5 SEO Myths That Drive Me Nuts
The term SEO has been thrown around for too long by both experts and amateurs. This has created a lot of confusion and attracted many myths. Here are 5 of these myths:
SEO is dead
This is a myth spread by black hat SEOs. With the release of new algorithms such as Panda, Hummingbird Mobile add on, Penguin, Florida and others, the tricks that worked a few years ago are no longer working. Five years ago, keywords played a huge role in the ranking of a web page. To rank high in the results pages, all you needed to do was to insert as many keywords in your article as possible.
The Hummingbird algorithm revolutionized SEO. Nowadays, the number of keywords that you use in your story don’t matter—it’s all about the value of your content. If you have valuable content and mention your keyword a few times in the article, you will rank high compared to a person with mediocre content stuffed with keywords.
According to a report made by Sales staff, over 57% of B2B marketers admit that SEO plays a huge part in achieving their lead generation goals. Another report published on Hub spot showed that leads generated through SEO were eight times more likely to convert into customers compared to those obtained through outbound leads.
From the data, we can conclude that SEO isn’t dead—it has only changed. To be competitive and remain relevant you have to create content that is of value to your readers.
Content is king and is the only thing that you need
SEO is a one-time thing
Lazy internet marketers will tell you that you need to do SEO once and you are ready to go. As sweet as this might sound, you will be in for a shock when your rankings plummet after some time For you to maintain and even improve your ranking you need to be consistent with your SEO. Some of the reasons why you need to be compatible include:
Prevent link rot: link rot is when pages stop working, or websites disappear. When your visitors click on these links they want to be taken to other pages and when this doesn’t happen, they are dissatisfied which amounts to bad customer experience. Broken links are not only bad for customers, but they also aren’t taken kindly by Google. You should regularly check your links and replace any broken links.
Refresh your content: creating new content is an important part of SEO. Regardless of how much you promote your old content, you will reach a point when the content will look stale to everyone. This means that people will stop visiting your site. They will also stop sharing your content. When this happens, your rankings will start dropping. To avoid this, you need to publish new content every few weeks.
Meta tags are useless
Meta tags include meta description, title tag, and keywords of a page. After Google had rolled out the Hummingbird update, there are some “experts” who believed that meta tags had no value. While Google doesn’t use them as ranking factors, they have their importance: they tell search engines and users what the site is about.
To attract search engines and users you need to create rich meta descriptions. These are descriptions that are descriptive, unique and short.
Social media has no impact on SEO
It’s true that Google doesn’t index comments and likes, but there is plenty of value that comes with social signals. Some of the benefits of having many social media shares include:
You put your brand and message in front of a broad audience. You build reputation and engagement which is vital to Google. More activity on social media gives Google the impression that your content is valuable and deserves to be placed at a higher position.
While you need to have great content for you to have a shot in the competitive SEO world, it’s not the only thing that you need. The content that you create should have proper context, relevance and properly promoted.
Once you have great content on your site, you need to promote it heavily to get the valuable back links. There are many ways of promoting your content: You can promote it on social media or use influential bloggers and journalists. One of the biggest names on SEO, Brian Dean, recommends that you should never publish your content and pray that people find it—you have to promote it.
Content is the king but But ROI overtakes the content
Although we need to keep producing quality content one after one, the real money spinner for a company is its PPC campaigns. In the time of need, it can immediately give you lead position in search results and fetch orders for you. But we can not even depend completely on PPC as that is not a viable model to bring out a profitable company or venture. What we need is a balanced approach towards having both in place and under complete control with restriction. The significant chunk of visitors should come from your content marketing, and the targeted visitors need to originate from the PPC, so, as the targeted visitors are coming through paid advertisements, the entire dynamics of the website marketing is changing even if the content being king of it ppc overtake’s at certain times.
You can see people using warrior forum to Facebook paid advertisement to release products and reach more amount of people in need to sell and build the lead. But through content people keep coming after the first burst of product launch period expires. If you are not running both the content and paid marketing for your website the expenditures will increase and due to reduced constant availability of the site regular traffic will fall. Traffic with regularity also enhances the reliability of the site which is taken as a factor by buyers to buy product or service. So, keep working on both parts and enjoy the dividend of the same.
Offering the best digital marketing institute in Kolkata with faculty who taught in IIT, Kharagpur and with best digital marketing course in Kolkata
