Many people (including some of our clients) have a wrong opinion about SEO, and what it is all about. The Search Engine Optimization changes all the time along with algorithms of Google and other search engines. In this post, we will reveal all the popular misconceptions about it and what the SEO really is.

What is SEO

SEO is a set of different activities to make your website or Amazon-eBay listings rank high in the search engines/Amazon-eBay. Appearing on the first page and first positions in Google is the main goal that leads many visitors to your site, which then increases ads income and number of sales.

Nowadays, almost every company needs its own website, and any website needs an SEO strategy to increase either its brand awareness, number of visitors or sales.

So, what are the popular misconceptions about the Search Engine Optimization?

5 Popular Misconceptions about SEO

Below you will find the most popular mistakes about Search Engine Optimization.

Main misconceptionss about SEO, infographic

The More Keywords the Better

People mostly think it is just about keywords and the how often you see it …SEO … on the page. It’s not entirely false, it used to be true some years ago. But, the search engines got better, the main goal of Google, Yahoo and others is to serve the people with the most appropriate search results for them.

That is the reason they make multiple minor changes per year, and a major change or introduction of a new algorithm once in 1-2 years.

Moreover, according to the SEMRush study based on a large amount of analyzed data, 18% of domains ranking for high-volume keywords don’t have the keyword in the body (main text), while keyword density, appearing keywords in body and title are some of the least important ranking factors.

The More Backlinks the Better

The primary Google algorithm and a Page Rank system was regarding the pages and websites more valuable than the ones that linked to them. For example, in this sequence of sites linking one to another (A->B->C->D), website D had the highest Page Rank score.

So, then it was the only ranking factor. Now, there are hundreds of them just in Google, and backlinks became just one small part of them.

Did you know that Facebook and Twitter are also Search Engines with their own algorithms and long lists of ranking factors!

Number of backlinks is still important, but their quality: place on the page, anchor text (eg. “facebook” here is an anchor text), number of people clicking it, relevance of the page, authority of the page and website and many other factors are something you should consider.

So, just spamming dozens of websites with a link to your website in comments will not help your site SEO, but will rather make it worse.

Writing Texts for Search Engines will Help you Rank High

Another popular misconception about SEO is that writing non-readable, but kind of ‘SEO-optimized’ texts can help to rank high in Search Engines, so many people order writing articles on a similar topic in bulk and post them every day to rank higher.

In fact, as the goal of Search Engines is to serve the user with the most relevant search results, they have released a long sequence of algorithms and made many changes in order to fulfil this goal. So, some of the most important ranking factors are number of people coming to your site again and again, how much time they spend on your site and how many pages they visit.

What does this mean?

It means that most important in SEO is writing interesting, helpful and exciting content for your target audience that they will like and come back for.

Some Other Popular Misconceptions about SEO

The three misconceptions above were the most typical ones, while there are some less popular, but important ones:

  • Keywords in H2-H6 tags are very important. In fact, not really. They should help you to structure the text to make it more readable, which will consequentially lead to a higher user engagement, more time spent on the site and so on.
  • Meta keywords. People having their websites on WordPress with installed SEO plugins like to add as many keywords as possible to the relevant fields for each post. You should know: they are not taken into account by most of the popular search engines for a couple of years already, so don’t even spend time on it.
  • Meta description. It is not necessary to add meta description to each page. Even websites of digital agencies and SEO companies often skip this part, as 1) it is not important for SEO, 2) if you don’t add it, Google will show as meta description the most relevant text to the user’s search term, not the static one that the SEO specialist put. The advantage of using it is the call to action that you can add to improve CTR (Click Through Rate).

Very important is that to improve SEO, you need a list of strategical activities, not just putting lots of keywords or finding many backlinks to your site. A professional SEO agency can help you with to create a whole SEO strategy and avoid all possible mistakes. So, order our SEO services now not to lose your time and money!

It was a list of most popular misconception about SEO and what it is not about. Hopefully, it helped you to improve your knowledge about Search Engine Optimization and stop wasting time on useless activities that will only harm your site. Learn about AdWords Cost Per Click here.