Common Misunderstandings About SEO

Last week I wrote about five underestimated SEO strategies and the response was overwhelming. For this week, I have decided to follow up with the most common misunderstandings about SEO that my team encounters with clients. Before I begin, it’s important to understand how Google works. This presentation from Paul Haahr, an engineer on the Search Quality team at Google, illuminates the issue brilliantly. With that backdrop, here are the five misunderstandings about SEO: Thinking SEO Is Dying It works for us because intent based search generated the highest returns in both time and investment. With such low competition, it only helps us. The fact of the matter is that SEO is not dead, far from it. New engines and search formats are cropping up every year and optimization will be the need of the hour. Universal Formula There are hundred’s of tactics with unique combinations for every type of country, location, category, customer segment, customer need and so on. There is no one size fits all solution. The tactics we use for 800Flower vary for DELL. Expectations > Reality Confusing social media with search means expecting quick results. Yes, black hat tactics will give the impressions of high rankings but should Google catch up (as its aggressively doing this year) all the links connecting to your digital property will die and be disavowed.  Search Engine Optimization is a day to day process with a long term investment. Short term tactics do more harm. Devaluing Meta Tags We see this with new clients quite a bit and the clean up can take days. A meta tag is your site speaking to the webmaster to inform it about what the site and its content is all about. The webmaster doesn’t speak human, it speaks HTML so make a tag in its language. Thinking Google Hummingbird Has Made Keyword Targeting Obsolete The algorithm change focuses on search intent instead of search terms. And keywords are still appearing on the front page. Not only should your content reflect the keywords from an initial search perspective, but your content should reflect the logical and emotional reasons behind the search. Content should speak to people unaware of your product category, unaware of your company but aware of the product category and unaware of your benefits that offset a problem that they are aware of.

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