You just started your business and trying to find ways to promote your company. You go online and are bombarded with tons of information. After doing some research you decide search engine optimization would be a great fit for your business.
However, you know nothing about SEO other than what you just recently researched. My suggestion would be to sign up for webinars and take in as much information as you can. I will state most of the stuff you learn online is theory-based and you will hear people share strategies that have been tested. I’m here to debunk Four myths that seem to be picking up steam in the internet marketing world.
Myth Number One: Domain Authority
If you have been doing your research, I am sure you have come across the term’sdomain and page authority but if you haven’t you can read more about it. Higher page authority implies your site is more authoritative than sites with less. However, this doesn’t mean a site with lower domain authority can’t outrank a higher one. One way to do this is through page authority. Your page authority must be higher than your competition. You do this by having good content on your web page along with high-quality backlinks.
If you have higher page rank that is great because you will be able to rank webpages with less backlinks pointing at them. However, like mentioned above newer sites don’t have the luxury of waiting to build up their domain authority. Niche sites don’t usually have enough content to build multiple web pages to create highly authoritative sites so if you fall into these categories don’t panic you will just have to focus on having higher page authority for the web pages you want to rank.
Myth Number Two: Content
You doing your research and come across an article talking about content and how you need a certain amount of words to rank well. instead of worrying about content length should worry about the content fulfilling the user the intent. What I mean by this is does your content answer the search query.
Here is an example to help you better understand. Say you own a loan brokerage and you want to rank for content about calculating loan amounts. Don’t you think it makes more sense to provide an actual long calculator? This would fill the user intent on search queries such as how to calculate home loan amount and many more.
Myth NumberThree: Backlinks
You will hear people say your backlinks need to come from sites with lots of traffic and that’s not true. In a perfect world, all your links would come from sites like that since they can provide traffic through the link. However, over 90 percent of websites don’t have significant traffic but this doesn’t make them bad. You just need to do your research on the links and make sure they come from sites that have good metrics and are clean of spam.
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Backlink types and the amounts needed to rank might be the most disputed subject in the SEO industry. Many people claim that nofollow links are useless which they are not. For those of you not sure what nofollow links are they where designed to help combat link spam. Google created this tag for website owners to place on links to prevent the power of the link from transferring through to your page. Since this tag was created many people have stayed away from building these types of links.
The goal when building backlinks is to have natural looking profile and link with a mixture of dofollow and nofollow is going to look a lot more natural than webpage that only has dofolllow links. Now for the amounts of backlinks you will need is dependent on your competition. Do you research and review the backlink profiles of your competitors and you will have a better understanding of how many links you will need to rank your web pages.
Myth Number Four: Site Speed
Site speed has been become a popular topic over the past couple of years. Especially with the shift going to mobile search surpassing desktops. You want to make sure your website loads fast and has a great uptime percentage. However, people go overboard in this and speed way more time and money than they will ever get in return.
For some reason people think if their website is the fastest loading, they will get higher ranking for this and that’s not the case. Google sets benchmarks and if you site fully loads within that time than you are good. Do we know the exact benchmark number no we don’t? People have suggested anything under three seconds is sufficient and I tend to agree but let me propose another way to find an appropriate benchmark for you load speed.
My suggestion is to review the top five websites that rank well for keywords in your industry. Test their load speed on sites like Gtmetrix, Pingdom Tools, and Google Speed Insights. Take and average of all 5 sites if you site is already loading faster than these five websites your job is done. If you are in the bottom half of the average load speed make a couple tweaks to increase it and you should be done. Your speed is below the average benchmark than you have some work to do but at least you know what the number needs to be.
Now that you read through three myths you can take what you learned and market your site better. Myths are created by mystique and the unwillingness to test.If people are willing to take the time and properly test most of the myths you here in this industry would disappear. I would even suggest testing what I wrote so that you know that facts from the fiction. I am sure you will find it useful in your quest to better marketing.