3 SEO Myths You Should Absolutely Not Believe

Search engine optimization (SEO) can be a confusing creature. Google seems to be constantly changing and the whole SEO thing can come across as a pretty complicated task.

So it’s no wonder that there’s some misinformation out there, right? How do you keep the truth from the simply-not-true’s?

I’ve put together this list of SEO myths to try and help you do exactly that.

(new to this SEO thing? What is SEO? is a good place to start)

Myth #1 – Don’t Install Google Analytics, Google May Use It to Lower Your Rankings

Not true!

The full mistruth: Google will somehow see what traffic is doing on your site in Analytics and use it against you to lower your rankings or change policies. Things like a high bounce rate or where your traffic is coming from could hurt your rankings.

The truth: Totally not true! Google Analytics is the coolest free online tool you could use for your business. Google has gone on record that it doesn’t use data like bounce rate to affect your rankings. And in reality, that would discourage users of Google Analytics which absolutely would not be in Google’s best interest.

What can affect your rankings is site speed which incidentally may increase your bounce rate – but Google doesn’t get this data from your Analytics; it gets it from its Google bots that crawl your site.

The same thing is true of where your links are coming from – a spammy link profile can hurt your rankings but Google doesn’t find this out from Analytics – their Google bots find it in their crawl of the web.

What to do? Stop letting this myth get in your way of incredibly awesomely powerful Google Analytics data. You can learn all 19 of these things about your business and more. Need to install it? Check out this tutorial.

Myth #2 – Meta Keyword Tags Will Help Me Rank Higher

False! (sorry) At one point this might have been true (think early search engine days, circa 1990s) but search engines simply don’t use the meta keyword tag as a signal anymore – it’s more used by your online competition who’s trying to discover what you’re trying to rank for. Google even verifies that they simply don’t use it.

What tag am I talking about? The one that looks like this <meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword, keyword, keyword”>

What about the meta description tags? The description you put in this tag is what shows up under your blue link in the search results (though sometimes Google decides to use a snippet of its own). I do advocate using this one but not for ranking; for encouraging searchers to click on your link by giving them more of an idea of what your page is about.

What tag am I talking about? The one that looks like this <meta name=”description” content=”This is an example of a meta description.”>.

Myth #3 – The More I Use My Keyword on My Page, the Higher I Will Rank in Google

Ah, sorry. I wish it were that easy, but actually using your keyword an unnaturally high amount is actually sending the opposite signal to Google – that your site is a bunch of web spam! Check out the word on keyword stuffing from Google here.

Now you and I know that your site is not a bunch of web spam, so here’s what to do instead so Google gets on the same page.

Use your keyword & a variation or two in the following places (if possible – remember, natural is best)

• Title tags
• URL
• Headline tags (the ones that looks like this: <h1>you keyword-friendly headline here</h1>)
• Naturally throughout the text

Not sure how to choose keywords in the first place? Check out this post.

Your Turn

Anything you’d add to the list? Curious about any other myth/fact you’d heard about SEO? Did you find this useful? Let me know in the comments!

photo credit: RLHyde via photo pin cc

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