#seomarketing Archives - Shourai Ltd.

The Truth and Myths About SEO

frederic — Fri, 05 Mar 2021 04:29:55 +0000

The Digital Marketing world changed a lot ever since the Coronavirus pandemic started. A lot of businesses shifted to online business to make their business afloat. To stay on top of the competition, SEO is one way to achieve it. In this article, the truth and myths about SEO will be discussed. There are a lot of arguments and misconceptions about Search Engine Optimization and people wanted to know the facts for these speculations to be solved.

Sean Si from SEO-Hacker enumerated some truths and myths about SEO. He also provided his insights about it and these are the following:

Myth: On-site optimization is just a small part of SEO.

Truth: On-site optimization plays a big role.

There are very few blog entries about on-site optimization. Perhaps because it is closely tied to having a technical background. On-site optimization can just as easily deal with keywords as much as it can with coding. And with all the new coding required stuff coming out like Schema Markup, Responsive design, Site speed optimization, etc., it’s easier to just go and do off-site and outreach to try and improve rankings.

That being the case, SEO specialists who know how to do on-site optimization well are easily at the best strategic positions today. Lots of people and blogs are talking about link building, link outreach, co-occurrence, co-citation, etc. Some don’t even know what they’re talking about.

Shift focus to on-site optimization. You’ll thank me for it.

Myth: You don’t need technical SEO. Content is king.

Truth: You have no Frikin’ idea what you’re missing.

Technical SEO is just a small part of on-site optimization. However, please realize that Google is a technical engine working a technical algorithm that reads your (technical) website.

Remember, your website is made up of a bunch of codes in the back-end. Whether you realize it or not, having a website is already technical in nature. If you neglect technical SEO as unessential because you can write like Seth Godin, you’re wrong. (Well… maybe not if you can really write like Seth Godin.)

A hard tweak here and there, an update on your structured data markup, a canonical to some duplicate pages, and voila!

Technical SEO is where the magic is.

Myth: Linkbuilding is dead.

Truth: Linkbuilding just got a lot more natural.

Any news that something in SEO died is a lie until proven with solid data. Or at least, until Danny Sullivan and Bill Slawski says so.

What really happened is that link building shifted to a more ‘natural’ way of evaluation. Artificially built links are seen as a taboo – and are deemed to get devalued or penalized.

Of course, building naturally earned links is encouraged. Who are we kidding? It’s way harder to earn links than build ’em up-front.

However, if naturally earned links make it harder to game Google’s algorithm, then it’s going to have to be the way to go.

Myth: Content marketing is the new link building.

Truth: Not really. You can still go with diversified Linkbuilding.

Content marketing has been built up and up and up and up. So many blogs wrote about it – even claiming it to replace link building.

I think you can never replace link building.

People tried social signals. People are trying co-citation. And so on and so forth.

However, links are still one of the main fundamentals of how Google sees the web. An influx of relationships between one website to another.

Links make up the web. Deal with it.

There’s another article entitled “Top Google Ranking Myths” written by Amanda Hoadley of Northwoods. The content is as follows:

Myth #1: Keyword Targeting is Irrelevant

Truth: Keywords still matter! Just not in the same way they once did. Keywords are still showing on search engine results pages (SERPs), and every Google algorithm update is intended to further hone in on search intent. You should still include keywords in your content, but any efforts by content marketers and bloggers to hit a certain keyword ratio became obsolete with Google’s Hummingbird update.

So, keyword ratios are out, but a focus on creating content based on search intent – knowing the motivation behind why particular keywords are being searched – and naturally incorporating relevant keywords in your copy is critical.

Myth 2: Meta Tag Keywords Don’t Matter

Truth: Meta tag keywords DO matter. Meta tags are used in HTML documents to provide structured metadata about a website and appear between the opening and closing tags on a page. The three elements of metatags are:

Title tag
Meta description
Meta keywords or phrases

Google doesn’t use the keyword meta tag for ranking purposes; however, meta tag keywords are still relevant as they indicate to Google what your content is about. Meta tags can also make your search results more appealing, which attracts more clicks from searchers.

Myth #3: Target Keywords in Anchor Text Don’t Matter

Truth: Link building has become a crucial part of SEO strategies; however, there is a debate in the content marketing community about whether you should use keywords in your anchor text. Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink that takes a user to another page.

The main reason why content marketers debate the value of keywords in anchor text is that overoptimization is penalized by Google. Keyword stuffing is seen as a red flag, which negatively impacts site rankings. To say keyword-rich anchor text doesn’t help your site isn’t accurate because anchor text helps Google understand page content and helps determine relevancy when it comes to link building.

So, instead of avoiding keyword-rich anchor texts, just change your approach by diversifying your anchor text to avoid overoptimization.

Myth #4: Having More Links is Better than Having More Content

Truth: There was a time when it was better to focus on creating more links than it was to develop more content, but that time has officially come to an end. Now, it’s all about the quality of links rather than the number. Creating a natural link profile with amazing content is what will help improve your search rankings.

Why the change? In the past, webmasters and SEO pros started to take advantage of link building by creating chunks of links that had no valuable content just to improve rankings. As Google caught on and its focus changed to search intent in order to serve up better content to its users, having relevant, trustworthy, and authoritative links became the name of the game.

Myth #5: Too Many Keywords Will Result in Poor Organic Rankings

Truth: SEO experts and bloggers are always asking themselves how many keywords are considered too many and if Google will penalize a website for over-optimizing. The simple answer is that as long as your keywords are used naturally and your content is helpful, the number of keywords you have doesn’t really matter.

The key to avoiding over-optimization is to make sure you include a variety of keywords in your content, including:

Branded keywords
Product keywords
Long-tail keywords
Short-tail keywords
Market-defining keywords
Customer-defining keywords
Latent semantic indexing (LSI)
Geo-targeting

The bottom line? Focus on creating natural and helpful content for your website visitors instead of counting keywords.

Myth #6: Social Doesn’t Impact SEO

Truth: While it’s true that a “like” or comment on a social post doesn’t directly influence your Google rankings, they do have a positive impact on shares and engagement.

And shares and engagement create social signals, which can have significant SEO value. Sharing on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social channels has been shown to increase social impressions and organic click-through-rates (CTR). Check out this social media study on SEO influence for more information.

If you’re successful at creating engagement on your social accounts, then your chances of attracting a larger audience via organic search and also of driving ideal traffic to your website increase – in turn, improving your CTR and impressions.

Myth #7: Local SEO Doesn’t Matter Anymore

Truth: When a user is searching for a product or service in their local area that you provide, you want to show up in those search results. But if your site isn’t optimized for local search, those users may not find you. That can mean lost conversions and potential lost business. In fact, 46% of all searches are conducted by searchers seeking local information, and that’s a significant amount of searches!

To make sure your business is showing up in local searches if you haven’t already done so consider visiting Google My Business (GMB) and creating a GMB page to help promote your business profile on Google search and maps.

Myth #8: Images Don’t Need to Be Optimized

Truth: Google uses file names and URLs to understand images, which makes optimizing your images a necessity. As a rule of thumb, it’s a good idea to use images that are supported by Google, including these file types:

JPEG
PNG
WebP
BMP
GIF
SVG

Your images also need to be accessible, which requires the addition of alt text. By adding alt text, your images will be accessible and understandable to those with vision impairments or other disabilities and will help Google understand them. (Learn more about website accessibility and WCAG 2.1 accessibility standards.)

Your alt text should be as descriptive as possible without any spammy attempts – for example, “waffles” versus “chocolate chip waffles with powdered sugar and syrup.” The more descriptive your alt text, the better understood your image will be and any chance of being penalized for overoptimizing reduced.

Additionally, to make sure your images can be discovered within Google’s image search, consider using an image sitemap and HTML markup to help Google understand your content.

If you need help with digital marketing services such as website and mobile development, SEO, Lead generation, and other IT Services, Shourai can help. Send us a message here or email us at info@shourai.io

For more articles about SEO, click here.

References:

https://seo-hacker.com/bitesized-truths-myths-seo/

https://www.nwsdigital.com/Blog/SEO-Myths-and-Facts-2020

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SEO Interview: Top 16 Questions Asked and Answered

frederic — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 03:57:41 +0000

Do you have questions in your mind about Search Engine Optimization? Do you want some answers? This article (SEO Interview: Top 16 Interview Questions Asked and Answered) might help you get the answers. Read more and you’ll find out!

According to Rahul Venugopal from Simplilearn, wrote these commonly asked questions in an interview:

1. What makes a website search engine friendly?

Several factors make a website search engine friendly, including keywords, quality content, titles, metadata, etc. A website needs these factors to be ranked by a search engine and therefore found by a user.

2. How do you measure SEO success?

You might want to answer this question based on the type of company you’re interviewing for, as goals might differ. In addition, there are a variety of ways to measure key performance indicators (KPIs) and, therefore, success. During an SEO interview, possible answers might include increasing traffic to a website or particular landing page, increasing conversions such as newsletter signups or sales, growing the number of inbound links, driving traffic for a particular keyword phrase, or increasing referral traffic. It’s critical that an SEO professional measures result to know if the tactics and strategy need to change to succeed.

3. How did you learn SEO?

Obviously, this answer will depend on your individual situation, but it matters because a potential employer wants to ensure that you are well-versed in SEO best practices. If you learned SEO by the seat of your pants at your last job because someone had to do it, an employer might doubt the quality of the skillset you offer. And, if that’s the case, you can always get certified before applying for that job to ensure you are well trained!

4. Which SEO tools do you regularly use?

You will likely have tools you’re familiar with, and you’ll want to talk about those. If you don’t yet have much of a toolbox because you’re new to SEO, check out the multiple webmaster tools Google offers, as well as the tools offered by Moz.

5. How do you approach keyword research?

As with the question above, your answer might vary. You’ll want to explain which keyword tools you use for research, as well as how you go about it. For example, if you use Google Keyword Planner to do your keyword research, then that’s your answer for the tool used. But you must also explain how you go about it. You must demonstrate you do more than simply guess at a keyword and type that into the tool before checking the results. For example, perhaps you use personas to consider potential problems a prospect faces, and you look for keywords around that. You should also explain that you consider longer keyword phrases, search volume, and the competitiveness of a keyword. Demonstrate that you know how to find the sweet spot in keyword research, where the keyword narrower so it’s targeted and has good search volume, but is not highly competitive.

6. What is link building and why does it matter?

Google exists to serve the searcher. That means Google is constantly trying to determine which results are most relevant to any given searcher and any given time. In addition to relevance, Google considers credibility too. So the search engine looks to see if other websites have linked to yours. If so, that means your content is worth linking to and is, therefore, more credible when compared to a website not linked to externally. In a nutshell, link building is what SEO professionals do to try and get links to their websites in order to improve search results.

7. What are backlinks?

A backlink is what we call the links into a website from an external source, as mentioned in link building.

8. What is page speed and why does it matter?

Page speed refers to how fast your site loads for a user, something Google takes into account while ranking websites since a faster loading page directly translate to a better user experience. If the interviewer asks what you would do to increase page speed, describe how you’ve achieved this in the past with examples such as reducing image sizes, enabling compression, reducing redirects, removing render-blocking JavaScript, leveraging browser caching, improve server response time, using a content distribution network to compress files, optimizing the code, etc.

9. What method do you use to redirect a page?

In general, a 301 redirect is the best way to redirect a page so you don’t lose any SEO value that has been accumulated.

10. How can you do SEO for a video?

Videos are growing increasingly popular on the web, which can improve SEO if the videos produced get attention and therefore share and backlinks. But to get the video seen can require SEO to get it found, and Google can’t watch a video. It needs the same types of information required for text-based pages to rank a video. Including the transcript as a text is an easy way to do SEO for a video because search engines can crawl the text. In addition, the same attention should be paid to keywords, page titles, and descriptions.

11. Which meta tags matter?

Meta tags have changed since SEO became a common practice, but two remain critical: the page title and the meta description. Stick to these when answering your interview question. The page title (sometimes called SEO title) plays an important role in ranking but it is also important because it is the title that shows on the Search Results Page (SERP). It must use a keyword to rank well with Google but it must also be compelling so a user will want to click on it. The meta description does not affect ranking, but it also plays a role in the SERP because it also must make the user want to click on the search result. You should also mention that Google recently increased the character length limit of meta descriptions to around 280 to 320 (no one is sure of the actual limit yet).

12. What is the difference between a do-follow and a no-follow and how are they used?

Nofollow links exist because we don’t want every single webpage or link to be something a search engine crawls and ranks. Therefore, no-follow link attributes tell search engine bots not to follow a certain link. The link is still clickable for a user, but not followed by a bot. On the other hand, all other links could be considered do-follow links, even though they don’t have to have special attributes to tell the search engine bots to follow them—the bots will by default.

13. Which SEO factors are not in your control?

The biggest SEO factor not in your control is Google! How exactly Google ranks websites is unknown. The company does not make public the search algorithms it uses, although SEO professionals have determined the best practices we adhere to in order to achieve results. However, Google doesn’t like young domains that aren’t yet tried-and-true, and you can’t control that if you’re launching a new site. Nor can you force people to link to your site, share your content, spend more time on your site, or come back to your site for another visit. Google looks favorably on all of these factors and ideally a marketing department is working hard to create content and user experiences that will make these happen, but these factors are beyond the control of the SEO person.

14. What is on-page vs off-page SEO?

This gets back to the question about the factors that are outside of your control. On-page SEO includes the factors you can control, such as keywords, content, page structure, internal linking, load time, etc. Off-page SEO includes those factors you can’t control, such as backlinks.

15. What are some black hat SEO practices to avoid?

Ideally, you won’t interview with an organization that condones any black hat SEO practices, but it might be a trick question to make sure you wouldn’t use them either. Cloaking, keyword stuffing, copying content from another site, exchanging or trading links, buying links, hiding text, and using a link farm are all underhanded techniques frowned upon—and penalized—by Google.

16. What is the relationship between SEO and SEM?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. The biggest difference between the two is that SEO is free and SEM is paid. SEM includes pay-per-click advertising and display ads that are purchased. Despite the major difference between the two, they work best in unison.

If you have any additional SEO questions that were not answered in this article, or would like a free SEO consultation for your website, don’t hesitate to contact us at info@shourai.io

For more articles about SEO, click here.

Reference:

https://www.simplilearn.com/tutorials/seo-tutorial/seo-interview-questions

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