6 SEO Myths Debunked

This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

Whether you’re brand new to search engine optimization, got some experience or you’re a seasoned vet, you’re probably operating under some faulty assumptions or outdated information you’ve picked up along the way. Unfortunately, there’s a chance you think you’re doing everything right but unknowingly hampering your own marketing. As you move forward into the holiday shopping season and the next year (we’re already in Q4, people), put these persistent misconceptions to bed so you can get the most out of your digital marketing efforts.

1. SEO Is All about Keyword Density

This myth is the remnant of a bygone age. In the old days of SEO you could trick search engines into thinking you had a highly relevant page by publishing thin content (just a few hundred words per page) that was crammed with keywords and their synonyms. This type of SEO was struck down by Google’s Panda update, which targeted low-quality, thin and duplicated content. Sites that had over optimized took a hit to their rankings and traffic. If you’re still operating under the idea that keyword density matters, you’ll probably struggle to rank well, and you’re providing your visitors with a worse user experience to boot.

That doesn’t mean don’t optimize your site for a specific keyword. You just need to do it naturally and keep in mind how you’re providing value to your users. Places you should still use your keyword are:

• URL: Search engines and human users look at URLs to tell them what they should expect to find on the page, so they play a big part in SEO. Best practice for optimizing URLs is to use your keyword at the beginning, use hyphens as word separators and keep them as similar to the page title as you can.
• Title tag: One of the most important on page SEO factors, title tags are one of the strongest hints you can give search engines about what the page is about. Like with URLs, use your keyword at the beginning of the title. This is a spot that’s really easy to over-optimize, so you should really think carefully about using more than one keyword here. Only do so if it can happen naturally and if the two keywords are very closely related. Otherwise, stick to one keyword, and once is enough — using the same keyword in the title tag repeatedly is a surefire way to make Google think you’re web spam.
• Headers and sub-heads: Headers (<h1> tags) and sub-heads (<h2>-<h6> tags) give your content order and structure, which makes it easier for search engines to interpret it and more enjoyable for humans to consume it. H1 tags are extra important as they function as the content’s title (although note that they are not the same as the <title> tag). Using keywords in these spots will tell readers what to expect from each section of content, but overdoing it will tank your ranking.

When it comes time to write your page content, don’t worry about how many times you’ve used your keyword — search engines don’t really look at it that way and if the content is too keyword rich it will make you look bad. Instead, focus on using your keyword in the places mentioned above and throughout the entire page. This is where longer content really pays off: you’ll have your keyword and semantically related words naturally appear in different places, which will make your page look better. Measure how consistently you use keywords and related words with a WooRank audit:

2. Images & Videos Don’t Matter for SEO

Images and videos play a role in SEO in two important ways: Regular search results rankings and image/video search results. Images and videos help your on page SEO in two ways:

• Improved user experience. No one wants to click through to a page only to be confronted with a giant, unbroken wall of text. Photos, illustrations, infographics and other images make your page look attractive and break up text for easy consumption. This will increase time on page and decrease bounce rate, two factors Google uses to rank pages. Keeping your image size down will reduce page load time, which is another important factor in UX and SERP ranking.
• More relevance to keywords. Even though search engines can’t see what’s in an image, they are able to crawl the image HTML tag on the page. Use this to your advantage by optimizing your images with alternative text and filenames that are clear, descriptive and use keywords naturally.

Well-optimized images and videos will also open up your page to a new channel of traffic: image and video search results. What’s really great about this sort of SEO is that you can double dip here: optimizing your media to help your pages rank will also help them rank in image search results. There are two vital parts of multimedia code to optimize:

• Filename: Use filenames like you would URLs for a webpage. Use keywords at the beginning, separate words using hyphens and be descriptive and include as much detail as you can.
• Alternative Attribute: Also known as the alt tag or alt attribute, the alternative attribute gives details about the media that didn’t fit in the filename. Write alt attribute like you’re describing the image to a person who can’t see — because that’s exactly what the alt text does. Search engines rely heavily on alt attribute since they can’t crawl an image to figure out what it is.

Check your image optimization with a WooRank audit to verify that your images have correctly implemented alt attributes.

Ensure that search engines are properly crawling and indexing your images and videos by using the <image> and <video> extension to your XML sitemap. If you’ve got a lot of images and/or videos, create image and video sitemaps and add them to your site as part of a sitemap index file.

3. Rich Snippets are Bad for Marketers

Rich snippets, both the Knowledge Graph and Answer Box, are part of Google’s effort to enhance search results by interpreting search intent and providing the searched-for information directly in SERPs using semantic search information, gathered from the web in its entirety. These rich snippets have some marketers tearing their hair out. Since Knowledge Graph gathers information from all over the web, it won’t always link back to your site.

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by Greg Snow-Wasserman via SitePoint