SEO Myths And Legends
Successful search results can feel like a mythical creature we are all searching for. Learn the SEO aspects that should not be taken as fact.
The Holy Grail of search engine optimization is something many webmasters and IT professionals search for endlessly. Achieving that coveted first place in search engine rankings can seem like a mythical quest, given the often conflicting or outdated advice bandied around online about how to approach it.
Below, we will slay a few SEO dragons, while pointing you towards the true path for search engine nirvana:
Keywords Are Everything
Folklore tells of an age when inserting keywords into every sentence of a website would achieve incredible search engine results. However, keyword stuffing has long been frowned upon by the algorithms that crawl through every word of every website. After all this process ignored user experience and compromised search engines’ reputations as deliverers of useful content.
As these algorithms have matured and been refined, they’ve become increasingly astute at differentiating between content written for people and text produced for robots. Today, keyword stuffing is likely to get a website blacklisted from future search results – a process that is very difficult to reverse, and which should be avoided at all costs. Keywords are not the be-all-and-end-all of online content any more.
Link Farms Increase Your Website’s Ranking
Another historic yardstick for measuring a website’s popularity involved the number of third-party websites that linked to it. Unscrupulous webmasters sensed an opportunity, and began creating shell sites whose sole purpose was to host links to unrelated domains in exchange for a fee. Again, however, machine learning has allowed the search engine algorithms to determine that a particular site is full of meaningless links. The farms themselves are blacklisted, while linked sites are downgraded in search engine results – the exact opposite of the farms’ stated intention. Only links to other reputable sites will boost a site’s ranking. Once again, put the customer first and the results will follow.
You Can’t Have Too Much Content
It was often thought that a constantly-updated website would look active and popular, and it’s certainly true that algorithms prioritize websites with regular updates. However, the last ten years has seen vast quantities of low-quality content being churned out simply to populate blogs and news feeds. This is called ‘infobesity’ and the last thing you want to do is clog up the internet’s arteries!
The recent rise of bot content hasn’t helped, while minor tweaks to existing content (in an attempt to pass it off as original) can now be easily identified by the algorithms. Cheap and poorly-written copy will be obvious, while plagiarism is easier to spot than ever. Conversely, unique editorial updates a few times a week will please the search engine Gods immensely.
Hyperlinks Are Really Important
The internet’s formative years saw extensive use of hyperlinked keywords and popular search terms on web pages. This was seen by early web crawlers as an indication of authority – if a website has a hundred links to reputable third-party sites, its content was probably created by experts. Needless to say, that was rarely the case. Optimized anchor text does still have a place, but it’s a fringe benefit compared to genuine forms of SEO like long tail keywords or robots.txt files. Meta tags and page headers are believed to count for more than links.
Unsolicited Emails Hold The Key To SEO Nirvana
Most of us will be familiar with these emails. They often have multiple exclamation marks in the title, promising us a position on the first page of Google (but never Bing, oddly). They typically originate in India, where 80% of the population doesn’t speak English and even the remaining 20% have a distinctive style of sentence construction. Employing the ‘services’ of such an agency will probably result in poor-quality generic text that has been mildly tweaked from a hundred other sites. In other words, it won’t work.