In this digital marketing age, it’s no wonder people are putting so much emphasis on SEO. Search Engine Optimization. It’s making your site more visible on search engines so that people can find you! And don’t we all want people to find us? SEO’s increasing popularity, however, has lead to several misconceptions about its use and how to optimize it! So I’ll take you through the nine biggest ones here – hold onto your hats, folks.
You don’t! Search Engines can find you all on their own without you needing to submitting your site. Also, submitting your site isn’t going to index it faster. Crawlers are going to find it and index it on their own leisure.
If you’re going to invest your time into something, invest it in generating relevant and interesting content! Links are important to your website – but content is what people visit it for and the links will follow.
You’d think that meta descriptions, those tid-bits of information found beneath a web page’s title on a search engine results page, might have a little bit to do with search rankings, right? Nope! Google itself has said that these don’t impact it at all. Does that mean you shouldn’t put any effort into these meta descriptions? Of course not, these descriptions can help drive people to your site by reading them on the results page…but you don’t need to jam every keyword into one sentence.
So Social Search is basically the intersection of SEO and Social Media. It means that the content you see is influenced by your social networks – what your Facebook friend likes or what your Twitter follower tweets. And if you don’t have social media strategy for your SEO, you better think again, buddy.
Don’t try to jam in every possible keyword that could maybe, possibly, kind of, in another lifetime, relate to your topic into your headline. People want to be able to know what your article is about, and very clearly understand what they will get out of it. It’s not a numbers game of how many keywords you can fit it – it’s about your content and how it drives people to want to read about it.
Those who focus on having the highest number of pages on their site tend to over look the quality of the content on those pages. Just as with keywords, it’s not a numbers game. It about having your content laid out in the most organic and thoughtful way to share information. Just because you have tons of pages doesn’t mean that all those pages will be seen and drive traffic.
Your homepage is the first thing your visitors will see when they visit your site. Try to make a good first impression instead of force-feeding them every bit of information you have on your site! Let them know the basics – who you are, where you are, what you do, etc. Confusing your visitors right off the bat is not not going to make for happy campers.
I’m not saying I don’t believe in magic. All I’m saying is, if you’re looking for a magic number of times you should repeat a keyword on a webpage, you’re never going to find it. Make sure it’s in your header, your URL, and mentioned as many times as is necessary for your content to make sense. You want someone searching for information to know exacting what your page is about, you don’t want to bore them with repeating your keyword every sentence.
If you haven’t gotten it already, the main point a lot of these facts should be driving home is that, at the end of the day, you can’t JUST optimize for search engines, because people are the ones that are going to be engaging with your site. Make it easy to read, easy to browse, and easy to convert. This will make the site accessible to crawlers and people. And that’s what makes happy SEO.
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Source: Hubspot
