SEO Misconceptions You Should Avoid

When I started writing this blog two years back, I had no idea how a search engine works. I had no idea what is pagerank, what the heck is link building and why people always crave for links, anchor text and rankings. I just wrote the articles one after another.

Overtime, I learned a thing or two about search marketing and how someone should optimize his blog or website or even optimize a LinkedIn profile for search engines. For the targeted search traffic, to be more precise.

If you’re someone who is starting out today, have written a couple of blog posts and wonder how your website is going to gets the ranks, here are some common SEO mistakes or misconceptions you should avoid.

It Will Take Some time

It’s not going to happen the moment you publish your first blog post. It doesn’t matter who you are, the search engines would keep an eye on your blog for at least 6 months until you can expect some positive results, as far as the rankings are concerned.

Having an already established blog helps you to direct readers (and the bots) to your new venture, spread the word and engage. But it’s nearly impossible for anyone to rank for a particular keyword with only 13 blog posts and a 20 day old site.

I didn’t fall a prey for this, because I never bothered about rankings for the first year or so. I just wrote 2-3 posts every week, most of them make no sense these days.

Of course, you can comment spam on thousands of blogs, install the Alexa toolbar and get a handsome Alexa ranking for sure. But it hardly matters, trust me.

“Negative Feedback” == Linkbait

Seo Misconceptions and PitfallsA lot of people think that if they provide negative feedback or start a personal commentary with the sole aim of  “Criticism” or “Being Loud”, they will attract more links. Some call it Customer Anger as LinkBait.

Here is an example.You start a web hosting company but never provide support to your clients (intentionally). The idea is that your customers will complain about your product on Customer complain sites, which will attract more back links. The more bad you treat them, the more links you get and the higher goes your rankings, your sales pitch or whatever you’re up against.

This is of course not a good idea for two reasons.

First, you are responsible for your company’s reputation. It doesn’t matter whether you or someone else is abusing your product – your existing and would be customers will “pull out” the moment they start hearing bad things about you. It  doesn’t matter how many Twitter followers or Faebook fans or search visitors you have, if your product doesn’t offer “value”, every other effort will fail.

Second, most of the customer complaint and feedback forums automatically use “rel=nofollow” for links, so getting a thousand backlinks from Customer complain sites will be utterly useless. Read Getsatisfaction.com’s explanation article – When Businesses attack customers

The result: The huge army of links from customer complaint sites neither flow Pagerank or anchor text and hence have no effect on how your website is ranked on search engines.

SEO is only about the Links

“I will need a lot of backlinks to my article for the rankings to work. Content can be developed later”

This is a crazy idea which must be avoided at all costs. How can you expect someone else to link to you, if your content doesn’t offer value ? Websites don’t link to websites, it’s the people who recommend other peoples work or research or voice.

So try to make sure your site has useful content, good architecture, Google Friendly skeleton apart from building links to your posts.

In the following video, Google Engineer Matt Cutts puts ome light on common seo misconceptions and how a blogger needs to avoid those pitfalls, if he is concerned regarding the ankings of his webpages on Google search results

Do you have any doubts on search engine optimization or do you have some more questions or conceptions to be cleared out ? Shoot your ideas in the comments below

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