10 SEO myths you should leave behind for SEO page analysis

Over the last decade of SEO, we’ve seen remarkable change in how searchers perform queries and interact with results; in how engines crawl, index, and rank pages using SEO Page Analysis; and in how marketers effectively influence the engines to send them traffic. But, in spite of these monumental shifts, a shocking amount of misinformation about the practice of SEO persists.

Myth 1: Setting up Google Authorship can increase my search visibility & clickthrough rates. In June of 2014, Google removed Google Authorship photos from search engine results pages. While your name and byline would still appear, your beautiful headshot would not.

Myth 2: I must submit my site to Google

While a brand new site can submit its URL to Google directly, a search engine like Google can still find your site without you submitting it.

Myth 3: More links are better than more content

When you invest in content, that content can be used for webpages, blog posts, lead generation offers, and guest posts on other sites — all content types that will bring more links with them over time.

Myth 4: Having a secure (HTTPS encrypted) site isn’t important for SEO.

For now HTTPS remains a “lightweight” signal, affecting fewer than 1% of global queries (according to Google). So while it’s clear that Google wants everyone to move over to the more secure HTTPS protocol, don’t freak out if you haven’t done it yet.

Myth 5: SEO is all about ranking

While there’s a strong correlation between search results placement and clickthrough rates, ranking is not the supreme end goal that it used to be.

Myth 6: Meta descriptions have a hugh impact on search rankings.

Google announced back in 2009 that meta descriptions (and meta keywords) have no bearing on search rankings. That’s not to say, however, that these descriptions aren’t important for SEO. On the contrary: Meta descriptions present a major opportunity to separate yourself from the riff-raff and convince searchers that your page is worth navigating to.

Myth 7: SEO is something I can hand off to IT.

While there is a technical component to SEO, it requires way more than just technical chops, so I’d think long and hard before handing an entire project to IT or a web designer.

Myth 8: On-page is all I need to rank.

It’s important to realize that Google is no longer trying to match the keywords you type into its search engine to the keywords of a web page. Instead, it’s trying to understand the intent behind the keywords you type so it can match that intent to relevant, high-quality content.

Myth 9: Keywords need to be an exact match

Keywords do not need to be repeated verbatim throughout a piece of content. In a headline, in particular, you want to use a keyword (or keywords) in a way that makes the most sense to your audience.

Myth 10: The H1 is the most important on-page element.

it really doesn’t matter what header tag you use, as long as you present your most important concepts upfront and closer to the top of the page. Remember, you’re optimizing your page for users first and foremost, which means that you want to tell them ASAP what your page is about through a clear headline.

Read another blog on this subject.