Search Engine Optimization is a culture. It’s not a means to over-night success.
In small & medium companies, even in large organizations – there are lots of misunderstanding about SEO among their marketing team. Company heads & their employees think – hire an SEO specialist, tighten the nuts and bolts, and get an overnight success. SEO is not like that.
SEO is like a culture. It should be instilled in all the employees of a company to get the results in online as well as offline world. It starts from the fine-tuning of online property of the company to the offline branding by their marketing team.
I will tell you the top 5 (most common) SEO mistakes or myths among digital marketers in present times. Let’s start with the commonest first…
1. SEO is an online activity
Most of the marketers and company owners believe SEO is confined to online medium only. But in reality, it is well extended to every sphere and every activity associated with the company or business.
Most of the online links can be acquired by attending, organizing and interacting with other influential people in various marketing forums, workshops and expos.
Same way, you can get great citations, mentions and press coverage rooting from the offline world. And branding, the most important component of SEO is not limited to online only. A company’s activities in the offline world, like charity, road shows, flash-mob, billboard advertising, etc. carry the brand forward.
2. Social media signals improve SEO
Majority of the online marketers believe social media signals play a big role in search engine optimization. And they madly run after Facebook likes, Tweets & Re-tweets, and Google +s.
It’s a proven fact that more number of likes & tweets don’t help a web-page to rank higher in search engines. Yes, more number of social likings and sharings indicate the content is of high quality and liked by the readers. Thereby, spending more time on the page. And “time-spent” is an important ranking signal in Google’s search engine ranking algorithm.
Example: This monsoon, it’s raining like cats & dogs. And majority of the people in the town have bought yellow raincoats. This doesn’t mean – most of the people have bought yellow raincoats, so it’s raining like cats & dogs. It’s merely a correlation, but certainly not the causation. And we’re good at correlating correlation with causation.
So, social media marketing augments your SEO efforts. It’s a component of SEO. But social media signals don’t help content to rank high in search engines.
3. SEO Plugins do magic
It’s one of the commonest mistake done by bloggers. WordPress is one of the most successful CMS (Content Management System) in present days. Along with bloggers, lots of small and medium business owners also run their online portal using WordPress. There’re a number of SEO plugins available in WordPress repository.
The problem is – webmasters install these SEO Plugins in their blogs and websites, forget about it, and hope, it will do all the SEO work for them. In reality, SEO Plugins don’t do any magic on their own. After installing you’ve to configure it according to your needs, then every time you publish a piece of content you’ve to fine tune it with different features of the plugin.
The point is – you’ve to dedicate some time to your SEO Plugin with every piece of content publication. It will not do any magic on its own.
4. Long formats rank higher
Content marketing has gained a tremendous momentum in recent times. Whether it’s publishing blog posts on own company blog or guest blogging on other authoritative blogs; digital marketers are doing it in large scale to acquire prospects, customers, and search engine optimization.
There is a false belief that – the more content (word counts) your blog post contains; the higher will be its ranking in search engines. With the introduction of Panda algorithm and In-depth article section in SERPs by Google, this belief has become more deep among bloggers and online marketers.
In reality, Google ranks only high quality content at the top of the search results; irrespective of word counts. A high quality blog post with 700 words can easily outrank an ordinary post with 1500 or 2000 words. So, Google always looks for quality, not quantity.
5. Ranking @ top 3 spots is everything
It’s OK to rank at the top 3 positions of Google search results. But, many a times, ranking at 5th or 7th positions also get more clicks than top 3 positions.
It’s because – the title tag & meta description of the article. An article with a great title tag and a complete and catchy meta description, ranking at 5th position on Google search results can get more clicks and attention than an article at 1st position with a dull or boring title and meta description.
Again, ranking at the top of search results is not everything for a company or website. It’s the conversion which matters the most. The content should’ve enough potential to transform a visitor in to a prospects, and then in to a loyal customer.
Finally, for a company – Customers & revenues matters the most; not the top spots in Google.
SEO is a fast changing field. Search engine rules come and go. You’ve to keep yourself up-to-date and away from all the above mentioned SEO myths or mistakes to get a sustainable & long-term results for your company.
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