Search Engine Optimization lies at the heart of your digital marketing strategy. But the field has dozens of SEO myths that waste your time on ineffectual strategies.
Peppermonkey Media is an SEO company that wants your businesses to succeed. Keep reading to discover the 11 most common myths and the best practices they obscure. If you have more questions, call us at (888) 231-9764.
1. Keyword Density: Higher Is Better
Keyword density refers to the frequency a keyword appears in your content. Many people believe that the more you use a designated keyword, also known as keyword stuffing, the better. However, it’s more about balance than frequency.
When you utilize adequate keyword research, your main keyword reflects a powerful, often-searched phrase, which you can use sparingly and still reap its benefits. Use your main keyword in the beginning, middle, and end. Use the word an additional time in the body of the content for every 500 words over 1,000 words you write.
2. Links: Quantity Over Quality
Many SEO professionals believe the number of links on your web pages matters more than the quality of the links. This is an outdated SEO strategy, and the quality of your links better represents the ranking factor than sheer numbers.
A high link density distracts users and reduces conversions and trust. Instead, focus on fewer links that are both relevant to your website and link to authoritative sites.
3. Links: Type Doesn’t Matter
One primary purpose of SEO includes building trust and authority that website users are likelier to click on and engage with. This means the types of links you include matter.
Ask yourself the following questions when including links:
- Does this link to a relevant site?
- Does this link to an authoritative site?
- Does the link add value to the user’s experience?
- Does this link help my current customers stay loyal?
4. Link Building: Not Important
While a bad linking strategy can reduce your rankings, that’s no reason to avoid link building altogether. Spending time to develop a strategy for link building makes a worthwhile investment.
One sure way to passively generate backlinks is by creating memeable and shareable content. When other creators share the content on their pages, they’ll link back to yours, creating a high-quality backlink.
5. SEO: Set It and Forget It
SEO works best when it’s updated and maintained. With constantly evolving customers, demographics, and internet culture, no content is truly evergreen.
Even with quality content, you should constantly maintain, analyze, and update it. Regularly measure your content’s performance and your user demographics and behaviors and adjust your content accordingly.
6. Page Speed: Not Important
One of the most detrimental SEO myths is that your page loading speed doesn’t matter. Unless your page is essential and the only place for the information your user needs, slow load speeds kill your traffic.
According to a study by Google, 53% of users navigate away from a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load. Slow load times frustrate your customers, reduce trust, and cause them to look elsewhere in the future. It also decreases your rankings on search engine results.
Ensure you don’t permanently turn away customers by regularly checking your website’s load time.
7. SEO: It’s Expensive
While you can spend a fortune on good SEO, you don’t always need to. Not only have digital marketing companies become more affordable to maintain competitive prices, but you can find a host of SEO tools to help the savvy marketer with basic knowledge create excellent strategies.
No matter your budget, you don’t have to develop your SEO methodology alone. Peppermonkey Media can develop a customized package and strategy to fit your needs and budget.
8. SEO: Only One Implementation
Search Engine Optimization isn’t a science. No foolproof step-by-step process exists that consistently works for every business. Search engine algorithms change, keyword popularity waxes and wanes, and customer demographics evolve.
The same factors that prevent you from allowing your SEO content to stay static prevent a single-minded approach to optimization success. While your approach should be data-driven and backed by experience, if an approach doesn’t work, try something else.
9. Interactive Content: Not Effective
The fundamental purpose of SEO is to increase engagement, subsequently increasing search engine rankings. Professionals who believe interactive content isn’t worth their time operate under outdated assumptions.
Interactive infographics and videos represent the cutting edge of SEO strategy. By increasing the time visitors spend engaging with your page, they skyrocket your search engine rankings and increasingly generate views, conversions, and loyal customers.
10 Site Age: It Affects Rankings
Outdated SEO professionals operate on two improper assumptions about your website’s age.
New Websites
The first assumption involves Google suppressing your website’s rankings for the first several months. The reasoning is that no matter how good the quality is, the search engine wants to see how it performs before it begins ranking it.
The truth is that while SEO rankings rarely show immediately or quickly and can take time to index, Google has no set policy or standard by which they suppress the results.
The Older, the Better
Google has repeatedly debunked the myth that the older a website, the higher it ranks. A kernel of truth does exist behind the assumption, but correlation doesn’t equal causation. Simply put, the older the website, the more time they’ve had to refine their SEO strategy.
Age itself has nothing to do with improving your website’s rankings.
11. Content: Longer Is Better
There’s truth in the fact that the top-performing pages have a certain length but remember causation vs. correlation. Longer pages tend to have better engagement and time spent on the website. However, if the content continues for too long, users become bored and leave.
Your content should be an appropriate length for your message without repetitiveness or unnecessary words.
Learn More With Peppermonkey Media
Don’t fall for these SEO myths. Peppermonkey Media provides local SEO for small businesses and helps them scale big. Call them at (888) 231-9764 to schedule a digital marketing consultation.
