What is Good SEO? Fighting SEO Myths

There seems to be a lot of confusion about SEO these days, many people know the term but are unsure what it is or how to get involved.

I’ve previously written all about how search engines, SEO and keywords work. Today I thought I’d do something different and cover some SEO Myths that you may have stumbled across.

Myth #1 – Comments = links

Commenting on blogs and forums isn’t necessarily good for SEO in terms of “link juice” and ranking. However leaving a useful, thoughtful or insightful comment usually does help grow your audience, create traffic and has been said to help with authority but saying “good post – link” does absolutely nothing but waste your own time.

Myth #2 – Label everything

Adding categories, tags or labels to your blog post is really only good for navigation. They don’t have a big impact on SEO. Think about how you’re using tags and don’t over-do it. When a reader clicks on a tag or label, they want to see more posts with that topic so don’t just tag your post with a bunch of related keywords.

Myth #3 – Add keywords everywhere

The meta keywords tag used to be a pretty important part of SEO, but it’s less so these days. Title tags and meta description tags are still useful. It’s also good to add some primary keywords throughout your blog post in a natural way but over stuffing your posts with keywords so that it no longer makes sense to humans reading it really isn’t doing you any favours.

Myth #4 – Social media does nothing

Social Media and SEO actually go hand in hand. Shares are like recommendations and this is something that search engines take into account. Social media as a whole does play a big part so ensure your blog has share options and engage with readers on social media to grow your following.

Myth #5 – Design doesn’t matter

The structure of your HTML Template is very important. It should be cleanly written and free of errors. It shouldn’t be stuffed with keywords or try to trick spiders in any way. It should also be responsive or mobile friendly as this will contribute to how well you rank, read more about that here.

Myth #6 – The more links the better

No not true, when it comes to link building you should be aiming for quality over quantity.

Myth #7 – SEO can be done overnight

It takes time and effort to build your blog/site and it’s definitely not something that can be done in a couple of hours or days. You need to invest in it, but eventually it will pay off if done right.

The Essential SEO Starter Checklist

50 easy steps to boost your visibility as a new business

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So what is good for SEO?

SEO is really all about writing/sharing great original content and optimising that content so that it is not only good for humans to read but also so that search engines have an easier time indexing it. The reason you want search engines to index it is so that people can find it!! That’s important to keep in mind.

First and foremost, you should write for your audience! Don’t be lazy when it comes to your posts, think about what you are writing. Use relevant titles, images and categories. Give your images proper titles and descriptions.

Just like the post title, the post url needs to be relevant. It’s not widely known but you can change the post url on Blogger – while within a new blog post click permalink on the right and select custom permalink. You can now change the URL of the post. Note that if you try do this to an already existing post any links to that post will now be broken unless you set up a redirect.