5 SEO Myths Debunked to Speed Up Your Optimizations
Last update: 27 April 2023 at 03:19 pm
3.00/5Focus on keywords, creating new content regularly, and indexing! Pay attention to backlink building, exquisite content, and a high reputation! Use SEO tools and implement the measures there!
As a website owner and SEO, you constantly read and hear about tips and optimization activities that are – supposedly – indispensable. And are supposed to boost the ranking of your own site.
Most of these are SEO myths.
The truth is: Not all SEO measures are equally useful and important, but partly hopelessly overrated. You can find out which ones they are here.
Keyword Density
The density of central keywords and key phrases in the text is long outdated. Of course, you still shouldn’t refrain from placing the main keyword and one or two secondary keywords in meaningful places (as early as possible) as well as in the headlines.
For website owners, SEOs and SEO managers, however, it is more important to offer unique, high-value and useful content on the pages that also fulfills the search intent – instead of forcefully placing the main keyword ten or 15 times in the article.
What Is a Focus Keyword and Why Is It So Important?
In today’s internet-based society, it’s essential to know how to promote your products or services online. Creating content is a vital aspect of digital marketing. Blog posts and articles can draw attention to your business by attracting people interested in the topics you write about. What is a focus keyword? The main word or phrase […]
The requirement to meet a certain percentage, i.e. to pay attention to the ratio of keywords to the total number of words in the text, is antiquated and dates back to the 00s.
Google’s algorithms and neural networks have long since become intelligent enough to read out the subject matter and the significance of an article for a search query on the basis of a sensible text structure, outline, and headline hierarchy/architecture.
Customizing the URL
After crawling, most SEO tools point to adjusting the URLs of the (sub)pages. They “complain” about a wide variety of things:
- Missing underscores in the URL
- A change between upper and lower case
- The length of the URL
These tips are generally helpful and not wrong, but you should not waste your efforts and manpower on – subsequently – adjusting the URLs. Because: as a ranking factor and common SEO myths, the URL structure is irrelevant.
In case of doubt, you may even suffer ranking losses and other negative consequences after the change, for example, because you forgot to set the appropriate redirects.
Links From Social Media & Social Media in General
The deliberate, targeted distribution and scattering of selected and target group-compliant content (whether text, audio, image or video) via social media can be quite useful to increase your own awareness. Or to attract new visitors who bring traffic to the site.
But social media links and activity on the networks do nothing for SEO and rankings. This is because Google cannot read the social signals (such as likes, comments, or how often a post was shared). And, more importantly, all links from social networks, whether Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, are so-called “no follow” links, which means: Google does not follow these links but ignores them.
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Find an agency!Use of the Search Console for Indexing Purposes
The Search Console is undoubtedly one of the more important Google tools, as the tool highlights technical problems, provides info on search traffic, refers to the current coverage and you are generally alerted to conspicuousness by Google.
However, a very important myth amongst the sea of SEO myths is that it is absolutely necessary to register and use Search Console in order for your website to end up in Google’s database (index) and ultimately rank. The fact is that Google will find and crawl your site even without a Search Console account, although this may take at least a few days to a few weeks at most. Depending on how your web presence is
- structured
- organized and
- (SEO) optimized
So if you are reluctant to use this – very powerful – tool, or if you don’t have the time or inclination to deal with the free analysis tool, you can rest assured: Google will sooner or later come across your pages when searching new content on the web.
Backlink Building
One of the most overrated SEO measures: the attempt of website operators to absolutely have to get backlinks. In general: Yes, backlinks represent a not unimportant signal for Google. This is probably SEO myths 101.
The search engine reads backlinks from (topic-relevant) pages as a recommendation. Especially important in areas and segments where sensitive facts and info are involved, such as websites dealing with health, medicine, money, and finance.
But the informative blog about gardening and gardening care needs just as few backlinks for attractive, consistently high positions in the search results as the dentist around the corner or the niche or special interest site on the subject of “horror film” or “DJ technology” – as long as the web offer satisfies user interest, takes into account the search intent and presents unique, outstanding content.
All these aspects are more important in their entirety than backlinks. Backlinks are beneficial, yes, but only if they come from pages that deal with similar content, already have trust as well as authority with Google, and the search engine “assumes” the pages have expertise in the relevant subject area.
Backlinks are good, no doubt, but you don’t get them in a hurry anyway. You earn them and other sites will sooner or later link to that content of their own accord – as long as there is correspondingly good, multi-value content. Measures such as link purchase and exaggerated, inflationary link exchange programs are not advisable, as this violates Google’s guidelines and, in case of doubt, can result in a downgrading of the page.
