SEO is built on speculation. Google is notoriously tight-lipped with their information, so SEO experts spend most of their time testing and retesting theories. There are a lot of different theories and some persistent myths that I hope to dispel here.
I can just put a bunch of keywords in my post and people will find it that way.
Noooooooo. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Don’t do that. Do not do that thing. That is a bad thing. This is known as keyword stuffing. Not only does it read poorly for your reader, but it signals to Google that your page might be spun content, or written by a bot, or scraped from other pages and compiled on one page, all of which will put you under the microscope for black hat SEO techniques and Google violations.
PageRank is the best way to tell how well my site is doing.
I mean, it used to be a good indicator. But aside from the fact that Google doesn’t even update this metric anymore, there’s no one single factor that will tell you how well your site is doing. You’d have to take into account your technical stability, your link structure, content clarity, topical authority, lots of different things. It’s really hard to get all that information condensed into one number. If you are looking for a number to guide your understanding of your site, Moz has domain authority and page authority. You can even install the MozBar in order to see these metrics on every page you visit and not have to visit Open Site Explorer to find it.
My activity on social media has nothing to do with my SEO.
So like… technically, Google doesn’t count Facebook shares or Twitter followers towards your rankings. HOWEVER. Activity does do wonders for your content awareness and search engine indexing. Remember how I talked about how spiders find information by crawling links on your site in my post about internal linking? This works outside of your website too. The more links a page has linking to it, the more chance it will be found by search engines, and the more topical authority it has. Social media is great for this, not to mention it’s the technological equivalent of word-of-mouth advertising.
SEO is a misunderstood field! Things change constantly and it can be hard to stay abreast of the latest changes. Myths stick around and I’m happy to chat about why things do or don’t work. As always, I’m here for questions!
On Wednesdays we wear pink. On Saturdays, we talk about SEO! Follow me on Twitter for the latest updates!