Negosentro | 3 Modern Facts about SEO You Need to Understand | Getting your facts straight about SEO is difficult. Difficult, yet necessary.
You see, there are countless lies and speculations about SEO circulating the Internet today. These same lies are even more prominent because SEO is constantly changing, and what works now may not work even in just a few short weeks. Or, even if advice is sound, it may not be comprehensive enough to account for actual SEO truths.
This stops now. We’re going to share what we consider to be three essential SEO facts. By understanding each, you can feel confident investing in an inbound marketing SEO strategy designed to increase visibility and drive growth.
1. Blogging Won’t Drive Traffic to Your Site (at Least Not Instantly)
Most companies understand that they need a blog to create value-driven content and attract visitors to their site. However, publishing a few blog articles won’t instantly put you at the top of the search results (or get visitors to your site).
Additionally, not all blogs are created equal. In fact, your blogging frequency, how long you’ve been publishing articles, and the type of articles you’ve created are all influential factors in terms of SEO.
As such, you should prioritize a few different elements of your blog posts to promote success over time:
- Make Great Resources – Content that offers value to readers is best for SEO. Write for people and not search engines, and you’ll be in good shape.
- Don’t Stuff Keywords – Keywords are important but contextually relevant content is more important. Of course, you should include some keywords, but don’t make this your focus.
- Keep it Consistent – Figure out how many posts you can create each month and stick to it.
- Consistency means your site is always getting updated and will help you rank better over time (not to mention gain a steady readership).
2. The Age of Your Domain Matters
Timing matters for more than just the age of your blog; it matters for your domain name as well. But unlike blogging, this is one thing that you can’t really change.
While certain factors like the quality of your content and the links to your content are thought to matter more than your domain age, age is still a factor that makes a difference when it comes to your site’s rankings.
After all, competitors who have had sites up for 3 or maybe even up to 10 years have enjoyed one advantage that you haven’t and can’t: the time to build up high-quality links that boost their rankings. As such, older domains tend to be associated with higher quality content and more high-quality links.
Remember, there isn’t definitive certainty regarding how much influence domain age has over your site. However, you can do your part to negate any negative effects of a newer domain by producing great content consistently to encourage linking and sharing.
3. Optimizing for Keywords Isn’t Always a Good Thing
If you asked a business owner how they ranked their site a few years ago, they would probably say one thing: keywords. After all, don’t you need keywords on your site to show search engines like Google that you’re offering relevant content for users? Sort of, but it’s not that simple.
In the past, business owners would pump just a few pages full of a range of keywords they believed were relevant to their audience. This means that users would get search engine results that were sometimes only loosely related to what they were actually looking for. And, as you can imagine, Google took notice.
After many algorithm updates, sites that have “thin content” (i.e., not many pages) were penalized for stuffing keywords into these few pages. This made the winners (and new, top-ranking sites) companies that had focused on creating contextually relevant content around a small handful of keywords.
The best way to avoid your own penalty and promote higher rankings is to focus on your content rather than the keywords themselves. Of course, you can use keywords to guide your strategy. However, you shouldn’t stuff them in the content in the hopes of ranking better (since often, you simply won’t).
Translating SEO Facts into Actionable Strategies
It’s one thing to understand SEO facts and another to take these facts and turn them into actionable strategies that you can use in your business. However, doing so is simple:
- Focus on creating value-driven, consistent blog content.
- Negate the power of a young domain by creating consistent content.
- Don’t focus on keywords. Instead, focus on creating content that relates to common keywords and offers valuable information instead.
Of course, content on its own isn’t enough to put your site at the top of the search engines. And when you want to be on top, all you need is the white-hat, long-term strategies, and monthly SEO plans for success.
Key Takeaways
- Blogging won’t instantly drive traffic to your site. Instead, you should create great resources, use keywords sparingly, and blog consistently to enjoy results over time.
- It’s unclear as to how much the age of your domain matters. However, producing great content consistently will negate the effects of a newer domain on your rankings.
- You shouldn’t always optimize for keywords (or focus on optimization exclusively). Instead, you should focus on keywords as inspiration for contextually relevant content and insert keywords just once or twice to give your rankings a boost.
Now we want to hear from you: Do any of the 3 points above surprise you when it comes to SEO?
