Regardless of how long have you been associated with the SEO industry, or how the industry operates, there are always some misconceptions that continue to persist.

Shall we call it lack of awareness or wishful thinking? Well, call it as you deem fit but let’s just clear up or debunk some of the most common misconceptions with the assistance of industry experts from KC Web Designs.

Myth #1 – SEO is All about Words and Links

You can say that this particular misconception is the result of SEO evolution. It is not long since the SEO industry is built on words and links. Authority links and right keywords matter but these are not the only components Google look for. Therefore, investment in establishing your brand authority will be more helpful in today’s competitive industry than creating cheap links.

Myth #2 – Higher Rankings Equals Social Media

Just like keywords and link building, social media is another major component that plays its role in your marketing strategy. In reality, social media play a big role in achieving higher rankings. Indeed, there is a difference between causation and correlation. Hence, racking up tweets and posts in the name of SEO will never take you anywhere unless Google finds a more consistent way to fully monitor social signals.

Myth #3 – More Pages Help a Website Rank Better

Having more pages but irrelevant content will never get you far. There are numerous sites that rank high in the search engine due to their target keywords and quality content, despite having fewer pages. An SEO strategy works on the basis of quality and not quantity. Thus, create pages that truly add value to the site. Otherwise, the mere existence of them will not help your site in any way.

Myth -4 Exacts Match Keywords Stuffing

Definitely, this was a truth once upon a time but now Google is a lot more sophisticated. The myth is no longer applicable thanks to the recent technical developments such as latent semantic indexing that has facilitated Google to gain a lot better contextual understanding including relevance. So all you need now is to keep your content relevant with a few basic keywords while improving readability and web traffic.

Myth -5 Meta Description is highly important for SEO

There is a huge misconception that if you don’t give Google a meta description along with your content, it will create one from the initial sentences of the content. Well, meta descriptions used to be a ranking factor in the past but it is no more important. This doesn’t mean that you should avoid them or neglect them but it matters to human searching on Google more than to the search engine itself.

Myth -6 Image Optimization is Useless

An image embeds on a site can easily be optimized for SEO by using the alt tag. Since search engines cannot read or view images like a human they do read these alt tags. So embedding images with relevant alt tags will help in improving search engine ranking in addition to other factors.