Ignore these SEO myths for your own good!

July 26, 2018

Search engine optimization has indeed come a long way from its humble beginnings in the 1990s. Back then, people didn’t pay much attention to it, but now, it’s become the latest rage in online presence. That’s no surprise, given it’s a multi-billion industry that employs thousands upon thousands of people all over the globe. It has also made millionaires of a number of entrepreneurs and SEO professionals.

With this level of success, you would expect the world of SEO to be free of myths by now, that everything about it should be cut and dried. Ha! Cut and dried… Maybe in a parallel universe…

However, one look at what people say about SEO will tell you that people don’t really understand how SEO works. Therefore, the industry, in general, could still use a little more work, at least in dispelling those pesky SEO myths, some of which are listed below:

Implementing SEO brings instant success.

One of the most frustrating things most people think about SEO is that results are instant. What’s sad is many individuals and companies offering SEO services typically feed clients and prospects this story. Surprisingly, many still fall for it hook, line, and sinker.

If you own a business and you get an email promising to make your website rank well in the search engine results pages or SERPs in a week or two, send that bad boy to the Trash. Whoever sent it is either ignorant of the way SEO works, or they’re just out to get your money.

There is no such thing as instant SEO success. Positive SEO results take four to six months to happen, and even then, you may not be fully optimized because you’re basically always competing to reach the top (think about it — your competitors are likely taking advantage of SEO practices as well). With focused SEO work, though, you can expect your SEO results to improve over time.

SEO is a one-and-done task.

With hard and focused SEO work, reaching the top of the SERPs is always a possibility. Many businesses have actually achieved SEO success this way. The problem is, some of them thought once they reached the top, their business would stay on top for a lifetime. Remember what we just said about always competing to be at the top? Yeah, so if you believe you’re done with SEO once you hit #1, you’re in for a rude awakening.

Always keep in mind: SEO rankings are inherently unstable. Being on Page 1 today doesn’t mean you’ll be on Page 1 forever. You need to work doubly harder to stay there because your competitors won’t stop until they wrest that top ranking from you. Fail to sustain your SEO efforts, and you’ll find your website on Page 50 pretty soon (or will you? Cause who really looks through 50 pages of search results? No one…). As far as SEO is concerned, resting on your laurels can be the biggest mistake you will ever make.

All inbound links are good.

Inbound links are integral to SEO success. That, however, doesn’t mean all inbound links are good for your business. Sure, getting backlinks from authority sites helps boost your SEO as well as traffic, but there are types of backlinks—like ones from link farms and not-so-reputable sites—that bring nothing but harm to your website.

Search engines will reward you more for keeping your backlinks to good, high-quality inbound links as much as possible. Any bad backlinks, and it’ll just be a matter of time before you’re caught and subsequently penalized.

Blogs are no longer needed.

There’s this myth going around that blogs for your website are no longer necessary — nothing is farther from the truth.

Blogs remain one of the best platforms for businesses to inform their audiences about the most recent industry development and innovations. Yeah, it takes some time and effort, but it’s well worth it. That’s because blogging not only allows you to position yourself as an industry expert through your own analyses or commentary on certain issues that concern your business and your readers, it also adds pages to your website and thus provides more opportunities for search engines to show your content to prospects when they’re searching online for industry-related information.

You don’t have to be mobile-friendly.

We now live in a world where Google is implementing something called the Mobile First Index. With the Mobile First Index, all its search listings and rankings will be based on your website’s mobile version, even for desktop searches. With this development, can you still honestly believe the SEO myth that websites don’t have to be mobile-friendly?

The above are just some of the SEO myths that you must ignore for your own good. To see more SEO myths, check out the infographic below.

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