SEO Myths in 2022
With many updates in the previous year, the industry came up with SEO myths that might lead your site to fall. We all know that it is not easy to rank in the search engine world. With billions of Google searches made every second, being on the first page comes with much effort. Your search engine results can be impacted by common user experience and website performance issues that affect your website traffic, engagement or organic results.
1. Keywords Don’t Matter Anymore
For a long time in SEO, the technique of incorporating keywords was king. You just had to place popular keywords throughout your content to get a chance to be referred by the search engine. After introducing “user intent emphasis” with topic clusters and pillar pages, having a bunch of keywords here and there seemed not to matter anymore.
This new update by Google was called the “Hummingbird.” It intent was to force website owners to create consistent and well-ordered content to provide readers with relevant information.
However, writing to increase user intent does not mean that keywords are no longer relevant. Keywords still play an essential role in SEO. When writing, keyword analysis should still be part of your strategy.
2. Quality Content Is More Important Than Core Web Vitals (CWV)
Core Web Vitals have to do with the way your site performs (page speed, mobile-friendly, etc.). As a website owner, you should work under your web dev to optimize them because they measure your website’s first input display, largest contentful paint and cumulative layout shift. If you have optimized Core Web Vitals and great content, you are more likely to perform better in organic search than on a page without strong CWV.
Tools like Page speed insight and Google search console can identify issues related to Core Web Vitals.
3. Meta Tag Keywords Don’t Matter
One of the SEO myths is that Meta tags are no longer a Google ranking element. Meta tags have been used to provide structured metadata about a website in HTML documents. They appear between the opening and closing <head> tags on a page. For those who don’t know, there are three elements of metatags are the title tag, meta description, meta keywords or phrases.
It is said that Google does not use the keyword Meta tag to make your keyword rank. However, the Meta keyword is still important because it points out your content. It also makes your search results more attractive, which leads to more clicks.
4. Over Optimizing Will Result In Poor Organic Rankings
SEO experts ask themselves if Google will penalize a website for over-optimizing. The truth is that, as long as your keywords are used naturally; and in helpful content, the number of keywords used doesn’t matter. Just make sure that your content includes a variety of keywords:
- Long-tail keyword
- Branded keywords
- Product keywords
- Short-tail keywords
- Geo-targeting
5. Just Create Great Content Because SEO Does Not Matter
Many of us believe that creating great content is enough. It’s true because content that solves a problem will always help. However, what’s the point of creating content that will not reach your target audience or will not see real growth from search engines.
6. Link Building Is Over
Some people in the industry believe that link building makes no difference in the growth of a site. The truth is that links are still one of the key rankings factors considered by Google. If you acquire a link from a site with authority, it will increase your rankings and traffic.
Conclusion
In general, when a new technique comes out; people tend to despise the former. In the SEO s world, you need to keep up with everything. Use the strategy that works for your site.
