For many people, SEO is still something that’s shrouded in mystery. It’s understandable because SEO is ever-evolving and new technology comes and goes. As a result, there are multiple misconceptions that surround SEO and you need to shed some light on these. Here are some common misconceptions that you should know:
- Content is everything: It’s wrong to think that your fabulous content will trump everything. It’s true that you need to focus on quality content, but there are many factors to consider. You need to create top-notch content, but it needs to be backed up by carefully planned and implemented SEO strategy. Eventually, this will improve SEO positioning and you can drive more traffic to the content.
- Keywords are everything: Keywords are critical in SEO, but they are not the Holy Grail. In fact, if you wrongly manage keywords, such as cramming many of them in your content, you will end up getting a penalization. Your readers will also hate it if they see too many similar keywords in the content. Google is getting better in recognizing the context of your content, by understanding its synonyms and topics. So, if you don’t use the same word and its synonyms over and over, it will count toward higher SEO ranking. You need to write your content in an engaging and more natural way.
- More webpages will help you to rank higher: It’s very clear that quality always counts more, compared to quantity. As an example, you could provide useful troubleshooting, tips and information. Your blog should regularly fresh content and target new keywords, based on the existing trends in your industry. This is a good way to provide higher value to your audience.
- Pictures are not all that important in SEO: It’s often said that SEO is all about text and search engine bots could only understand plain text. It’s true that bots can see and understand pictures, but this is already a prime opportunity to boost your rankings. In reality, you can assign various text elements to an image. You can start by using SEO-friendly file name, alt tags and descriptions. Google and other search engines have image search feature that allows users to find specific images. As an example, your audience may want to know how a “quick to make chicken sandwich” looks like. If you have such a recipe in your website, include the relevant image as well, along with assigned text elements. When people are interested, they will click the image and are brought to your website.
- Responsive design is just optional: In the connected digital world, responsive design has become quite essential. Today, people could access your website with dozens of different screen resolution, from a small smartphone to the huge 4k smart TV. It’s very likely that your audience will use smartphones to access your website. So, if your website is not responsive yet, it will perform poorly to mobile access. So, even if your audience use small smartphone, you should make sure that your website is easy to use, engaging and intuitive.
- SEO team will always have things under control: Probably, this is not true, no offense to the SEO team. While your SEO team is competent, there are some details that they miss or neglect. They may need to have new types of training and skills set to respond to new changes and trends in SEO.