SEO: a term which technically stands for search engine optimisation. To bust a myth straight away (or mutilate an acronym) SEO is not just about optimising for search engines – there’s far more to it than that these days.
It is all too easy to come across ‘tips’ that are more likely to throw you off-course than enhance your online presence. Here are the top three SEO myths that are outmoded and you should avoid to ensure a watertight content strategy.
The more keywords, the better
SEO: Stop Excessive Optimisation! In terms of ideal keyword density for a given page, there is no given formula. However, this is not to say that keywords should be incessantly repeated throughout a piece of content. Parroting keywords is a sure-fire way to deter readers, who can only deal with so many hyperlinks in one sentence.
Ideally, keywords should be included in the headline of a piece of content (or in sub headings, since these can also get picked up by search engines) and once within the content.
Bear in mind, however, that awkwardly framing your headlines around a keyword or phrase won’t do you any favours: it’s far better to write a cracking headline that makes sense rather than forcing in a keyword where it doesn’t belong.
Keywords > quality
There’s no denying keywords are a crucial element of your SEO campaign, but they should be on an equal footing with quality. In all the recent updates to Google’s algorithm, the search giant has ensured that quantity is inferior to quality, so it is crucial to create and distribute valuable content.
Put enough of a focus on the content itself, by ensuring it is top quality and relevant to your audience, and you’re on the right track to getting SEO-savvy. Good content paired with other SEO ranking signals, such as quantity and quality of backlinks pointing to it, will help improve its placement within natural search results.
Good SEO involves outsmarting search engines
Google is pretty clever: it knows what it’s doing and certainly won’t be happy if you contest its intelligence by trying to outfox it.
As an example, lifting trending content from other sites, editing it badly and stuffing in keywords may boost your readership for a while – but this is definitely not paving a path to good, lasting SEO. You may be penalised by Google or have your SEO strategies devalued, both of which will lead to a drop in search rankings.
On the contrary, good SEO is about building an informative website with unique and relevant content and encouraging the sharing and distribution of this content to drive organic publicity and links back to your site.
