly, one organization does not categorize the whole SEO process and the activities related to it. It is always tempting to go for the big promises and the low prices but you should always know that everything has a true value. It is just that SEO takes time to show the end results and it is an ongoing process that requires a lot of time, efforts and some help from the experts. So, it is actually not Fraud but helps you in ranking higher in a natural way by creating engaging content, build quality links, formatting your pages and so on.
2nd Myth
Google Plays a War With SEO
Many people believe that whatever you do with SEO, Google applies new algorithms and undo everything that you have done. All your efforts vanish in just a click of the mouse. One day you will enjoy the higher rankings and the other day you will be under the circles of Hell right out from the Heaven. Google has a war against the SEO based platforms and results. This myth is popular around a vast audience.
Google Doesn’t Play Any War Against SEO
The myth is just a myth. It is not true. It might feel to the audience that Google does everything to deprive SEO of all the senses, of course, it is never like that. Google focuses on minding its own business which is making the users happy. It just hates the manipulative SEO’s that uses every fake opportunity to increase their rankings artificially. Otherwise, Google just aims to improve the SEO rankings for the users. As per Google, SEO has the capacity to improve your website and saves time. Google also suggests on hiring SEO earlier as it is better to be hired earlier than later for effective results. For more consideration, you should know that Google also published their own SEO Starter Guide which is kind of outdated now but encouraged a lot of people to use SEO. It’s just that they want you to understand the difference between the hard working SEO and the manipulative SEO.
3rd Myth
A Onetime Effort in SEO is Enough
Most of the audience believes that one-time effort is enough in SEO. You either came out with a campaign once in SEO that either gave you more results or gave you good results, and you are not interested in going any further, at the moment this will make you think that one-time effort in SEO is enough; however, this is not the truth.
One Time Effort Will Not Take You Anywhere
As we discussed above, you must know that SEO is an ongoing process that takes time to kick in. For the one time successful campaigns, you should know that everything generally tends towards the chaos and the chaos itself arranges into the order only at the scale of the Universe. In other words, you must know that without continuous improvement and maintenance, everything will always fall out of place and will lead to degradation. You will face link rotting, outdated content, competition moving ahead, new algos affecting different parts of your SEO, new possibilities to look better in the SERP’s missed out and so on. What you can do in this situation is to check out the engagement factors like the bounce rate, session duration, CTR, new visitors, the number of visited pages and so on. However, if these metric lowers your average, it means that the users are not quite happy with the website. The best idea to monitor your rankings in a regular way is to launch a rank tracker and create a project for your website where you can check out the rankings in your work space to update your site’s position more than once where you will see a different value that is calculated to reflect your ranking progress. With this, you will see your progress graph changing over time to give your ranking a growth in a visual form.
4th Myth
Link Building is Very Dangerous
As per this myth, the Google staff uses every opportunity to show that they are not too thrilled about link building. The myth came to life after the words of John Mueller that link building is something that he would try to avoid. The distaste for the unnatural links starts basically from the webmaster quality guidelines. As it is written there that any links intended to manipulate Page Rank or a site’s rankings in Google search results may be considered part of the link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Link Building Is Not Quite Dangerous
It is worth it. All the statements were misinterpreted by the users and thus they formed the perception that link building is dangerous and that the users will be penalized for that. You should know that the white hat link building is a legit way to build up the website authority as it is a marketing practice that is successfully tested with time. What the users do is that they build millions of useless links to rank higher overnight however if you act like that you will certainly be penalized for that. Every effort that adds value to what you do is great and every action that is manipulative is a part of a crime. You just need to aim for the high-quality links from the trustworthy sources and quality is not something black and white it varies depending on the spheres of application you are using it in.
5th Myth
Keyword Research Leads To Wastage Of Time
This became a myth after the release of the Google’s Hummingbird update in the year 2013 when the universe of on-page SEO especially the on-page keyword research was shattered. In that situation, the users were made to believe that the keywords were replaced for the concepts as there was no sense in the keyword targeting anymore. The statement went on like this, “Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words.”
Keyword Research Was Never Wastage of Time
Google never stated it openly that keywords were no longer important for the SEO process. After some of the major updates by Google, the SEO got panicky and made some extreme conclusions. Even though the search engine algorithms get intricate but there is always a little magic that is left here and there. We know that Hummingbird and Rank Brain did make some changes in the search process which ultimately shifted the context and the related concepts of the keyword research but it never made it less important. Keyword research is important as it was before. Hummingbird affected keyword targeting in a positive way and the users do not need to worry about the keyword ratio anymore. They just needed to understand the searcher intent behind all those queries. So the keywords are important as you will have the reason to think beyond and create the content to meet the needs and preferences of the clients.
Conclusion
You must have observed that most of the myths were born out of false comprehension and fears and gaps in the knowledge. Moreover, the new algorithms are also not 100% perfect. We all just need to keep a balance to get out of the bad practices and the outdated technologies and get rid of the cheating in the process.
These were some of the most amusing myths explained with conclusions. There are many more out there. If you find out anything about myths related to SEO, do share.
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