Mythbusting: Debunking Toxic SEO Misconceptions

The world of SEO can be pretty mystifying if you’ve never had any dealings with it, and there are lots of misconceptions about what does and doesn’t help search engines find your website. Today I’m going to debunk some of the most commonly held myths about SEO which could be poisoning your site.

MYTH: Link-swapping helps to boost rankings

Quite simply, this isn’t true. Lots of people think they can be really clever by agreeing to place a link to a friend’s website on their own site in exchange for placing their own link on their friend’s website. Google will see this immediately and suspect that something shifty has happened. Oh, and by the way – Google will probably also spot three way link swaps too (Link A on B’s site, Link B on C’s site, Link C on A’s site), so don’t bother.

MYTH: Linking to other sites boosts your PageRank

Not true! If that were the case, it’d be simple: make a low-ranking website and cram it with links to Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, Twitter… it’s only the reverse that will help: finding sites to link back to you. Now, if Wikipedia were to link to your site, that would be a different story altogether…

MYTH: I need keywords! So many keywords!

Absolutely not! It used to be the case that Google could be fooled into thinking your site was more relevant by using your target keywords over and over again. For example: ‘Sue’s Bakery in Sussex sells the best cream cakes, wedding cakes, birthday cakes, celebration cakes and fruit cakes in Sussex and these cakes are the favourite cakes of practically every cake-eating Sussex resident!’ Google will see straight through this and penalise you for trying to trick its system.

MYTH: Meta tags are the key to top rankings

This is certainly no longer the case! For many years, the meta tag features were abused by people looking for any way at all to force their search terms into their pages. It won’t be seen on the page, but Google will see it so it must be great, right? No! This is because people tried to cheat the system by showing Google what they wanted it to see without having to spam site visitors with unnecessary, sneaky content. It appears to have been largely disregarded by Google’s algorithms now.

Rather than these toxic myths, what you really need is an SEO expert who can get you up to speed on today’s SEO methods, and that’s exactly what we offer here at Artemis, so get in touch today if you want someone to tell you exactly how it is and help you create a realistic SEO strategy for your website.