Search Engine Optimisation is often Trick or Treat – but don’t let it leave you paralysed with fear! Adams are here to debunk 13 myths and quackery about SEO.
No doubt you would have received an email from someone promising to get you to number one on Google. Usually telling you by way of a dodgy gandalf666 Hotmail email address and suspect grammar that they’re your knight in shining armour and will rescue you from the bowels of search engine insignificance. Just send money. Don’t fall for it. Count that as lesson one.
SEO is certainly a modern-day buzz word that often confounds many. You may have heard or read from a reliable source that Search Engine Optimisation is vital to being found on Google and Bing, and many of the other upstarts such as Duck Duck Go. Everyone is looking to get in on the carnival act. But what you’ve read seems vague and the practitioner’s toolkit more like a bag of tricks that will empty your wallet before delivering the promised results. SEO is a process and a strategy – not a magic trick. That’ll be number two.
All tricks, no treats for you.
There are numerous myths surrounding the process of optimising your website for better performance on search engine results pages and if anyone guarantees you number one spot on Google we suggest you find the nearest exit from your pending hall of horrors – don’t say we didn’t warn you a third time.
Fallen myth four is that you need an old domain name with providence and history behind it. Honestly, the age of the domain name is malarky. Use your current one, Google is not ageist.
Five is Alive! Ok, this is kind of a reverse myth buster in the sense that you can’t let your website get mouldy. It needs to stay fresh with regular updates. If it gets stale it’ll stink to search engines, and that’s bad. Believe it or not, Adams have been known to resurrect a few dead websites in our time.
Don’t let your website die due to neglect. If you fail to tend your secret garden it’ll become overgrown with weeds is our remedy number six. The web is organic, constantly changing and evolving. So is your target audience. Your website doesn’t maintain itself and before you know it someone from the darker realms will find a way in and pull out all your roses.
Keyword quackery. You know the kind, “buy keywords!”. Really. You can buy keywords! May I ask who’s selling them? Do they take creeptocurrency 007?
Don’t be late number eight, Google and Bing want to make you suffer by paying them more money to get to the top fast. Now let’s get one thing straight – you cannot buy your ranking on results pages any more than you can buy keywords. What you can buy is a sound SEO strategy and pay for ads that are related to keywords that people search for. Slow and steady wins the day.
No hokus pokus.
Cats have nine lives or so they say. They also say that web pages should be absolutely bursting at the seems with your keywords. The theory is that the more times you mention the keywords on the page the more serious the search engines think you are about those keywords – the problem is that the overuse of keywords makes the content almost unreadable. Nine live’d cats and keyword stuffing are equally as spurious.
Familiar with the ten plagues? This could’ve been one of them: social media activity has no SEO value. Next.
“We did it once before” is the equivalent of expecting your electric car to run forever just because you gave it a charge when you bought it. Unless you’re one of the very few who have more than enough business and web traffic you need to keep topping up. You can’t leave it to the eleventh hour and expect continued results.
Are you feeling like you’re losing your way in all this? Well, without a sitemap Google will feel the same way. People have been getting lost without maps since they started exploring this planet. Don’t be a rose short of a dozen and think they’ll find the whole bunch of pages on your website – help the search engines out!
Who knows for sure why 13 is considered unlucky. Many have their theories. You may not have a number thirteen on your street or no thirteenth floor in your building but we can guarantee you this – search engine optimisation is not a zombie. Google’s updates have not made SEO irrelevant. If anything, good SEO practise is good fortune. SEO is not dead.
So there you have it – 13 SEO myths busted and quackery exorcized by Adams.
For better remedies that actually work, give us a call or contact us today.