SEO myths tend to keep you away from achieving all your digital marketing goals. We know it’s hard to identify which advice is accurate and fact-based and which is not. That’s why we’ve listed down a list of some of these common SEO myths 2020 that you need to stay away from!
You have more chances of affecting your ranking and traffic with SEO myths rather than boosting it.
Source: Neil Patel
To get the best results from your SEO tactics, you need to stop believing in some common misconceptions surrounding it.
Common SEO Myths 2020
More Links > More Content
Building links without analyzing the linking domain was an SEO strategy that typically worked for many in the past.
Although, link building is still a very important ranking factor to focus on, the quality of the links you are obtaining is even more important. So sometimes less can be more!
Source: E2M Solutions
Getting quality backlinks without quality content is difficult. The whole idea behind linking someone is letting the audience know that the information is from a trusted source so they can check it out themselves.
So it makes it equally important to work on both for a successful search engine performance.
More keywords = Higher rank
When trying to optimize our website, we are often tempted to take shortcuts for faster results.
That’s why we try to stuff our target keywords unnecessarily on our blogs or webpages in the hope of ranking higher.
Sometimes the result often looks something like this:
“If you want to buy some affordable running shoes, we’ve got you covered! We have a wide variety of the most affordable running shoes that you cannot miss. These affordable running shoes are not only affordable but also come in vibrant colours.”
The example above has gone overboard with the use of the target keyword that it may create a bad experience for the users.
Apart from that, keyword stuffing is also not a practice that is acceptable by search engines. Your website may come forward as spammy which can further affect your search rankings – and you would not want that!
So what is the appropriate number of times you can use a keyword?
Source: Alexa Blog
To figure this out, keep the keyword density formula in mind:
Keyword Density = The number of times the keyword appears / The total number of words X 100
For example, if your blog post is of 1,200 words and the target keyword appears 12 times, the keyword density will be 1%.
Videos don’t help in SEO ranking
Considering YouTube is the second largest search engine, it’s safe to say that the statement is nothing more than an SEO myth.
Not only that but Google prioritizes videos themselves. Just go and search for any query on the search bar. Chances are you’ll get video recommendations on the first page of the search result itself!
Video content has a greater impact on user experience and search engines know that. In the rising popularity of the digital age, it has become increasingly difficult to gain consumer trust. Videos help you with that!
Source: Hubspot
According to YouTube :
“Like Google’s search engine, search on YouTube strives to surface the most relevant results according to keyword queries. Videos are ranked based on a variety of factors including how well the title, description, and video content match the viewer’s query. Beyond that, we look at which videos have driven the most engagement for a query. Search results are not a list of the most-viewed videos for a given query.”
Pop-ups are not good for ranking
Pop-ups have been popping a lot of controversies ever since Google announced that they will begin to penalize websites that use (what they call) “intrusive interstitials.”
Before you scratch your head, the term is just another fancy name for pop-ups.
The thing to keep in mind is that Google doesn’t penalize all websites with pop-ups – just the ones that interrupt user experience or come in the way limiting the user’s ability to access content on the page.
These ‘interstitials’ are the ones that Google targets in its policy. For instance, websites that directly lead users to their advertisements or sponsored pages before they can access any content on the page.
On the other hand, banners, slide-ins, or newsletter sign-ups that do not harm interrupting a user’s experience are fine.
Meta tags are irrelevant
Meta tags are nothing but snippets of code that tell search engines what your webpage is all about.
There are 3 elements of a meta tag:
Meta tags are vital for SEO as they give information about the content of your page to search engines. You can easily optimize your meta tags to highlight the important elements of your content to make your webpage stand-out in the search results.
In fact, Google says,
“Meta tags are a great way for webmasters to provide search engines with information about their sites. Meta tags can be used to provide information to all sorts of clients, and each system processes only the meta tags they understand and ignores the rest. Meta tags are added to the <head> section of your HTML page”.
So here are the common SEO myths 2020 that you should stay away from.
People often fail to understand SEO mostly because of the misinformation thrown at them like snowballs.
That’s why sharing active and fact-based information becomes important. We hope that this blog was a helping hand in doing that.
What is one of the recent SEO misconceptions that you came across? Let us know in the comments below!
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