Top SEO Myths Everyone Should Know About

1: Only the first rank matters

Many eBooks and other resources that business owners use will place an important emphasis on the need to be at the top of search results, whether that be on Google Search, other engines, or even in places like social media. But surveys have shown that people quite often will look at other results and they will scroll down through the page.

2: You can do SEO with no outside help

Doing SEO simply means that you follow a set of techniques and procedures to increase the chance that web users will go to your site. It is true that anybody can learn these techniques, and if you are a web site owner and you want to do your own SEO then you can spend the time to learn and apply those techniques. But SEO can be complex and touches many areas such as online marketing, coding, technical aspects along with PR skills.

3: META tags are very important

It used to be that every page on your site needed META tags in order to rank well. Those are small pieces of code that would give Google a list of keywords and a description. The search engine would base itself on those to find out what your web site was about. Now however, those do not affect your ranking at all.

4: Keyword-rich domain names are ranked higher

Back in the .com days, it used to be that the URL you used was very important. Google placed a lot of importance on the domain name, and if you could get a name that had your keyword in it, you would gain a big advantage over other sites. This is why a lot of companies in the late 90s bought domain names for a lot of money.

5: Submit your site to Google or other search engines

All search engines used to have URL submission forms where you could send your site to Google and others. The crawlers that these engines use now are sophisticated enough that any new site will be found in a matter of days. The only time you would have to worry about submitting your site is if for some reason it was not indexed automatically after a couple of days.

6: Submitting a sitemap will boost your rankings

Google offers a webmasters interface and from there, you can submit a sitemap, which is an XML file containing links to every page on your site. Some site owners take the time to submit such a file every time they make a change, but that is not necessary. Submitting a sitemap does not change your rankings, all it does is add pages which may not have been indexed already.

7: SEO has nothing to do with social media

Before the advent of Facebook and Twitter, SEO was the one and only technique to get traffic from an organic way. But now, social media is everywhere, and the line is quickly blurring between the two. While some marketers still consider SEO and social media to be different beasts, the truth is that they are very closely linked. For example, Google now places their own social network, Google Plus, into its search results.

8: Google does not read CSS files

The Google bot used to be fairly primitive and only saw text, which is why many people concentrated on the text part of their web site. But now that engine is very sophisticated and it reads JavaScript, CSS, and more. The crawler can definitely see whether your site's presentation is appealing for users or not. For example, if someone searches on a mobile device and you have no mobile layout on your site, you may be missing out.

9: You need to update your home page all the time

Some people think that by updating their home page content all the time they will rank higher, or by not updating it their ranking will drop. In most cases that is not the case, because if you have a sales page that offers a product, then there would be no reason to update that page unless something about the product changes, and Google expects that.

10: The H1 header has greater value than the rest of your text

The structure of your page is seen by Google and other engines, but you have to realize that many sites are structured very differently. As such, no one specific tag has more value than another. An H1 tag is simply a header that corresponds to a CSS entry in order for the user to see your page a certain way.

11: Linking to other highly ranked sites helps your ranking

Some sites try to link to many other high authority sites in order to help their rankings, but that does not help at all. Google uses PageRank to decide how your site will rank, and that algorithm is based on how useful your site is to others, and as such it will only look at how many other people link to you.

12: Using automated SEO methods is always spam

Many people use automated SEO methods that do not fall into the spam area. Many companies have very big sites and they use automated scripts to do a lot of the grunt work of SEO. Whether or not a method is spammy is based on what the result is, not on how automated it is.

13: PageRank is the only factor that matters

The algorithm that Google uses to rank sites is PageRank, which determines how useful a site is to others. But the result also takes indications from hundreds of other inputs as well, according to what Google says. Some of these inputs are easy to see, like having your site being recommended by others on Google Plus. This proves that not only PageRank matters

14: The title tag is hidden from search engines

Most of what Google sees on your site is the text that is visible to users, such as what appears on the screen and is rendered in a web browser. As such, it would be easy to think that the title is not picked up. However, your title is very important for SEO, because that is the text that appears on the link people will click on

16: Usability does not affect SEO

The whole point of SEO is to gain traffic and get people to stay on your site so they can be entertained or buy your products and services. As such, SEO very much goes hand in hand with usability, because this is what will make a difference in whether or not someone stays on your site for long.

17: The.edu and.gov backlinks are the best

It is true that most.edu and.gov sites are well ranked and have a high authority, because those are typically official sites that are well maintained and contain no spam. However, this is just a byproduct of how they are maintain, it is no guarantee

18: SEO is based on the quantity of links

Believing that the success of a SEO campaign is to have the most possible backlinks is misunderstanding how ranking works.. Often, a single link from a popular news site talking about your product will be much more valuable than spamming hundreds of links to unknown blog sites.

19: Backlinks are more important than content

SEO usually costs time and money, and as such it is unrealistic to think you can do everything possible in every facet of online marketing. So often you have to make choices, and some may be tempted to focus on link building instead of content. However, the goal of SEO is to bring good traffic to your site. Quality is very important, not only quantity. Not having good content means your site has no value to anyone, and as such it will quickly lose any benefit that the extra links gave you.

20: Paid links will get you banned from Google

There are many ways to get links, and some of them includes some type of payment. But not all paid links are always bad, it depends on how that payment occurs. For example, many sites, including Google, offer advertising services. You can buy an ad on Ad-word, you could go to another ad network, and many sites offer their own ad services

21: Good content is all you need

Just like building an army of links will not help you keep traffic for very long, having good content and nothing else is also not enough. Most people agree that good content is the cornerstone of having a successful site. By having engaging, useful posts for your visitors, you can ensure that they will want to visit your site and stay there for a long time. However, simply building it does not make it known.

22: Google actively penalizes certain sites

Anyone who has done some work in SEO has been puzzled at some point when seeing strange drops in ranking. It may seem as if you did nothing wrong, you increased all of your marketing efforts, yet somehow Google decided to rank you lower. It may be easy to think that your site was penalized in some way, but most often that is not the case. Google clearly states that they only penalize sites that break their terms of use by actively going after unethical methods like spamming users.

23: Google AdWords will give you preferential

Ad-Words is a very useful program by Google where you can place an ad on other sites to advertise your own. It should be part of any online marketing campaign. However, Ad-Words by itself does not help boost your rankings. Some think that because a company pays Google, then they will give them preferential treatment in organic search, but that is not the case

24: SEO is something done once only

A lot of sites do this mistake. When the site is new and it has just been created, the owners will invest in doing some SEO, and then think that everything is done. But just like marketing in the real world, SEO is not something you can do once and then forget. Instead, it is a continual process which has to be done over a long period of time, often the entire life of the site

25: SEO companies can get guaranteed results

This is a very common yet completely bogus claim which some marketing firms like to use. They claim that by using their methods, your results will be guaranteed. But the truth is that no one can claim a certain method is foolproof for the same reason that SEO is not something you do once then forget. Everything changes online and you never know when something that used to work well will stop working.

26: Placing links per page can penalize you

Some people have been told that a certain amount of links on a page can be bad for your rankings. For example, placing more than a hundred links on your landing page will be bad for Google and you will get penalized in some way. While it is true that spamming links on a page is something you should not do, and the Google bot has ways to detect when a page is a link bait one, you should not be afraid to create pages with lots of links.

27: Internal links don't matter for SEO

Many people think of linking only as far as backlinks go, and only focus on having other sites link to their own pages. But internal linking is also important, just like your site layout is important, because the search crawlers try to act as much like a normal web viewer as they can. If your site has bad internal navigation, Google will be able to detect that, and this could penalize you

28: Social marketing are the number one factor in SEO

Social media has taken a central role in how people find information on the web today, and the signals sent by these sites are fed into search engines in real time. No modern business should ignore social media, simply because of the amount of time people spend on Facebook or Twitter. However, no one social site is the holy grail of SEO. Even if getting Facebook likes can be important, is not any more so than the many other techniques that can be used

29: Keywords are no longer relevant

Sites used to be created with a paragraph at the bottom filled with keywords in order to attract more traffic using something called keyword stuffing. In recent years, knowledgeable marketers have realized that this is no longer needed, in fact it is a practice that is heavily discouraged by search engines. However, this does not mean that keywords are not still very important.

30: Using bigger headers will improve your ranking

Header tags such as H1 or H2 do matter because search engines look at the layout of your site, so you need to have headers that make sense and that contain your keywords so that the search engine knows what the content is about.

31: Keywords have to be exact matches

It's true that words have to match what people type into a search engine, however there are arguments for using words other than your selected keywords. For example, most words have a lot of synonyms, and people type in those synonyms all the time. By using a larger selection of keywords, you can be sure to catch those searches as well.

32: PageRank does not matter anymore

When Google first started to be the top search engine and everyone focused on ranking well, PageRank became the number one criteria every marketer would go after. It used to be, and may still be, the input metric that affects a ranking the most, but the company has been clear many times that sites are ranked on hundreds of different metrics, not just PageRank.

33: Google Analytics can spy on people

Google Analytics is the most popular analytics software used by sites around the web, and as a result some people think that they are being spied on. But the company has said many times that no personal data is being transmitted using Google Analytics.

34: You should finish your site before starting SEO

SEO can be thought of as a form of marketing, and most marketing efforts are made after a site is completed, but there are steps that you should take before. For example, you should make sure you have a good layout, good navigation, META tags, titles, and so on

35: Buying links, likes will help your site rank better

There are a lot of sites selling Facebook likes, followers, and so on. Often, those services seem quite cheap, such as 10,000 likes for $10. However, in most cases these are not worth the money. First, they are usually fake accounts, bots that simply mass follow for a price. They are not real people, which means no one will see those social signals, and as a result they will not increase your ranking

36: Paid links always come from shady sites

In the case of bulk services, it is true that a lot of those paid links will come from shady sources, including bots or proxies. However, many reputable sites sell links as well, in the form of advertising or even preferential treatment. In those cases, you may have very legitimate links on high authority sites, and those can help your site rank better on search engines.

37: Google won't find bad or spammy links

Some of the people who buy bulk links or who use automated methods to spam blog posts think that Google will not find them, and that they will gain from their unethical practices. In many cases, that may actually be true, since Google and other search engines are not part of the secret police

38: You should not place too many outbound links

Some people think that they should only link to a small number of outbound sites. There is only one case where linking to other sites can hurt you, and that is if you become part of a backlinks network for the sole purpose of raising your ranking. In that case, when one site is discovered, all of them may be hit

39: With good SEO you do not need PPC marketing

Some sites will spend a lot of time doing SEO and get great organic results, but even then PPC campaigns can be useful. Surveys should that it often is not the same people who click on ads versus those who click on organic links, so it can be worthwhile to do both, if you have the money for it.

40: You can manipulate search rankings

This is a myth many marketing sites attempt to promote, the fact that they can somehow manipulate search rankings in a way that is outside traditional SEO. The truth is that there is no magical way to manipulate search rankings, and usually when someone says that they can, what they mean is that they will use unethical ways to speed up your ranking. But using spam and other spammy strategies mean your site is put at risk.