The internet is a vast sea of information, some of it a little helpful, a lot of it complete garbage, and buried amongst all of that are a very few sites with the exact solutions you are searching for. It may not seem fair but just having some relevant content on your website does not guarantee you your audience will find you, you have to work to rise to the top of the heap. Fortunately for you, search engines are on your side in that they want the highest quality information to appear in their searches.
Search engine optimization is a digital strategy designed to enhance the ranking of websites on search engines. It is based on premise of "natural selection" – the idea that the more successful pages in a search result will get the most attention.
Therefore, SEO is a competitive process that requires new websites to first compete in local search results before attempting to compete in the national and global arena against millions of other sites and pages.
Because SEO is so competitive and the inner workings of Google’s algorithm are shrouded in mystery, many businesses wrongly attempt SEO in the wrong ways due to the many myths surrounding this digital strategy. This article will debunk four of these myths to help use your valuable time to achieve the best results.
Let's debunk these four common myths:
Myth One: More Keywords on a Page Can Lead to Higher Ranking
More keywords really don't mean better performance when it comes to search engine optimization. In fact, more keywords may even mean a lower ranking for your page.
To understand how this works, you must first understand how search engines rank websites. To rank well, you must follow the search engine optimization protocol, which focuses on prioritizing sites publishing meaningful and unique content. Keyword stuffing gets in the way of creating such content, it’s like writing an essay in middle school solely focused on hitting the minimum word-count instead of actually completing the assignment.
A page with ten keywords will get fewer page views than a page with only five highly-researched keywords. You will gain a better ranking and more traffic with fewer keywords, provided you use these keywords properly to provide useful information to your audience.
Myth Two: You Only Need to Perform SEO Once
One of the most common misconceptions about SEO is that it is a digital strategy that only needs to be performed once. Set your site up and forget it, your customers will come flocking to you in droves and you’ll make millions of dollars.
Unfortunately that’s not the case. To rank well in search engines, you must consistently keep your website optimized. You need to adjust your SEO protocol as the search engines change theirs.
For example, when Google provided the Panda and Penguin updates, webmasters around the world were required to adjust their SEO protocol to match these new guidelines. If you fail to adapt to the latest search engine guidelines, your website will not rank as well. If you’ve ever noticed a sudden drop-off in organic traffic, look up changes in Google’s algorithm and see if the timing corresponds, it likely caused the sudden dip.
Myth Three: Loading Speed Is Irrelevant
We’ve discussed page loading speed before and the fact remains that your audience is impatient. If your website takes too long to load, they will simply go to a competitor's site to find what they're looking for. Every second your page takes to load is a second where you are losing money. Search engines recognize this fact too which is why page load speed is such a heavily weighted point in their evaluation and ranking of pages.
One of the best ways to increase your website's loading speed is with a content delivery network (CDN). A content delivery network increases your website's loading speed by distributing your content to data centers worldwide.
Myth Four: SEO Is All About Keywords
If SEO is all about keywords, why is it essential to write unique content? Content is what gets you great rankings. We talked about this in myth one and at one time when search engines were less intelligent, simple key words were how you grabbed their attention but today it’s all about the relevant, quality content.
Consistently providing unique content is the first step toward great rankings. Including a mixture of keywords and long-tail keywords will help improve search engine rankings and improve the conversion rate but you really need to focus on creating unique content that helps your audience.
Take for example this article you are reading right now. It has keywords around SEO that we have identified to be searched by our potential customers but the content itself goes beyond stringing those together because we in-fact are not a full-service SEO agency. We do offer some SEO services and we make sure to follow SEO best practices but at the end of the day, we found this information to be relevant to our audience and it’s important that we share these tips, regardless of a single person contacting us about doing this work for them.
Like the saying goes, do what you’re passionate about and the money will follow, SEO is similar. Focus on helping your audience with great content and the rankings will follow.
Final Note
SEO is a powerful strategy that can help you generate more traffic, drive more sales, and increase brand awareness. It's a strategy that requires persistence and consistency. You will succeed by focusing on your audience and solving their pain points and combining that with SEO best practices. Investing the time and energy into creating unique content will help you outshine the competition and reach more people you can help.
Your SEO strategy is as simple: create relevant, unique content to help your customer.
If you're looking for a firm that provides online business solutions like SEO assistance, consider working with Torch Digital Labs. We commit ourselves to deliver SEO services to improve your business' brand and provide you with more page views and leads.
