SEO myths exposed!
- SEO |
When I first started a business earlier this year, one of the biggest banes of my life was SEO. I absolutely hated it, set up a crappy website without understanding it's importance and significance and ended up basically having to start from scratch.
Initially I decided just to cut my losses and pay someone to take care of my SEO needs for me (which doesn't come cheap by the way), but I also knew that I had to get a better handle on my knowledge at least to have a basic understanding.
Wow - once I started to understand it more, there was no going back for me! I'm obsessed with it now and love knowing what works, what doesn't work, how it works and more than that - I love to pass on what I've learnt to help people who are in exactly the same situation I was.
I get it, it's not for everyone - but for anyone who needs a bit of a helping hand, I'm just going to give you a few things that I've learnt which just aren't true! I guess you could call them myths because for me certainly, they were things that i assumed but of you think that any of the following are true - it's time to think again!!
Meta descriptions and tags help with optimisation.
Yes and No. Keywords placed in your meta tags and descriptions aren't crawled by Google so they don't add any value to your ranking. When you'r eon page one though, they do help your site look better than all the rest, so get into the habit of making these look professional and makes sense, because they will still encourage people to click on your sie when everyone else's tags are blank or have been pulled directly from the page.
Keywords - quantity over quality.
There is nothing more infuriating or more likely to put Google off of favouring your site than key word stuffing. Adding the same phrase five or six times into a 100 word piece of copy is not going to get you noticed, it will get you penalised. The golden rule is that website copy should be written for your market, not for the Google bots. And yes, you need keywords in there to tell your market what it is you do, without them your copy will likely be too vague. As far as keywords go, less is more. Creating sentences around your keywords will get you nowhere!
The more pages the better.
Here's something which I don't think is common knowledge - Google doesn't index all pages on every website. I started out with the mis-guided understanding that the more pages I created the better however home page is the only given. IF your content is valuable then yes it'll get indexed, otherwise the Google bots just keep going until they get to something relevant! By creating lots of irrelevant pages you're penalised in two ways - a) it takes up your valuable time, b) it makes your website slow to load and had to use, things that Google will actually punish you for. Remember that less is more and quality over quantity as far as you're content is concerned.
Location doesn't matter.
This is another biggy. A lot of businesses are online these days so people assume that their target market are all over the world too. While this is true to an extent and geography is certainly not a restriction like it used to be - people still favour local businesses and heavy research shows that the majority of people type in their location when looking for a product or servie. If you don't have a valid postal address on your website and on your Google business page - you WILL be penalised.
Mind blown yet?
Images don't matter.
Images are just to make the site look good right? WRONG! You can, and should, index all images using a keyword and a accurate description of what the image is. Without this, Google can't index properly and the bots only pick up half of the content on your page. If you don't do this, you're passing up a big chance to have your whole site indexed as Google just don't know how relevant it is.
Lists don't matter.
If I can give you one piece of advice it's to create a numbered list and put it on your home page. How to list, step by step guide; anything that can be picked up as relevant content by the bots and placed on the throne of the search page - the answer box! The featured answer box sits above answer one and above the paid ads. If this content is picked up by Google (and no reason it shouldn't be if it's written properly) you are guaranteed to increase your traffic tenfold. Getting onto that spot is SEO gold so it's worth putting some time into getting there!
SEO is IT.
No way! It's not! Many people think that SEO is too technical so to get an expert means getting someone in IT. If you din't have the time or capacity to learn SEO yourself then do yourself a favour and engage with someone who does. It might be expensive but there is so much that goes on in the back end of a website and it's scary to know how much is missed if you don't know what you're looking for.
As I said, I had to basically rip my website apart and start again because I went in blind to this so i hope a couple of these tips help!! I can talk SEO all day and all night (I'm a bit of a geek like that!) so if anyone has anything to add to this list of things that they always assumed to be true about SEO - I'd love to hear it
Initially I decided just to cut my losses and pay someone to take care of my SEO needs for me (which doesn't come cheap by the way), but I also knew that I had to get a better handle on my knowledge at least to have a basic understanding.
Wow - once I started to understand it more, there was no going back for me! I'm obsessed with it now and love knowing what works, what doesn't work, how it works and more than that - I love to pass on what I've learnt to help people who are in exactly the same situation I was.
I get it, it's not for everyone - but for anyone who needs a bit of a helping hand, I'm just going to give you a few things that I've learnt which just aren't true! I guess you could call them myths because for me certainly, they were things that i assumed but of you think that any of the following are true - it's time to think again!!
Meta descriptions and tags help with optimisation.
Yes and No. Keywords placed in your meta tags and descriptions aren't crawled by Google so they don't add any value to your ranking. When you'r eon page one though, they do help your site look better than all the rest, so get into the habit of making these look professional and makes sense, because they will still encourage people to click on your sie when everyone else's tags are blank or have been pulled directly from the page.
Keywords - quantity over quality.
There is nothing more infuriating or more likely to put Google off of favouring your site than key word stuffing. Adding the same phrase five or six times into a 100 word piece of copy is not going to get you noticed, it will get you penalised. The golden rule is that website copy should be written for your market, not for the Google bots. And yes, you need keywords in there to tell your market what it is you do, without them your copy will likely be too vague. As far as keywords go, less is more. Creating sentences around your keywords will get you nowhere!
The more pages the better.
Here's something which I don't think is common knowledge - Google doesn't index all pages on every website. I started out with the mis-guided understanding that the more pages I created the better however home page is the only given. IF your content is valuable then yes it'll get indexed, otherwise the Google bots just keep going until they get to something relevant! By creating lots of irrelevant pages you're penalised in two ways - a) it takes up your valuable time, b) it makes your website slow to load and had to use, things that Google will actually punish you for. Remember that less is more and quality over quantity as far as you're content is concerned.
Location doesn't matter.
This is another biggy. A lot of businesses are online these days so people assume that their target market are all over the world too. While this is true to an extent and geography is certainly not a restriction like it used to be - people still favour local businesses and heavy research shows that the majority of people type in their location when looking for a product or servie. If you don't have a valid postal address on your website and on your Google business page - you WILL be penalised.
Mind blown yet?
Images don't matter.
Images are just to make the site look good right? WRONG! You can, and should, index all images using a keyword and a accurate description of what the image is. Without this, Google can't index properly and the bots only pick up half of the content on your page. If you don't do this, you're passing up a big chance to have your whole site indexed as Google just don't know how relevant it is.
Lists don't matter.
If I can give you one piece of advice it's to create a numbered list and put it on your home page. How to list, step by step guide; anything that can be picked up as relevant content by the bots and placed on the throne of the search page - the answer box! The featured answer box sits above answer one and above the paid ads. If this content is picked up by Google (and no reason it shouldn't be if it's written properly) you are guaranteed to increase your traffic tenfold. Getting onto that spot is SEO gold so it's worth putting some time into getting there!
SEO is IT.
No way! It's not! Many people think that SEO is too technical so to get an expert means getting someone in IT. If you din't have the time or capacity to learn SEO yourself then do yourself a favour and engage with someone who does. It might be expensive but there is so much that goes on in the back end of a website and it's scary to know how much is missed if you don't know what you're looking for.
As I said, I had to basically rip my website apart and start again because I went in blind to this so i hope a couple of these tips help!! I can talk SEO all day and all night (I'm a bit of a geek like that!) so if anyone has anything to add to this list of things that they always assumed to be true about SEO - I'd love to hear it
-
adamcurran -
[ 1 ] Thanks
{{ DiscussionBoard.errors[10903798].message }} -