Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is commonly misunderstood as being overcomplicated or all tricks that don’t work. Here, we clear some of the more common myths.
- Social activity doesn’t affect SEO
Most people think posting a blog on your own website will increase your SEO presence because Google will recognise your website as being updated with “fresh content”. This is true to some extent, however, if your website is new, simply posting a blog to your site won’t give you much of a benefit from an SEO perspective.
The purpose of a blog is to drive traffic for long-tail keywords. So one of the best things you could do is get your blogs in front of maximum eyeballs for maximum exposure. Written a blog? Also do social posts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to promote your blog and drive traffic back to that piece of content on your website.
Getting your content in front of the right audience will foster more engagement and shares that can lead to more links and further sharing. It’s as simple as that. Sharing content with the right audiences can significantly boost your SEO efforts.
- All backlinks are the same
Or are they? Backlinks or hyperlinks from other sites linking back to your website are one of the main building blocks to good SEO. Hyperlinks on Facebook, Twitter or your email newsletter won’t necessarily help you rise in Google ranking.
The hyperlinks you include in your posts on social media sites don’t get counted as a link that will help improve your backlink profile. The backlinks you want pointing to your site should be a natural part of the content, industry-related and authoritative. Keyword stuffed backlinks can actually cause more harm than good.
- Stuffing keywords will improve your SEO
Google algorithms can identify legitimate sites that are actual businesses that are getting genuine site traffic. If you manipulate and have too many keywords stuffed into your domain or content, Google can pick this up as spam.
Including a keyword within your company domain name is a good practice, providing it’s a natural fit. For example, our company name ‘Ultimate Edge Communications’ has the keyword ‘communications’ which will allow Google to clearly understand that the company is related to communications.
- We tried SEO once and it didn’t work
SEO requires effort and continuous optimisation over time, including publishing new content regularly, archiving or repurposing outdated content, monitoring and keeping up with evolving search engine algorithms and what the competition is doing… and more.
- I want to rank number one for the top keyword
It doesn’t matter.
The truth is, when you create solid content focused around topics, you almost always receive far more, and often better-quality traffic and leads from long-tail keywords that you didn’t try to rank for. The magic happens when visitors reach your site because the content matched what they were looking for, but not necessarily when you matched the right keywords.
Summary
It’s important to remember that the algorithms used by search engines like Google are constantly evolving and getting smarter. It imitates human behaviour in evaluating content and user-generated signals, such as links and engagement metrics, to trawl through billions of pages of content and rank results.
Real SEO makes every part of the content organisation and the browsing experience better. By optimising your web content in every aspect, you may not even realise you’re doing SEO, but you’ll reap many times the rewards.
