Enhance your Digital Marketing Strategy by avoiding these SEO myths

Writing an in-depth content backed up with proper stats and data, using high-quality keywords, promoting a blog post and creating your market space among your competitors, all to gain traffic and getting a position by a search engine. This is done with the help of SEO, but in order to get traffic, you need to stop believing in some myths.

Myth 1: SEO is a one-time activity

There is a strong myth that once a website is created and handed over to an SEO team, and once they have made you reach the top, your website is successful. But SEO is a continuous process with equal effort. You have to keep your website updated and optimize it over a period of time to get the conversions and retain your position.

It is equally important to keep patience for the results which takes about 3-6 months to put your website on the top page and further maintain the process.

There are chances of your competitors taking over your position if you become liberal with the SEO process.

Myth 2: Backlink is an only key factor in SEO

The architect of the website should be user-friendly.

The website should be easy to navigate i.e the visitor should not always fight to dig in for content and desired information.

Structure of the website should be attractive and interactive, which includes content with text, images, infographics, gifs and videos.

Myth 3: Are you different in the market? No research needed

Generally, website launches their products for marketing and optimization to get more traffic without undergoing proper research about the product and the target audience.

Analyzing the product and the target audience before launching your product is necessary because it helps knowing user’s persona and the potential of the product, Buyers behavior and the Demographics.

Myth 4: Writing blogs for bots

Content building is very important for a website. The content should always serve user’s purpose. There is a wrong belief that content should be complicatedly built in order to make it look classy, but it should be grammatically constructed in a simple language so that the target audience could pull information out of it.

Generally, website developer creates a content with irrelevant blogs for bots in order to get themselves on top ranking. These blogs are put up just for the sake of blogging rather than fulfilling user needs.

Make sure your website’s content is constructed in a manner it is informative.

Myth 5: Forget Keyword research

Keyword research is an important aspect of SEO. It becomes important to understand the search query for the target audience and the services you are providing.

This is to make sure that you are present on the first page of a search engine when they are looking out for you.

In case you are not present on top ranking, competitors might take over your market.

Therefore know the keywords with which visitors are coming to your website through webmaster which is also known as search console.

Make sure you are always updated with competitors research, to know the keywords which are pushing them on top rank so to target those keywords as well.

There are various free and paid tools to explore relevant keywords and optimize your website periodically. And accordingly, come up new contents to enhance your marketing space.

To know more about importance and to do Keyword research, check out this blog from Get Digital Pro

Myth 6: Target Keyword in anchor text can be manipulated

Anchor texts are the clickable texts in the hyperlink. The keywords in anchor text are one of many signals search engine uses to determine the topic of the web page.

Anchor text is also known as the link label or link title. The target keywords present in the anchor text determines the ranking of the page by search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc.

Does the use of keyword-rich anchor text boost up the rankings?

Overuse of keyword-rich anchor text might harm your site rankings and can get you penalized by Google. Sometimes the links in the anchor text might misguide you to another site which when overdone can be easily tracked by search engines and can harm your site rankings.

Too many SEO manipulations generally considered as Over Optimization can also affect your site ranking.

It is always suggested to use your brand name as anchor text whenever possible.

Myth 7: Meta Tags does not matter

What are Meta tags?

Meta tags are the most basic element in SEO. They are the snippets of texts that describe the content of the page. These are hidden in the page’s code and exists only in HTML and added to the “head” of the page. Meta Tags help webmaster to pull information from their sites and provide it to the search engines.

The three element of Meta tags are:

Title tags – These are the texts that appear on the top of the browser which is viewed as the “title” of the page.

Description – A brief description of the page

Keywords – A series of keywords which you find relevant to the content and which can rank your content top on the search engine.

Meta tags help the search engine to trace the keywords and description and find if they are related to the visible content. It also makes the content look attractive and the search engine will track that high – quality content as user-friendly.

Myth 8: Plugging in XML sitemap will boost up search rankings

XML sitemap will let the search engines to better index your site and help the crawlers to bot through the entire structure of the site and retrieve it more efficiently. When you create a new content or update an existing content, Google XML sitemap will index your content faster which might lead to the visibility of the website. This does not mean that it guarantees to boost your rankings on search engine.

Google Penguin, an update by Google launched on April 24, 2012, also a codename for Google algorithm aimed at lowering the search rankings of the websites which over-optimized the content by spamming the search results in order to boost their search rankings and also manipulating the backlinks. Therefore avoid using optimized anchor texts and use diversified anchor text which might help your site rankings.

Myth 9: Long form content gears up ranking

Long- form content are blog posts with approximately 1,200 or more words.

Any content only in text form might exhaust the reader and thus the user engagement metrics i.e Bounce rate and Time on site might come down. These content gets a lot of search traffic initially but they lack return traffic when the user engagement metrics starts coming down.

Hence such posts must be created with the combination of texts along with images, infographics, gifs etc which can keep the visitor engaged while reading. It is also necessary to use proper headings and subheadings to make the post more user-friendly.

Long form contents are valuable only until it is serving users intent, further finding its site on top rank.

Myth 10: Guest Blogging does not exist

Guest Blogging is used to increase traffic of the blog post where bloggers from outside comes to publish their blogs. It is necessary to make sure the website on which you are doing the guest blogging has a high domain authority.

Do not give more than one incoming link to your website or else you can get penalized by Google.

The blog post must be careful with the anchor text and must have high-quality content.

A relevant domain is very important for guest blogging.

Make sure these points are there in your guest blogging or you might end up harming your website or the competitor website can take away your ranking.

Myth 11: Keyword Stuffing will gain more traffic

This is the most common misconceptions in Search Engine Optimization. Though it is true that Keywords act as a compass for SEO, contents stuff keywords to rank themselves on the top of the search engine. This trick can be identified as a spam by Google and you can be penalized for the same act.

There are instances where a company builds similar random URLs expecting any one of them to hit the top rank of the search engine. Avoid doing this as Google might identify this as deceptive which might not be well suited for your company.