Like all avenues of the tech industry, SEO is ever-evolving to become more complex, intuitive, and influential for businesses and their consumers.
Whether your business is a large-scale enterprise powerhouse, or an independent operation run by a talented team of one, investing in SEO is essential to reaching your target audiences and scaling your
business.
With the constant changes in SEO, it is indeed challenging to develop and maintain an effective SEO strategy that best suits your business. The upkeep can be demanding and there always seems to be a new problem to solve like: What’s happening with Google’s latest update now? How will that influence my SEO strategy? Is it time for my business to start investing in voice search? How do I determine which content should or shouldn’t include video?
The questions are endless, but that’s not a bad thing. If you’re regularly asking yourself questions like the aforementioned, you’re already winning. This simply means that you’re invested and on the right track to creating the best SEO strategy for your business. As you continue asking yourself questions and researching solutions, this guide is going to help point out all of the most common myths and assumptions about how SEO works and debunk them for you. Your time is valuable and should be spent where it is most effective so you’re not wasting a single moment on things that simply don’t matter for SEO.
Myth #1
“I must submit my site to Google.”
The idea that you need to submit your website to Google in order to appear in search results (or rank) is nonsense. Google finds content on its own by leveraging bots – as known as “web crawlers” – that are constantly searching the web for content to index. However, if you’re making changes to existing website pages or creating new ones, you can submit an updated sitemap of your website to Google to help its crawlers find your content faster.
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Myth #2
“More links are better than more content.”
In the past, building as many links as possible without analyzing the linking domain was how SEO typically worked. By doing this, your website was sure to rank higher. Today, building links is still a very important part of ranking factors. That’s because a link to another website is more than just a link — it’s a vote of confidence a recommendation, a way for publishers to say to their readers: “Here’s a source I trust. Go check it out yourself.”
That being said, it’s important to focus on the quality of links you are obtaining, rather than just the quantity. Sometimes less can be more if you know how exactly to build links the proper way. You can learn more about how to earn backlinks (the right way) here. If you’re deciding between investment in link building vs. content creation, remember: one of the number one ways to generate quality backlinks is to start by creating quality content.
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Myth #3
“Keywords matter more than anything.”
Amplified by the rise of mobile and voice search, search queries have become more and more conversational. And Google’s updates over the past 2-3 years have focused on understanding these types of queries better through natural language processing, most notably with the rollout of Hummingbird in 2013. The introduction of this new search algorithm, which began analyzing phrases instead relying on keywords alone, marked a major switch for the search giant from keyword to topic-focused SEO.
The takeaway here for marketers? The traditional view of “keywords” in search has changed. Where a few years ago there were maybe 10-20 “big keywords” that would be sought after for ranking within a topic, there are now hundreds or thousands of long-tail variations that are regularly searched within a topic and change based on location. Simply dominating a few words is no longer enough to produce successful results.
Instead of obsessing over keywords, we recommend marketers explore a topic cluster strategy. This approach to content creation is centered around the reader, helping them discover
the content they are searching for, regardless of the exact keywords they use.
Myth #4
“Having a secure site (HTTPS) isn’t important for SEO.”
Have you ever noticed that some URLs start with “http://” while others start with “https://”? Perhaps you noticed that extra “s” when you were browsing websites that require giving over sensitive information, like when you were paying bills online. To put it simply, the extra “s” means your connection to that website is encrypted so hackers can’t intercept any of your data. The technology that powers that little “s” is called SSL, which stands for Secure Sockets Layer.
In August 2014, Google announced that it had started using HTTPS as a signal in its ranking algorithms. At the time, this meant that if your website still relied on standard HTTP, your rankings could suffer as a result. Then, in October 2017, Google released a new version of their popular Chrome browser, version 62. At this time, it warned users that if their page contained a form but did not have SSL enabled, visitors would see a “not secure” label alongside the URL. This label began to roll out in July 2018. From an SEO perspective, Google has publicly stated that two websites which are otherwise equal in search results, if one has SSL enabled it may receive a slight rank boost to outweigh the other. Not to mention, up to 85% of people stated that they will not continue browsing if a site is not secure, according to a recent survey from HubSpot Research. As a result, there is a clear SEO benefit to enabling SSL on your website, and across all your content.
Myth #5
“You shouldn’t link out to other websites.”
Provide value. When you’re creating content for the web, this should be the motivation behind it. And if that means linking out to a website other than your own to provide additional information, there’s nothing to be worried about. “If you’re linking out naturally from your website to other sites that offer additional value and more context, then that’s fine And there’s nothing special that you need to do,”
explains Google Webmaster John Mueller. There are a few exceptions, though. If you link out to a website in exchange for a link back, link to an advertisement, or link out in your comments, that link is typically not as contextual or valuable as one that occurs naturally. In these situations, Mueller encourages the use of the rel=”nofollow”link attribute.
Watch for more marketing myths on our Steel Blue Media blog, The Mix
Article courtesy of Hubspot
