In this tutorial, we will discuss some of the common SEO myths that are pretty important and you should be aware of. Without further ado, let’s start……
1. You need to post new articles to your website regularly
Google loves new contents? Yes. That’s not a myth. But that doesn’t mean Google hates old contents. On the contrary, Google loves old contents even more!
Truth is, I have many websites that I hardly touch for years. Yet they are still getting traffic from Google, and the traffic is increasing as the website ages, because AGE is an important factor in SEO.
The notion of Google loving new contents is because Google will give new contents a search result boost, based on the assumption that new content has some kind of ‘news value’.
For example, if you post a new article to your blog, that article may quickly appear on the first page of Google for the keyword you’re optimizing. But a few days later, that article will lose its ‘news value’ and it will have to compete with other webpages, based on the amount of backlinks and other SEO factors.
An advantage of posting new articles regularly is that it will increase the frequency of the search spiders visiting your website. That will affect how soon your new content is indexed, but it will not affect your search engine ranking at all.
2. You need ‘quality’ backlinks to succeed in SEO
If you have been reading blogs from official SEO experts, they will all tell you the same story. Get quality backlinks!
How on earth can you find so many quality backlinks? Try asking someone with just a PR3 website to link to you and see if you can get any reply from him. Even if he does, try doing it for 100 of your webpages!
The only workable way to get quality backlinks seems to be buying links, assuming you are superbly cash rich. But link buying has been condemned by Google. Try it if you dare. I’m serious. You may not be caught.
The truth is you don’t need quality backlinks to succeed. Rather than spending your time seeking or dreaming of quality backlinks, spend you time to try out tools and systems that you can leverage on to build more “legitimate” backlinks with less effort from you.
3. You need to post ‘quality’ articles on your website
Though I believe Google has a way to identify junk content, I don’t believe that it can differentiate between a “grammatically-correct” article and an “award-winning” article.
What I mean is you don’t have to insist on writing all the articles yourself if your sole purpose of the article is to get traffic from the search engine. Outsource article writing to save you time to do other things. You just have to make sure that the article is grammatically correct and is search engine optimized.
4. Google penalizes websites with duplicated content
I think I explained this before. Google doesn’t penalize websites with duplicated content. It will just ignore websites with duplicated content, if that website is not ‘important’, i.e. very few backlinks.
Say if you syndicate the same article on 200 other websites, maybe 50 of the articles will be indexed. The other 150 may be ignored by Google. Officially, Google says it will show the result from the most relevant website. But my experience tells me that it will show the result from websites with more backlinks!
Some common question relating duplicated content:
Is it okay to use duplicated content on your website? My advice is no, because you are risking your content being ignored. You can always get someone to rewrite the content before posting it on your website.
Is it okay to syndicate an existing article on your website on other people’s websites? My advice is no, for the same reason. Rewrite that article before syndicating it.
Is it okay to buy those made-for-adsense websites that come with lots of articles from article directories? Again, my advice is no.
In short, although Google doesn’t penalize website with duplicated content, you would want to avoid duplicated content if possible.
5. You need to have certain keyword density in your content
If you happened to read an SEO book that says you need certain keyword density for your article, that book is outdated! You need to include a few keywords in your article, but the actual density is no longer an important SEO factor.
6. Search engine traffic is free
Search engine traffic is free in theory, not in practice. You need to spend money on outsourcing work, such as getting people to write articles. You also need to spend money on link building.
Though it’s not free, it is cheaper than most other traffic sources. More importantly, the traffic is very targeted.
7. You need an expert to help you succeed in SEO
This is what SEO consultant wants you to believe. If you can do everything I say in this SEO tutorial series, you too can become an SEO expert.
8. Google is always changing its search algorithm
Obviously I can’t say that’s a myth. But to me, search engine optimization hasn’t changed since Google revolutionized it.
I am still doing what I did 5 years ago, except that now I employ more leverage.
My point is, Google will continue to evolve and improve. But whatever it does, its primary objective is still the same, i.e. to provide values to their traffic and advertisers. Don’t be caught up with the latest development. Don’t be lured into some blackhat technologies.
Focus on the basic and it will lead you a long way. The basic is to build search engine optimized websites that provide value and focus on link building strategies that provide some form of value too, such as distributing articles, web templates or something of value in exchange of backlinks. You simply can’t go too wrong if you focus on providing values.
Thanks for the great blog post.We will add this story to our blog via our IT guy as we have a audience in Seo Market,they would like to read this article Seo news
Kenneth, thank you for another great post in this seo series. I agree with all your points, but do question why we work so hard to put quality original content on article directories and then celebrate when they are picked up by publishers. Seems like a waste of time if duplicate content is not recommended. Would that not also tend to negate the need for your new product – article directory?
If you publish your article to say 200 article directories, some will be ignored. But there is still a substantial amount that are indexed in Google. I don’t know the exact number. No one knows. But it’s definitely not a low number of say 1 or 2 sites. It’s in the order of 50 to 100 sites. That’s still a lot of backlinks.
As for my new product, ezarticlelink, all the articles are spun. So all of them are unique. The idea of duplicated content doesn’t apply.
Kenneth, thank you so much for the clarification.
hi it is really nice articles.I weekly update the content of my site.I have also started a blog and I also work on blog and update it after 15 days on regular basis and It is really getting good traffic.
Thanks Ken, Always great information, some of the info here will end up saving me a lot of time
Hi Kenneth, very good content. If you submit your articles to directories will they delete them if you don,t keep submitting articles to them? Then you loose your backlinks.
No.
A very helpful and informative article. Link building is a very time consuming process and must be done correctly should you want to rank well with search engines. If you follow all the methods as layout by Ken, you can see good results eventually…. but…it will take some time to see these effects. Just like the saying goes….Rome was not built in one day!
Kenneth…
A good post, although there may be a few more myths (not mentioned here) floating around.
I’d like to add though, to the..
“There is an expert needed to optimize your page/website for SEM” or similar.
This is intended for the readers, of course, not you.
So, dear readers… SEO is in the end the ‘art’ of getting noticed by search engines.
I would like to make a comparison with dating… If you would try to get a date from a ‘target’… would you employ an “expert” to take you by the hand all the way to the bed? Huh?
I wouldn’t exclude that scenario completely – while it is still possible (and certainly happens sometimes) – BUT it is unlikely.
At most, you’d read a book or other instructional material from an expert and try to follow the tricks, the body language, the visual contact, etc…
Now, this is the same thing here… learn the tricks of the trade, but DIY (not what you think!) with the knowledge acquired.
Is it easy?
Sometimes…
Is it hard?
Well, sometimes… lol
Can you do it?
Sometimes…
Is it likely to happen?
Only if you really WANT it, boys and girls. The desire is indeed needed to succeed.
Bottomline is this…
Write your content and build your pages with that luring tactics in mind:
You don’t want to go to them – you want them to want to come to you!
I rest my case…
And YES, you may quote me.
I wrote a report on how to achieve that easily. As Kenneth’s readers, YOU may get it free here:
. Don’t let the title deter you gals, it is NOT written for boys only – on the contrary!
Steve Lorenzo SEOVirtuoso – on an innuendo rant about good SEO, he, he…
Once again, thanks for the excellent tutorial. I will be linking to on my blog.
Kenneth,
Another great article on SEO! I always look forward to tutorials on this subject matter. I will post your content to my blog as usual and link back so my followers can share this great article. Thanks again for the great information.
Jeff
Great article!
Thanks a lot for sharing such a nice and informative article,very nice and detailed review on it
Thanks for sharing this. This is a awesome help :) This is an article i will be passing on to other people :)
A really helpful and informative article. Link building is a very time consuming course of and should be completed accurately do you have to wish to rank effectively with search engines. If you follow all the strategies as layout by Ken, you possibly can see good results ultimately…. however…it should take some time to see these effects. Identical to the saying goes….Rome was not built in sooner or later!
people keep saying that building backlinks is dying or not the right way to go, and I get that you want to build quality ones, but it just seems like a really long drawn out process for a newer site to try and tackle.
This looks like an old post by now…
How much of the info is STILL actual?
Cheers,
~ Steve
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Another SEO more recent myth is that Google uses the website domain authority and page authority for its rankings.
In fact, these metrics were invented bt moz.org in an attempt to predict how well a website will rank on SERP.
However, even though the site with a big domain authority might rank better than the sites with a low authority, this doesn’t have anything to do directly with the “domain authority” metric. Google doesn’t use that info to determine the position a site ranks to in the search results.