This is a guest post by Jesus Ramirez from MarketingUnfolded.com.
Having trouble with SEO?
Don’t feel too bad.
I used to struggle with it as much as you did if not more.
Of course that was way before I wrote The Ultimate WordPress SEO Guide For Internet Marketers.
A few years back I spent countless of hours scavenging the internet trying to find information on SEO.
I literally found thousands of articles on ranking high in search results.
I learned everything I possibly could on the subject (talk about information overload!).
It was with time that I realized that many of the things I had learned were no longer effective or were never effective.
I spent countless of hours optimizing my keyword meta tags, creating low quality articles for my website, and for article marketing sites.
All with the hope to crack within the first page of Google.
Unfortunately for me, then I did not know about Matt Cutts, Head of Google’s Webspam team, who answers SEO related questions from viewers in a Google sponsored Youtube channel.
In his videos, Matt addresses all types of questions about SEO and has definitely debunked a lot of SEO myths that have plagued the SEO world for a long time.
If I had known what the following videos explain, I would have saved tons of time, and would have ranked higher much quicker!
Here’s the list of the top 6 SEO myths debunked by Google:
1. Domain Age:
Myth: Most SEO experts agree that the age of your domain makes a big different in your websites ranking. The older it is, the most trust worthy it is, and the higher it will rank.
Fact: While Google does look at the age of your domain, it makes a very minimal impact in your website’s ranking.
Matt Cutts advices that the quality of content in a website and the quality of links pointing to it are far more important than the age of your domain, as always good quality content is far more important than domain age.
Video –> http://youtu.be/Y1_1NQWQJ2Q
2. Tags Clouds:
Myth: Blogs should use meta tag clouds as much as possible for SEO boosts.
Fact: I was guilty of this one, I had a big ugly tag cloud on my site that looked horrible.
After some time I removed it because of pure aesthetics, but as it turns out tag clouds have no positive impact on SEO at all and can actually hurt your search rankings if overused.
Really large lists of tag clouds can be confused as “keyword stuffing, especially since tag clouds are a bunch of arbitrary words mixed together.
The risk of dilating your pagerank also increases dramatically when overusing tag clouds.
Video –> http://youtu.be/bYPX_ZmhLqg
3. Keyword Meta Tags
Myth: You should add Meta Keywords to all your websites pages to increase the ranking on your website.
Fact: This is something that took dozens of hours of my life when I started.
I keep reading everywhere the importance of good keywords and how adding the right keywords to your meta-tags could help you rank higher in search engines.
But in actuality Google recommends that your spend ZERO time adding keywords to your meta tags!
Google does not even look at them.
Instead you should spend your time in optimizing your title meta tag and your description meta tag since they are used heavily in search queries.
Video –> http://youtu.be/_euoDRk1qN0
4. Frequent Updates
Myth: To rank high in Google, you need to post frequent updates to your website.
Fact: When it comes to SEO, updating your content more regularly doesn’t give you any added benefits.
However your human users do benefit from new fresh content, and you should try to update as much as possible but only to keep your readers interested and engaged.
Video –> http://youtu.be/d6-KA20QqL8
5. Article Marketing
Myth: Article Marketing is a great strategy for building backlinks.
Fact: This one is a tricky one.
While I have used this technique in the past and saw some positive results, it seems that this is no longer a good strategy.
Ever since the new Panda update Google has dropped the authority of many popular article marketing directories.
It seems that article marketing is no longer a good way to build backlinks to your website, especially since most article directories offer poor quality content which Google frowns upon.
Also, this technique can create duplicate content, with the same anchor links pointing back to your site; something that Matt Cutts believes will be detrimental to your SEO efforts.
It’s better to focus on creating valuable easy to read content and using social media marketing to help your content receive natural backlinks.
This links are far more beneficial for ranking high on search engines than the ones you receive from article marketing.
Video –> http://youtu.be/x5xP-pTmlpY
6. Keyword domains
Myth: To rank high your website needs to have a keyword specific domain.
Fact: This is another tricky one.
While it is not necessary to have a keyword specific domain to rank high, in search engines, you do get benefits from having them.
It all depends on what you are trying to do.
For most people having a domain that is brandable, like Twitter, Zinga, and Yahoo is a far more beneficial option.
Even though they do not contain keywords in them.
As Matt Cutts explains, Google is considering changing their algorithm to lower the weight on how much a keyword in the domain affects a search query.
If this does happen and your domains weight has less impact on the total score of your ranking then you will be left with an un-brandable domain that might not be beneficial to you at all.
Video –> http://youtu.be/rAWFv43qubI
Conclusion
Sometimes our impatience leads us to take shortcuts and follow the wrong advice.
Those short cuts, or plugins, or “tricks” to rank high on search engines will do nothing more than to waste your valuable time.
To rank high on search engines you first should do your due diligence in your “on-page SEO” efforts (Check out this ultimate on-site SEO guide for WordPress users).
Spend time creating truly valuable content, which your users will love, share, and link to.
Once you’ve done this, you can then start thinking about social media marketing, and guest blogging to help you get some backlinks.
I’m sure you’ve heard it time and time again, but it’s worth mentioning one more time, the best SEO strategy is and will always be creating good quality content.
Top 10 Search Terms:
• seo myths
You nailed it!! I find SEO comes down to two main things – 1) Good quality content and 2) good quality back links. Add to that a number of onsite SEO techniques such as ensuring you have a quality title meta tag and you start ranking for real search terms.
I totally agree with your statements. We’ve been misled to believe so many things in internet marketing. SEO isn’t rocket science. The best approach is to build a blog that Google likes. A lot of people blindly assume that Google can be tricked. At the end of the day, they get sand-boxed or flagged as spam web pages.
You quite explained the myths and proffered solutions where necessary. You’re truly an SEO geek. Good works and Merry Xmas to you.
Thanks for the advice about the keyword meta tag. I spend way too much time adding them onto my blogs. What I’ve noticed with my site is that I am not ranking any higher in Google but the traffic is quite high. Unfortunately, it is due to spam comments. Love the tips about SEO and helping people avoid the pitfalls of being marked as spam.
Very nice Jesus, I agree with all of it. I do still add keyword meta tags for the search engines that still use them but I spend very little time with it.
Number 7, if you want another one:
Myth: Your outbound links should be no-follow or you will leak link juice.
Fact: That’s ridiculous and every time I see that statement I know I’m dealing with an amateur that’s just repeating nonsense they’re heard.
While Google does use the no-follow tag to help with association, very little weight is given to it in a SEO sense. In fact, Matt Cutts from Google says we should freely and naturally link out to other sites. There’s little to gain by being “selfish” and basically saying, “Here’s all the links from my blog but I don’t vouch for any of them, I’m just linking to their content because…”. Use the no-follow tag for ads and such, link out to relevant sites and everything will be fine.
Great post! I knew that title and description held weight, but didn’t realize they held so much more than keywords! I’ve been wracking my brain about keywords for a while now! Thanks for setting it straight!
Very well done Jesus!
To be honest, I haven’t paid much attention on the Google channel and Matt’s videos until someone shows me the links. But the above videos are really useful especially for new SEO 😀 Thanks for sharing man!
well, my heart seems to be broken to know that most of the things i’ve done, the things i thought was right is absolutely wrong or nearly useless. But anyway, thanks for waking me up and saving me from wasting time making the same mistakes in the furture. But i think that the domain age and the keyword domains will still play an important role in the next google’s angorithm update.
Thanks for the advice about the keyword meta tag. I spend way too much time adding them onto my blogs. What I’ve noticed with my site is that I am not ranking any higher in Google but the traffic is quite high. Unfortunately, it is due to spam comments. Love the tips about SEO and helping people avoid the pitfalls of being marked as spam. umm
Thanks for the advice about the keyword meta tag. I spend way too much time adding them onto my blogs. What I’ve noticed with my site is that I am not ranking any higher in Google
There are so many myths about SEO and most of them sound like they are true but the ultimate fact is that Google wants to serve to searchers the most relevant and quality content possible on the web, so the answer to anyone who wants to rank high on google is to add the most possible quality and informational content they can on their site.
Actually the key to make this happen is to not care at all about google, instead you should care only about people and what they would like to read searching for a specific phrase, it’s that simple…
SEO is a difficult task primarily because of the relentless debate that surrounds the methods for optimizing your pages. It is incredibly difficult to sift through all the information, deciding for yourself what to ascribe to and what not to.