SEO, unfortunately, is known for the never-ending cycle of truths becoming myths and rumors becoming facts. This stems mainly from the fact that search engines vehemently refuse to discuss their algorithms and make the public understand what they really want to see from websites. While this is completely understandable, many people – both newbies and old-timers alike – get caught in a web of hearsay that quickly spreads out and gains traction. This article aims to explain some of the most common SEO myths and to debunk them as well.
Keyword domains are the solution for high search rankings.
A keyword domain is basically a domain that contains the keywords that you want to target. An example would be cheaphomeinsurance.com. In the early days of SEO, keyword domains held much power and were an SEO strategy that actually worked. However, when Google announced in 2010 that they were going to investigate why keyword domains actually ranked well and that they would tune down that power, using keyword domains have become a not so effective optimization strategy. Now, Google has almost completely wiped out all keyword domains that they think don’t deserve the rankings they were getting.
If you’re looking to build a solid foundation for your site, then you should choose a domain that is brandable and has a high recall instead of attempting to make your targeted keywords fit into a spammy-looking and awkwardly long domain that’s difficult to remember. But let’s say that you already own a keyword domain. Search engines won’t count that against you if you embark on a legitimate SEO campaign that involves proper link building and social media marketing.
Meta tags are worthless.
Yes, they aren’t as important as they were a decade ago. But no, they’re not worthless! Don’t you want to control what appears as the title and description of your website on search engine results pages? Or would you rather have search engines randomly pull whatever title and description they can from your homepage? Meta tags serve as your window of opportunity to engage human users and persuade them to click through.
When Google+ was launched, every time a link gets published on it, a page title and description are displayed. If your site doesn’t have any meta data, then Google will simply use whatever information it can find about you and you risk having your links look pretty ugly.
Keyword density matters.
In spite of the presence of so many publications debunking this myth, many still believe that keyword density plays a huge role in determining your search engine rankings. It seems that there are a lot of people who haven’t moved on from the magical keyword density requirement back in the early days of SEO. If your website wasn’t doing well back then, you’d simply have to add more keywords and, voila, higher ranking.
Remember that you’re creating your website for humans and not for search engines. Write for your human visitors while incorporating your targeted keywords naturally into your content. Do not stuff your copy with key phrases. Search engines will mark you as spammy and human users will get turned off.
Word count also matters.
The truth is plain and simple: for SEO purposes, there is no word count requirement. You have to strike a balance between short and lacking AND long and boring.
If you churn out content that’s too short, then you probably won’t be able to cover the subject completely. Your visitors won’t be satisfied and probably search engine crawlers won’t be happy as well.
If you create content that’s too long, then users might get the impression that it’s unreadable and/or boring. Its viral capabilities will suffer, which would of course have a negative effect on your rankings. It may also turn off your users that they’ll hit the back button as fast as they can. In SEO lingo, this is known as “bounce back.” Take note that search engines keep track of this. Your bounce back rate will definitely have an effect your ranking.
No-follow links are not valuable.
The no-follow attribute is a way of telling search engines that you’re not vouching for the website that the link is pointing to. Hence, when search engines crawlers don’t follow the destination page contained in the link, some SEO benefits like PageRank and anchor text don’t get passed on. This leads many people to think that no-follow links are useless. But the truth is that it doesn’t really matter what kind of backlink you get because both do-follow and no-follow links will bring in more traffic to your website. Also, wouldn’t search engines find it suspicious if your inbound link profile is composed primarily of do-follow links?