6 Myths That Could Kill Your Rankings

Written: May 17, 2019

6 Myths That Could Kill Your Rankings

In the online marketing world, getting grips with your SEO site performance is very important. The competition between online businesses are very tough and everyone wants to occupy the first few spots in the search result page. This is probably because people keying-in a search will only click and check sites that are on the top spots. If your website is not appearing on the first page of the search results, you might have an issue with your pages such as broken links, unrelated content, and missing keywords.

The use of “search engine optimization” will help any online business get on top of the rankings on the search page. This is one of the strategies being used by online businesses to boost their rankings up the search page results and get higher chances of getting noticed. And there are many effective ways to do a search engine optimization job that will truly work and last for long.   

Everyone in with an online business such as small business owners, marketing managers, webmasters, content creators, bloggers, and many others are continuously learning important points about the use of SEO. When one googles SEO, the search will yield millions of results and it can be overwhelming for someone new at this. Most SEO experts are left to find out what they think works to get the top search rankings and debunk practices that do not work. But of course, there are also those who promise the provide the best services but only provide dodgy SEO services that give short term boost in rankings but soon cause problems for the site.

Here is some information about six myths that can kill your rankings which some SEO consultant still offer and you must avoid at all costs.

Google Page Rank is an Effective Measure for SEO Efficacy

Back in the days, Google PageRank is utilized to rank websites and pages on a ten point scale. Although Google still uses PageRank for ranking websites, it is already an old and outdated tool to measure SEO results. There are hundreds of other indicators that Google now uses to rank web sites. Google PageRank was just a small tool from the Google Webmaster Tools. PageRank updates scores around 3 times a year only thus, web owners might be getting outdated rankings by relying solely on this tool.

Off-Page SEO Is a One Time Job

There are actually two areas where search engine optimization can be done. There is the on-page or on-site optimization and the off-page or off-site optimization. On-page SEO works is focused on making sure it is search-engine friendly, easy to navigate, no broken links, well-built and with good internal links. This job is usually done once and left as is until it is time to review its performance.

Off-page SEO, on the other hand, is an ongoing job that involves getting high-quality links pointing on various pages of the site. It needs constant attention even for sites that sits well on the top results for important search world. Online businesses can be very competitive and a sudden SEO push of the competing company can topple the top ranking business off the top results of the search. Do not rely on hitting 1 or 2 keywords, optimize your site and links for related keyword searches.  

Manual Submission of Website To Google

SEO consultant and experts do not understand where this belief came from. A search engine like Google works to search the whole world wide web and there is no need for new sites to be submitted to them. There are virtual robots utilized by search engines that constantly crawls the web for new content, pages, and websites. So if you have had a new website and it has keywords and links that are related to phrases or words searched in Google, then your site will appear in the search results.

Registering to Google or Yahoo Webmaster Tools can also help this speed up this process of appearing in the search result. Some web owners provide a site map where search engines can point to when a search related to the page is made.

Meta Keyword Tags Must be Optimized

You might have encountered the term “meta tag” or “meta keyword tag” and were advised by some SEO Experts to include your main keyword in them to help you rank better. Well, this is a complete myth that must be ignored. Google has reported that they are not using meta tags for their algorithms and it is not included in the factors that help web pages rank fairly in the search results. If you will focus on this, you will miss out more important strategies that will help improve your rankings. Meta descriptions will not boost web page actual rankings.

Keyword Matters in Search Rankings

Search engines use various indicators to comprehend what a page is all about and get the domain authority of the page. It is important to include keywords in the pages of your website and place them in key areas such as about us pages, headers, URL and others. However, there is really no point in getting a specific keyword ratio. SEO consultant suggests that it is better to write high-quality content that is informative for the readers than to saturate your page with keywords.

Social Media Activity and SEO are not Related

Google may not directly use social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn for ranking web pages, but there are actually advantages to comes with heightened social media activity. Sharing your content on various platforms, the more links will be embedded and this will be one of the factors used for rankings.

The internet is continuously changing its landscape and online businesses must adapt to these changes. While many tools were once utilized for ranking web pages, some of them has already become an outdated and unreliable measure for checking the performance of optimized pages. Those involved in web page optimization must keep on studying the dynamics of SEO to understand this ever-changing landscape.

These myths must be debunked and forgotten otherwise web pages run the risk of falling from the top ranks. A wobbly ranking might affect the business severely. This is why it is very important to keep an eye on the competitor when working on online marketing and online businesses. If your company is having a hard time staying on the first page of the search results, you must consult with SEO experts who are experienced in various digital marketing platforms to assess where you might need improvements on your site.