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
interesting point about keyword domain names. i still see some success in getting website with high keyword rich domain names ranking high. brandable companies I suppose do not much emphasis on SEO as their marketing strategy is to actually sell what they are offering, ie PR and the likes.
Yes impatience sometimes leads to some shortcut tasks. I still believe our rankings is highly dependent on the competition. Even if we do so much, there are times that we can’t get the rankings we want to have simply because there are already big competitors out there on the first page, those that have very big seo teams.We must take note also that Google considers 300 plus ranking factors. We must also look at other factors that contribute to rankings.
getting good search engine rankings boils down to creating unique content daily, in addition to engaging meaningfully with others on social networks and distributing press releases.
Number 4, frequent updates. This is so clear to be important. A tree that stands still day by day year by year can not grown. A website that is not updated frequently is like a tree that stops growing. It’s dead!
Another myth is that the nofollow atribute is not worth at all. I have ranked with only nofollow links for a couple of keywords. So, in my personal experience, it is NOT a myth.
well i have to say this turns my link building prospects on its head, i have always listend to SEO proffesionals and they swear to using articals for link building, even some of the top SEO Guru’s are using these artical directories and using the RSS feeds from the directories to build a larger RSS feed to load into RSS aggregators.
so from this post i need to look more into this
There are indeed some myths about SEO that prove not to function anymore, with the new Google algorithm functioning. I still think that the age of a domain plays a role in the way Google ranks your site and I also think that you shouldn’t build too many backlinks when the domain is young. What do you believe about external nofollow links? Do they pass some link juice, or are they detrimental to your site?
My website is in trouble do not know what causes it, usually all the keywords on my website go to the first page, even the first position, but yesterday it suddenly plummeted websie, no keywords are entered into the top 10 even to 100, up to now this website is still like that. have not seen what the cause of my website can be like that
Well I am still confused about keywordy domain, i think for some sites it works like magic…may be didn’t for others!
I don’t agree with the 3rd point.
Of course, the role of meta tags is overdone but you advice not to use them at all. It is wrong. I think that people should use meta tags for main pages of website.
I agree Alex, it should be smoothed out a little.
Also, point 1, what about online authority?
SEO is a moving target these days but relying on the basics of good keywords, content, and link building will always win the day for your site–your readers and search engines will be pleased and they’ll reward you for the effort.
Mike Corso
Cool Site of the Day