You’ll be surprised at just how little business owners and entrepreneurs know about search engine optimization, and this is why many of them are still getting duped by black-hat operatives who promise the moon and deliver nothing close. This article outlines some of the myths that have been passed off as gospel truth in recent years and where the real truth lies. Read on to learn more.
1. Having a blog will improve your SEO
Many people believe that including a blog on your website will magically improve your SEO standpoint and improve visibility. This is only partially true in that site blogs can draw more traffic to your site only if you already have a strong site (good visibility). The main reason you should have a blog is that it’s the most effective way to drive traffic when targeting long-tail keywords. Sites with high domain authority will have high-ranking blogs as well, but the reverse is also true.
Now, think of domain authority as a percentage score which predicts how a website ranks on search engines. This signal was developed by Moz.com and is often used by SEOs to compare one site to another or track progress over time.
Of course, if you’re in a niche with little competition, your blog posts can get high rankings, even without having a lot of SEO work done. Such businesses are, however, the exception rather than the rule. For the rest of us, we have to work hard to earn good rankings and work even harder to maintain them.
Here are some tips that will actually improve your SEO once you have created an internal blog:
- Create blog posts and articles for higher authority websites that will backlink to your site and improve your domain authority over time. Inbound links are an important search ranking signal.
- For your blog content, include a social network advertising campaign – Facebook is a good start – to promote the blog and drive traffic to the content. You can’t just write great content and then hope the right people will see it; you have to take it to them.
Follow these tips and you’ll see your site rankings improve over time.
2. All inbound links are the same
The days when Google just counted the number of backlinks you had without considering the source are long gone. Today, backlinking strategy is about creating lots of high quality backlinks – yes, backlinks have a quality score. So just hyper-linking from your email newsletters or social media sites will not have the effect you think it will.
For powerful social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, hyperlinks included when you share content do not count when Google looks at your link profile. For a lot of sites, they’ll have no-follow links, which webmasters use to tell search engines to ignore that link and thus protect themselves from unverified content or paid linking, both of which can earn you a penalty.
What your site needs is to have authentic, natural backlinks coming from industry-related, high-authority sites. Again, reciprocal links – where you talk to a webmaster to link to you in return for a link on your site – do not carry much weight. Of course, link spamming is the quickest way to slap your business into an abyss you’ll take years to come back from. Build a solid link-building strategy using this and this guides.
3. You can give SEO guarantees
As an entrepreneur, you’ve probably received several phone calls and email pitches from SEOs promising to get your site to Google page 1 if you just pay something. This is the biggest lie of them all because search engine optimization is no quick-fix solution. In fact, using such people can get you slapped with a penalty because no real SEO will make guarantees like that. These crooks often dabble in forbidden or unethical practices that could get your site penalized.
Real SEO improvement happens over time, by sticking to a strategy that is formulated based on your business’s niche, goals and operational model and the state of your website. A good SEO team such as Big3 Media will take time to learn your business and product/service offerings, identify which are performing well and which need a boost and create a strategy based on the results of that audit. You will probably need technical SEO work done, as well as keyword research and off-site optimization. It’s the whole package. Even then, you can’t guarantee improvement in rankings within a particular amount of time. Anyone that promises this is lying.
Closely related to the above lie is the professional that says they have a contact at Google who can help your SEO. Google doesn’t have employees whose job is to help businesses improve their SEO. All they do is constantly update their algorithms to give their users better results for queries; it’s up to you and your SEO to align to these updates.
Conclusion
SEO should always be considered a long-term marketing practice. There are no shortcuts, but there is one tip that can save you loads of time and energy – Google is likely to appreciate any efforts made to solve your user’s direct needs, e.g. providing in-depth, high-quality and helpful content, improving navigation, etc. Think about what you customer needs before thinking about search engines, and you’ll be on the right track to improving your visibility permanently.
Guest article written by: The author has over two decades’ experience in online marketing with particular interest in search engine optimization. He is currently part of the team at Big3 Media and has shared countless articles on various online platforms.