Top 5 Common Misconceptions About SEO
1) Get me to the top of Google
The seven words every optimizer hates. Fortunately at White Hat Media we have very understanding clients who listen well when we inform them about the basic practices of SEO. However, anyone in the industry can tell you that some clients think it’s as easy as pie to get to the top of Google’s results page for any number of keywords. Of course this is not the case, no matter how many meta tags you perfect or how much link building you execute there’s no way of guaranteeing first page top rankings. Depending on the sector your client’s in, it is very likely that their competitors also employ an SEO agency and the two of you are battling it out – which is where much of the fun comes from.
2) SEO’s a one time thing
Many people are under the impression that once the site is optimised and you’ve submitted a few articles, you can sit back and reap the… impressions. Unfortunately this is not the case. Search engine optimisation is a long and on going process, it’s not necessarily arduous but it does require hard work and patience. Clients are keen to see swift results, which frequently you can give them, however to steadily move up the search engine’s results page and maintain a top position requires constant onsite maintenance and regular link building activity. As soon as you relax you’ll see that traffic ebb away and your conversion rates start decrease as your competitors creep ever closer to your coveted number one spot.
3) It’s all onsite
This one’s a half truth. In its rawest form SEO consists of two elements; onsite optimisation and link building. You can spend all the live long day writing and altering your title tags, meta descriptions and headers however this will only take your site so far. Without some quality inbound links acting as votes of confidence in the eyes of the all mighty Google, your site will still rank poorly. In addition the more links to your site the more alternative paths people and potential customers have of finding you online. The world of SEO is constantly evolving and there’s no end to the things you can do to optimize a website, what was best practise last year will probably be outdated next year.
4) Our webteam can handle the SEO
In an ideal world all companies would have internal SEO teams that double up as their web developers and their online PR etc etc. And don’t get me wrong, some web developers are well aware of how to optimize sites for the search engines, but many aren’t. Programming is a highly specialised field and it takes a lot of time and effort to learn the language of C++, PHP, ASP and all the others. Just as SEO is an art form, and there’s a lot of knowledge and technical skill that goes into a successful campaign. Cutting costs by hiring a web designer who promises he’ll optimize your site for half the price of a search marketing agency is only going to hurt your company’s online image, traffic and conversion rates.
5) It’s all about keywords.
This is another half truth and quite misleading. In many ways it is all about keywords, of course you want your clients to rank as best they can for the most relevant keywords to their industry and yes keywords are what catch the eyes of search engines but overloading a website’s copy with a heavy keyword density is not the way to go. Your page content should be user friendly and read smoothly, it’s all about getting the right keywords in the right place. Each page of your site should be optimized for one or two of the most pertinent keywords to the material on that page, featuring in the opening and closing sentences of the main body content, as well as headings and subheadings (H1, H2, H3 tags etc) which help to break up the copy and are given higher prominence than the rest of the text. Content is king in SEO and it’s important to find a balance between keyword rich copy and easily readable material.
Are there any I’ve missed out? Let me know your favourite SEO misconceptions in the comments below.
September 25th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
I thought I’d add the competition element – it makes little sense trying to compete with sites that have large volumes of backlinks and an established following by using the same keywords they’re employing. Lately I have been using ‘long-tailed’ keywords, long phrases that have few competitors, in headings and subdomains, with a reaqsonable amount of success!
September 26th, 2009 at 3:38 am
Hello
How many keywords should I put into my article’s body and also the heading.
Thank you
Chan
September 28th, 2009 at 11:02 am
Hey Chan, I’d recommend targeting no more than 3 keywords or keyword phrases per article or page content, however I think it actually best to only target 2 page specific keywords or phrases per page
September 28th, 2009 at 11:03 am
Yep, excellent point Derek, targeting the long tail search terms is a good way to get in through the back door for some top rankings
October 20th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
“the more links to your site the more alternative paths people and potential customers have of finding you online”
-This may be so, but the path will only ever end ‘happily ever after’ if it is relevant to those who choose to follow it. I.e Don’t think that it’s all about quantity of links to your site just to drive traffic that will end up leaving as soon as it hits, think more about the quality of every link that you build to your site. Quality beats quantity in “the eyes of the all mighty Google” afterall, so ensure your anchor text at the source indicates what people are likely to find and that it targets and encapsulates the keywords that you’re trying to optimize too.
Indeed, “without some quality inbound links acting as votes of confidence” that are from trusted and authoritative sources, your site “will still rank poorly”. Don’t get tarred with the same brush by Google if your inbound links are from the darker, dodgier side of the web.
October 23rd, 2009 at 11:56 am
Absolutely Amy, its certainly a case of quality rather than quatity.