Last week, we went over 4 common myths and misconceptions in SEO. This week we are going to give you four more in hopes to help guide you in the right direction. We know there are a lot of companies and services out there that promise to get your website to the top of Google. We don’t make that promise to our client. What we do promise here at Transformation Marketing is trust and results. SEO is ever changing and to get good results, it takes a lot of time and work. We can’t promise you a #1 page rank, but we can promise to work hard for you to make sure what is being done to your site is not a waste of time and money.
5. Meta-tags will help your rank.
When SEO first started being researched and implemented, your meta-tags and descriptions would have influenced your rank on the SERP. Today, they will not. This is not to say that these tags are not important anymore, they just aren’t being used in the ways they used to be. If your meta-description (which lies right under your title tag on the SERP) is used in the right way it will describe what your site offers, pulling users to your site where hopefully you can convince them to continue returning.
6. You do not need Social Media for SEO.
With Social Media gaining popularity in the recent past, this misconception formed with it. It is true that Social Media interactions do not affect your ranking on SERP directly, but it does not mean there aren’t indirect benefits to gain from using Social Media and SEO in tandem. When you use social sites like Twitter and Facebook in unison with your website you offer an opportunity to reach other creators interested in the same things your site has to offer. When one of those creators likes what they see and read on your site they may reference your website or Social Media page in their work, directing other (often new) individuals to your page. This is one major reason why you should be utilizing both SEO and Social Media in your strategy.
7. Good SEO involves trickery and foolery.
Some individuals believe that in order for SEO to work, you must “trick” search engines into ranking your page higher based on what their crawlers index on your page. This may provide small, short-term results, but this is not the way you have to go about SEO. The algorithms these search engines use are given as a guide into what they look for in hopes that it will help you decide what content is important and relevant on your page. If you use this guide and structure your content around it, you will have no need to “trick” or “fool” the search engine into thinking your page has more than what is there.
8. SEO is a one-time deal.
For many of us, we wish this was the case, but sadly it is not. As we have highlighted throughout several of our blogs involving SEO, the environment around it is constantly changing. One day certain things are irrelevant only to become the most important factor in a few months. For this reason, SEO is not something you can sit down and take care of all at one time in your office chair. It is something that requires small tweaks and updates consistently to stay in tune with the times.
This concludes our 8 myths and misconceptions in Search Engine Optimization. We hope we’ve helped guide you in the right direction, but if you feel you need more guidance, or after reading these two blogs, if you feel more than ever you need help with your SEO, please give us a call at Transformation Marketing. We are here to help you weed out the myths and get right to the facts of a well-optimized website.