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Common SEO Misconceptions
If you’re brand new to SEO, you may have a couple of incorrect notions in your head.Let’s get rid of
those right now:
“Our site gets a ton of traffic! We’re so popular, we’re a shoo-in for top ranks.”
Search
engines don’t have insider information about your overall web traffic, so they don’t know exactly
how popular your site is.But they can count up how many sites they find that
link
to your site, and
this is one factor in how they judge your site’s popularity.
“We’ve got to get more sites to link to us so that our ranks will improve!”
If the only reason you
set out to get more links is so that Google will rank you higher, you are missing the big picture.
Inbound links are pathways that allow people to visit your site.They can be excellent, direct
sources of targeted traffic!
“Our site is doing great! We ranked #1!”
Ranked #1 for
what
? Starting now,erase “We ranked
#1”from your vocabulary and replace it with “We ranked #1
for the term ______
”. Ranks are
irrelevant unless they are tied to a meaningful target keyword.
“We’re only going to promote our home page.”
SEO is not about your
site
, it’s about every
page
of your site. Every single page in your site stands on its own merits and can sink or swim
based on its unique combination of the factors described in this chapter. If you approach SEO as a
page-by-page endeavor, you will be on a surer path to success.
“We’ve filled in our meta keywords tag…we’re good to go!”
The meta keywords tag carries
very little influence with the search engines, and it’s certainly not going to do much for your ranks
if the rest of your site isn’t shipshape. Just like any element of SEO,the keywords tag works best in
the context of a holistic approach.
Your server performance
The search engine robots visit your site on a reasonably fre-
quent basis to make sure they’ve got the most up-to-date content to offer searchers. But
what if a robot happens to visit your site while it’s out of commission? If they can’t find
you, they probably won’t rank you. You’re likely to be very sad next time you check
your ranks, at least until the robot comes back and rediscovers you.
Which search engine database you happen to be looking at
We’re talking billions of
pieces of data from millions of sites. There’s no way the search engines could keep it all
in one database. This means that, at any given time, searchers are looking at one of a
number of different search engine databases, each giving out slightly different search
results. Expect that your ranks are going to hop around a bit on a daily basis. Try not
to sweat these little dips or put too much stock in the little jumps.
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