It is time to discard old myths and obsolete customs that we are dragging along. If you want to position your page in the first results of Google (because if we talk about SEO, we mainly talk about Google) you have to take into account a lot of options, variables and strategies. The truth is that many of these ideas and ways of working have become outdated or, directly, were never like that. We review in this post the 15 SEO myths that we still maintain in 2022.
POSITIONING A WEB IS EASY
Positioning a website for a specific term, very specific, which can include the brand itself, is easy, but nobody thinks about that when it comes to positioning. Obviously, whoever searches for our brand will find it. What interests us is getting the visits of those who are looking for a specific service or product, but do not know our brand. That is no longer easy. That’s where everyone comes in to fight for the first position, and with competition comes difficulty. Reductio ad absurdum: If it were easy, we would all come out first.
Do not trust, therefore, anyone who tells you that they will easily position your website. Either he is lying or he will position himself in a search without any interest.
THE KEYWORD RESEARCH IS PROVIDED BY THE SEO TOOLS
Many people, even in 2022, still think that SEO tools can give you keyword research. The confusion comes because they confuse this term with a list of keywords. So what is keyword research? This is keyword research. We can start from a list that an SEO tool gives us, but it is only the beginning of the work. You have to analyze the site, the users, the competition… The classification of keywords and evaluation, according to previously established criteria, is essential. The final result of a keyword research is usually a table that reflects the main URLs to work on and the proposed modifications around a chosen keyword.
Summarizing it a bit, a keyword list is a group of keywords, while keyword research is a deep analysis of these keywords, from a marketing point of view, with the aim of classifying and distributing them on the web.
CAPATING PAGES THROUGH ROBOTS.TXT
One of the ghosts that still persist for more than 10 years. There are still people who pretend that their pages do not get indexed by blocking them in robots.txt. For example, they include the URL of the privacy policy in this file. This does not work. There is a specific tag that is placed in the header of each page and tells the crawler if it is an indexable URL or not. This is noindex.
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex” />
KEYWORDS IN THE DOMAIN
We have stayed with the custom of putting the keyword in the main domain, however, Google has denied several times that the words of the domain position. Therefore, this action has no more value than facilitating the memory of the URL.
IF MY CONTENT IS GOOD, IT WILL POSITION WELL
We often think that if what is written is interesting, it will end up working. Unfortunately, nothing is that simple, not only in SEO positioning, in all aspects of life. To satirize this premise a bit: having a graceful physique does not guarantee you to flirt; It also depends on how you dress, how you behave, where you are… and, of course, what the other person is looking for.
In the web world you will find many people with lousy content, but highly optimized and a very good marketing strategy that will position them on higher quality content. That’s where SEO comes in.
(AND THE CONTRARY) INVESTING IN SEO WILL MAKE ME POSITION WELL
As a result of the previous point. Many people think that, by investing in SEO, they will already position their content well. Also a bit like a continuation of the first point: Positioning is not easy. SEO will help, and you will always have better results than if you do nothing, but SEO cannot be understood in the same way as programming. Working on SEO is like going to an opposition having studied: it will make it easier for you, but it is still hard and you don’t know what exam you are going to find. And everyone wants to be first!
SEO IS PERFORMED ON TIME
Some people think that when they commission a website, they give it to them with SEO done. Others believe that they can do a couple of months of SEO to rank better. It’s not their fault, they don’t do it and they don’t have to know about it. But we, as professionals, by moral imperative must indicate that this is not the case. A website prepared to work on SEO can be delivered; two-month intensive action can be done to fix problems; but SEO work is laborious work that takes time. It is a little ant work that requires a lot of time and cannot be condensed, since it requires being able to measure the consequences of the changes that are made.
GOOGLE WILL FIND YOUR CONTENT WITHOUT HELP
It’s easy for you to find it by yourself, but we need to have some knowledge about tracking. It is easy that some configuration has not been done correctly and our site is not accessible to search engine spiders. Some of the impediments may be the aforementioned noindex tags or the lack of links to our website.
ALL SEO WORK IS DONE WITHIN THE WEB
There is a tendency to work on SEO from within, but we must not forget that this is only part of it (on-page SEO). There is a very important part outside of hosting, it is off-page SEO. It works on things as crucial as external links to get referred visits or the work of the Google My Business file.
If you don’t know where to start, here is an entry by Neil Patel that will serve as an introduction.
THE MORE A KEYWORD IS USED, THE BETTER IT POSITIONS
This may be the oldest ghost of the oldest algorithms. At first, content search engines “read” websites and classified them according to the words they contained. Much importance was attached to how many times a word appeared in the text; the more it was used the more you were supposed to talk about it. Immediately, the content creators adapted to the new premise and began to shoehorn the same keyword, giving rise to robotic texts without any syntactic coherence.
As if it were an arms war, Google changed its way of evaluating the pages and, what was previously a point in favor, ended up being a reason for a penalty. Nowadays, entering a keyword too many times can be counterproductive, since the content can be considered over-optimized and we are trying to trick the crawler.
GOOGLE PENALIZES DUPLICATE CONTENT
This is probably the most important myth in SEO, not only among clients, but also among professionals.
The first confusion arises around what duplicate content is. How much text is considered too much? Some people consider that a paragraph copied as is is already duplicate content.
The second doubt arises around the origin, duplicated with respect to whom? Within my own website or outside it?
Regarding the latter, duplicating content from another website can lead to poor content quality, but we have already seen that this is not so decisive. Regarding the length of the texts, to consider it duplicate content, almost the entire page should be the same, with repeated key elements (title, elements, etc.). An example, a category called bags with three products and a label, also called bags, with the same.
Now comes what we often don’t understand (or don’t know how to transmit): If we have duplicate content, Google doesn’t penalize us, what happens is that we are competing with ourselves. Two identical pages will compete for the same result and that, obviously, is not a good strategy. But from there to being penalized, there is a world.
SEO ENDS WHEN VISITS ARE TAKEN TO THE WEB
There is a tendency to think that SEO consists of bringing visits to the web. This is part of the day-to-day tools, but it is not understanding SEO work. It would be like assuming that a doctor’s job is to give you medicine. Yes, sometimes it can be like that, but other times it is about diagnosing, referring, eliminating habits or foods… they are just tools to take care of the patient’s health. Likewise, in SEO, it is not about bringing visits for the sake of bringing, you have to optimize that traffic, get it to convert… Because visits by themselves are useless.
POST MORE TO POSITION BETTER
There is still a tendency to think that published posts have to have a minimum length, or that we have to have a very extensive blog to position ourselves well. Short posts also rank, or blogs with three posts. The important thing is that it gives a solution to the user, that it works.
Sometimes it is not to publish more to position better, but to publish better to position more.
SEO IS CHEAP
This myth borders on the hoax. I know several people who have been offered to do SEO work for a ridiculous price. Those who have contracted these services will have been able to corroborate that the quality of the work is in accordance with the price: also ridiculous.
If you have come this far, you have already seen that the work of an SEO agency is complicated and laborious, nothing to do with copying and pasting data in a report. Therefore, it is not possible that it is “cheap”, if you are going to hire this service, be wary of these prices; And if you are going to sell this service, do not play along with those who try to break the market, value your work as you should.
SEO IS DEAD
I leave the most mythical for last. If you work in this sector, it is something that you will have heard a lot, each new update of the algorithm resurrects it. The truth is that here it continues, and here it will continue. I, who have a background in Fine Arts, have heard this same statement hundreds of times with different subjects, and I’m sure you have too: Painting is dead; the radio is dead; the gasoline car is dead; rock is dead… There are always those who see the end of the road because they are not capable of looking beyond it.
For SEO to die, search engines need to die.
