Fact or Fiction? 8 SEO Myths Debunked

[jrineakter]

The majority of your website visitors will arrive at your website via search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo. If you want to increase your number of visitors, a good SEO strategy can ensure that you score better in those search engines, making it easier to find you and therefore getting more visitors. If you want to draw up a good strategy, then some knowledge of the subject is useful. For example, it is important to know what is fact and what is fiction when we talk about SEO. That is why I would like to help you dispel these 8 myths about SEO.


1. SEO is a one-time process
Fact or Fiction? Fiction… (in most cases)

SEO is usually not a one-time project. SEO can give you great results, even if it is the first time you are doing it. But SEO only becomes really powerful if you execute a consistent strategy that you also actively follow up and adjust.

Some reasons why SEO is not a one-time thing:

Changes in Google's algorithm.
Unfortunately, the competition is not standing still.
New content you want to add to your website.
Links to your website become less valuable over time.
Google loves fresh content.
Of course, there are exceptions to this. cyprus telegram number list Think of a local business that has a good reputation. As long as they are found locally on their 'brand name' and most important keywords , they are basically satisfied. It can therefore be sufficient to perform a small check per quarter for this type of website and to adjust if problems arise.

2. Social media has a direct impact on SEO
Fact or Fiction? Fact and Fiction… (depending on the search engine used)

It is not true that the number of likes or tweets on your social media profiles has a direct influence on the search results in Google. This has also been confirmed several times by Google itself, for example by John Mueller and Matt Cutts.


Why Google doesn't yet accept signals from social media:

The sheer volume of content on social media. Take a look at these Twitter statistics . On an average day, there are 500 million tweets. Even Google has its limits and can’t fully index this vast amount of data (at least for now).
Social signals are too easy to falsify. For example, it is relatively easy to quickly spend hundreds of euros in advertising budget to get more followers/likes etc. This can quickly create a distorted image.
Nofollow tags on links. Major social media such as Facebook and Twitter use nofollow tags in links. This means that Google will not follow these links, and Facebook also does not give away any ' link juice ' to links.
Bing, on the other hand, does admit that social media play a role in rankings for organic search results. You can read this in the Bing Webmaster Guidelines . Loosely translated: "In the long term, good social signals can boost your position in the search results." The influence of social media on your position therefore depends on the search engine used. What social media certainly ensures is that your web page is more visible and that can certainly be good for SEO.

Some examples:

Your web page/content will get more reach, which will also increase the chance of links to the content.
Facebook posts and Twitter hashtags are well indexable by Google. This means that a post on social media may also appear in Google's organic search results. This allows your content to dominate the search results better, by taking up places two and three in search results from social media in addition to place one (your own website).
Conclusion
The effect of social media on SEO is highly debated in the SEO world. Because the algorithm used by Google is completely secret, it is possible that the information we have is now outdated. Bing indicates in its Webmaster Guidelines that the correct use of social media can give a boost to the rankings in the long term.

3. SEO is all about rankings
Fact or fiction? Fiction.

This myth is debatable. There is a clear connection between the ranking in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) and the number of clicks to a website (the so-called CTR: click through rate). In general, you can say: 'the higher a website ranks, the more clicks'. However, in 2016, rankings are highly personalized by the search engines. This ensures that two people who search for the same keyword will see two completely different SERPs. A big difference from, say, ten years ago, when almost everyone who searched for a certain keyword saw the same results.

Rankings can be influenced and personalized by several factors:

The country you are in.
The city you are in.
Your personal search history.
Social posts through your network such as contacts on Google+.
This is a very logical development of the search engines. It goes without saying that someone searching for 'plumber' from Ghent, Belgium, has little use for a plumber from Amsterdam. Search engines like Google try to play into this through personalization, with great success! However, this personalization makes it more difficult to keep an eye on rankings. Suppose your customer is a local plumber, active in Ghent. That customer can perfectly be in the top 3 if you search for the search term 'plumber' in the Ghent region. But what if your SEO tools indicate that his website does not appear anywhere in the top 20, because the search term is executed from a different location? In that case, rankings are useless statistics.