Top 5 SEO Myths for 2016
Until Google really sharpened up their act in 2013, there were loopholes and cheats to rank well – if you were willing to take the risk of getting caught. And even then, the penalty didn’t seem in scale with the reward.
This allowed the “dark art” search brigade to flourish – promising great ranking improvements, but hiding their methods behind a veil of technical voodoo. Ask your typical “SEO expert” how to rank well on Google and you were treated to an impression of a mechanic from the mid-eighties, complete with slow intake of breath, the shake of a head and “well, it’s all highly technical, what with your spiders / carburettors and your meta tags / head gasket”.
Most of it was very simple – they were buying links, using link farms and keyword stuffing. But the myths they propagated then are still around now. So if you hear anyone putting forth the following “wisdom” – call them out on it:
1. Buy lots of domain and forward them to your website
The logic goes, you buy lots of domains that include your targeted keyword (eg www.websitedesignerleightonbuzzard) and point them all to your real website. But if you’re forwarding visits, the domain is invisible to Google anyway. It’s just possible you might benefit from any links the domain got from previous owners, but usually there aren’t any.
2. Use your meta tags
Unless you have a time machine, this isn’t going to work. If you do have a time machine, you probably don’t need to do any search optimisation. Meta keywords are useful – to tell the competition what you’re targeting. But Google are hardly going to pay their brainboxes millions to build a search engine that reads a list of keywords on your homepage, are they?
3. Social media will improve your search rankings
There are a couple of versions of this myth:
- If we embed Facebook / Twitter on our site…; and / or
- If we tweet / post on our Facebook page lots…
Usually propagated by social media agencies / “experts”, there is – at most – evidence of correlation between social media success and search ranking. But NOT causation. Successful brands tend to be active on social media, and also generate more of the signs that Google et al like (inward links, holding visitors onsite, site growth over time etc). Think of it this way – how easy is it to buy likes, followers? How easy is it to set up a bot tweeting regularly? And does Google reward easy? Nope… move one.
4. Video will improve your search ranking
As with social media – easy to do. Anyone can embed a Youtube video on their site – and remarkable as Google’s technology is, it doesn’t have the ability to download your page, “watch” the video and parse the relation of the two. It may help with some search signals – keeping people from returning to Google straight away, for example – but it’s not magic.
5. Let’s have landing pages for each area we cover
The idea here is often to replicate the homepage lots of times, with the only difference being to use a different location on each – eg “Website designers in Leighton Buzzard”, “Website designers in Hemel Hempstead” etc.
It used to work – and we’ll admit, we used to do this, way back when it did – but now Google have explicitly said they consider it cheating. It falls foul of a few of their standard checks – duplicate content, for one – and anyway, we’ve seen its results tail off a lot over the past few years. Make each page unique, relevant to the targeted area and you’re on the right track. But just duplicate pages and substitute the odd word – it just doesn’t work.
So, can you cheat at search, jump the queue?
No.
Search optimisation these days is much closer to PR than many realise.
Get mentioned online, get linked to from other websites, get a reputation that makes potential customers want to discover more – that’s your route to getting more visitors from search.