The road to SEO success is very broad and complex. Ranking on first page is not heaven sent. I’ve seen a lot of never-ending debates about SEO and internet marketing from leading forum sites. Having said that, it’s very important for us to take the advice of experts in the field. Simply because they’ve been there and they’ve done that. They can help us understand SEO and internet marketing better and lead us straight ahead.

1. Top SEO Myths
Everyone Should
Know About

2. 1: Only the first rank
matters
Many eBooks and other resources that business owners use will place
an important emphasis on the need to be at the top of search results,
whether that be on Google Search, other engines, or even in places
like social media. But surveys have shown that people quite often
will look at other results and they will scroll down through the page.

3. 2: You can do SEO with no
outside help
Doing SEO simply means that you follow a set of techniques and
procedures to increase the chance that web users will go to your site.
It is true that anybody can learn these techniques, and if you are a web
site owner and you want to do your own SEO then you can spend the
time to learn and apply those techniques. But SEO can be complex
and touches many areas such as online marketing, coding, technical
aspects along with PR skills.

4. 3: META tags are very
important
It used to be that every page on your site needed META tags in order
to rank well. Those are small pieces of code that would give Google
a list of keywords and a description. The search engine would base
itself on those to find out what your web site was about. Now
however, those do not affect your ranking at all.

5. 4: Keyword-rich domain
names are ranked higher
Back in the .com days, it used to be that the URL you used was very
important. Google placed a lot of importance on the domain
name, and if you could get a name that had your keyword in it, you
would gain a big advantage over other sites. This is why a lot of
companies in the late 90s bought domain names for a lot of money.

6. 5: Submit your site to Google or
other search engines
All search engines used to have URL submission forms where you
could send your site to Google and others. The crawlers that these
engines use now are sophisticated enough that any new site will be
found in a matter of days. The only time you would have to worry
about submitting your site is if for some reason it was not indexed
automatically after a couple of days.

7. 6: Submitting a sitemap will
boost your rankings
Google offers a webmasters interface and from there, you can submit
a sitemap, which is an XML file containing links to every page on
your site. Some site owners take the time to submit such a file every
time they make a change, but that is not necessary. Submitting a
sitemap does not change your rankings, all it does is add pages
which may not have been indexed already.

8. 7: SEO has nothing to do
with social media
Before the advent of Facebook and Twitter, SEO was the one and
only technique to get traffic from an organic way. But now, social
media is everywhere, and the line is quickly blurring between the two.
While some marketers still consider SEO and social media to be
different beasts, the truth is that they are very closely linked. For
example, Google now places their own social network, Google
Plus, into its search results.

9. 8: Google does not read
CSS files
The Google bot used to be fairly primitive and only saw text, which
is why many people concentrated on the text part of their web site.
But now that engine is very sophisticated and it reads JavaScript,
CSS, and more. The crawler can definitely see whether your site's
presentation is appealing for users or not. For example, if someone
searches on a mobile device and you have no mobile layout on your
site, you may be missing out.

10. 9: You need to update your
home page all the time
Some people think that by updating their home page content all the
time they will rank higher, or by not updating it their ranking will
drop. In most cases that is not the case, because if you have a sales
page that offers a product, then there would be no reason to update
that page unless something about the product changes, and Google
expects that.

11. 10: The H1 header has greater
value than the rest of your text
The structure of your page is seen by Google and other engines, but
you have to realize that many sites are structured very differently. As
such, no one specific tag has more value than another. An H1 tag is
simply a header that corresponds to a CSS entry in order for the user
to see your page a certain way.

12. 11: Linking to other highly ranked
sites helps your ranking
Some sites try to link to many other high authority sites in order to
help their rankings, but that does not help at all. Google uses
PageRank to decide how your site will rank, and that algorithm is
based on how useful your site is to others, and as such it will only
look at how many other people link to you.

13. 12: Using automated SEO
methods is always spam
Many people use automated SEO methods that do not fall into the
spam area. Many companies have very big sites and they use
automated scripts to do a lot of the grunt work of SEO. Whether or
not a method is spammy is based on what the result is, not on how
automated it is.

14. 13: PageRank is the only
factor that matters
The algorithm that Google uses to rank sites is PageRank, which
determines how useful a site is to others. But the result also takes
indications from hundreds of other inputs as well, according to what
Google says. Some of these inputs are easy to see, like having your
site being recommended by others on Google Plus. This proves that
not only PageRank matters

15. 14: The title tag is hidden
from search engines
Most of what Google sees on your site is the text that is visible to
users, such as what appears on the screen and is rendered in a web
browser. As such, it would be easy to think that the title is not
picked up. However, your title is very important for SEO, because
that is the text that appears on the link people will click on

16. 16: Usability does not
affect SEO
The whole point of SEO is to gain traffic and get people to
stay on your site so they can be entertained or buy your
products and services. As such, SEO very much goes hand
in hand with usability, because this is what will make a
difference in whether or not someone stays on your site for
long.

17. 17: The.edu and.gov
backlinks are the best
It is true that most.edu and.gov sites are well ranked and
have a high authority, because those are typically official
sites that are well maintained and contain no spam.
However, this is just a byproduct of how they are
maintain, it is no guarantee

18. 18: SEO is based on the
quantity of links
Believing that the success of a SEO campaign is to have the
most possible backlinks is misunderstanding how ranking
works.. Often, a single link from a popular news site talking
about your product will be much more valuable than
spamming hundreds of links to unknown blog sites.

19. 19: Backlinks are more
important than content
SEO usually costs time and money, and as such it is
unrealistic to think you can do everything possible in every
facet of online marketing. So often you have to make
choices, and some may be tempted to focus on link building
instead of content. However, the goal of SEO is to bring
good traffic to your site. Quality is very important, not only
quantity. Not having good content means your site has no
value to anyone, and as such it will quickly lose any benefit
that the extra links gave you.

20. 20: Paid links will get you
banned from Google
There are many ways to get links, and some of them
includes some type of payment. But not all paid links are
always bad, it depends on how that payment occurs. For
example, many sites, including Google, offer advertising
services. You can buy an ad on Ad-word, you could go to
another ad network, and many sites offer their own ad
services

21. 21: Good content is all you
need
Just like building an army of links will not help you keep
traffic for very long, having good content and nothing else
is also not enough. Most people agree that good content is
the cornerstone of having a successful site. By having
engaging, useful posts for your visitors, you can ensure that
they will want to visit your site and stay there for a long
time. However, simply building it does not make it known.

22. 22: Google actively
penalizes certain sites
Anyone who has done some work in SEO has been puzzled
at some point when seeing strange drops in ranking. It may
seem as if you did nothing wrong, you increased all of your
marketing efforts, yet somehow Google decided to rank you
lower. It may be easy to think that your site was penalized
in some way, but most often that is not the case. Google
clearly states that they only penalize sites that break their
terms of use by actively going after unethical methods like
spamming users.

23. 23: Google AdWords will
give you preferential
Ad-Words is a very useful program by Google where you
can place an ad on other sites to advertise your own. It
should be part of any online marketing campaign. However,
Ad-Words by itself does not help boost your rankings.
Some think that because a company pays Google, then they
will give them preferential treatment in organic search, but
that is not the case

24. 24: SEO is something done
once only
A lot of sites do this mistake. When the site is new and it
has just been created, the owners will invest in doing some
SEO, and then think that everything is done. But just like
marketing in the real world, SEO is not something you can
do once and then forget. Instead, it is a continual process
which has to be done over a long period of time, often the
entire life of the site

25. 25: SEO companies can
get guaranteed results
This is a very common yet completely bogus claim which
some marketing firms like to use. They claim that by using
their methods, your results will be guaranteed. But the truth
is that no one can claim a certain method is foolproof for
the same reason that SEO is not something you do once
then forget. Everything changes online and you never know
when something that used to work well will stop working.

26. 26: Placing links per page
can penalize you
Some people have been told that a certain amount of links
on a page can be bad for your rankings. For
example, placing more than a hundred links on your landing
page will be bad for Google and you will get penalized in
some way. While it is true that spamming links on a page is
something you should not do, and the Google bot has ways
to detect when a page is a link bait one, you should not be
afraid to create pages with lots of links.

27. 27: Internal links don't
matter for SEO
Many people think of linking only as far as backlinks
go, and only focus on having other sites link to their own
pages. But internal linking is also important, just like your
site layout is important, because the search crawlers try to
act as much like a normal web viewer as they can. If your
site has bad internal navigation, Google will be able to
detect that, and this could penalize you

28. 28: Social marketing are the
number one factor in SEO
Social media has taken a central role in how people find
information on the web today, and the signals sent by these
sites are fed into search engines in real time. No modern
business should ignore social media, simply because of the
amount of time people spend on Facebook or Twitter.
However, no one social site is the holy grail of SEO. Even
if getting Facebook likes can be important, is not any more
so than the many other techniques that can be used

29. 29: Keywords are no
longer relevant
Sites used to be created with a paragraph at the bottom
filled with keywords in order to attract more traffic using
something called keyword stuffing. In recent
years, knowledgeable marketers have realized that this is no
longer needed, in fact it is a practice that is heavily
discouraged by search engines. However, this does not
mean that keywords are not still very important.

30. 30: Using bigger headers
will improve your ranking
Header tags such as H1 or H2 do matter because search
engines look at the layout of your site, so you need to have
headers that make sense and that contain your keywords so
that the search engine knows what the content is about.

31. 31: Keywords have to be
exact matches
It's true that words have to match what people type into a
search engine, however there are arguments for using words
other than your selected keywords. For example, most
words have a lot of synonyms, and people type in those
synonyms all the time. By using a larger selection of
keywords, you can be sure to catch those searches as well.

32. 32: PageRank does not
matter anymore
When Google first started to be the top search engine and
everyone focused on ranking well, PageRank became the
number one criteria every marketer would go after. It used
to be, and may still be, the input metric that affects a
ranking the most, but the company has been clear many
times that sites are ranked on hundreds of different
metrics, not just PageRank.

33. 33: Google Analytics can
spy on people
Google Analytics is the most popular analytics software
used by sites around the web, and as a result some people
think that they are being spied on. But the company has said
many times that no personal data is being transmitted using
Google Analytics.

34. 34: You should finish your
site before starting SEO
SEO can be thought of as a form of marketing, and most
marketing efforts are made after a site is completed, but
there are steps that you should take before. For
example, you should make sure you have a good
layout, good navigation, META tags, titles, and so on

35. 35: Buying links, likes will
help your site rank better
There are a lot of sites selling Facebook
likes, followers, and so on. Often, those services seem quite
cheap, such as 10,000 likes for $10. However, in most cases
these are not worth the money. First, they are usually fake
accounts, bots that simply mass follow for a price. They are
not real people, which means no one will see those social
signals, and as a result they will not increase your ranking

36. 36: Paid links always
come from shady sites
In the case of bulk services, it is true that a lot of those paid
links will come from shady sources, including bots or
proxies. However, many reputable sites sell links as well, in
the form of advertising or even preferential treatment. In
those cases, you may have very legitimate links on high
authority sites, and those can help your site rank better on
search engines.

37. 37: Google won't find bad
or spammy links
Some of the people who buy bulk links or who use
automated methods to spam blog posts think that Google
will not find them, and that they will gain from their
unethical practices. In many cases, that may actually be
true, since Google and other search engines are not part of
the secret police

38. 38: You should not place
too many outbound links
Some people think that they should only link to a small
number of outbound sites. There is only one case where
linking to other sites can hurt you, and that is if you become
part of a backlinks network for the sole purpose of raising
your ranking. In that case, when one site is discovered, all
of them may be hit

39. 39: With good SEO you do
not need PPC marketing
Some sites will spend a lot of time doing SEO and get great
organic results, but even then PPC campaigns can be useful.
Surveys should that it often is not the same people who
click on ads versus those who click on organic links, so it
can be worthwhile to do both, if you have the money for it.

40. 40: You can manipulate
search rankings
This is a myth many marketing sites attempt to promote, the
fact that they can somehow manipulate search rankings in a
way that is outside traditional SEO. The truth is that there is
no magical way to manipulate search rankings, and usually
when someone says that they can, what they mean is that
they will use unethical ways to speed up your ranking. But
using spam and other spammy strategies mean your site is
put at risk.