Myth 1: If You Build it, They Will Come

This is a favorite mantra of the content marketing. Just build an amazing website with even more amazing content and watch the traffic roll on in.

Really? Well, no.

If it were that easy, all SEO professionals would be writers or out of work. Unfortunately, while great writing and great content is a large part of SEO and something your site definitely needs, it also needs links, a strong technical base, fast page downloads, and the list goes on and on.

Create content, but other SEO tactics are needed unless you want to be sitting all alone in a big field.

Myth 2: Link Building is Dead

While Cutts would prefer you never build another link to your website, this isn’t “Field of Dreams”. You can build it, but it doesn’t mean traffic will come to your site.

First, Cutts never said links were dead. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

Cutts said Google has tried excluding links from the algorithm and the results were “much worse.” So while I don’t think it will stay forever this way, we have years before it potentially could go away, according to Cutts.

Links aren’t dead. You need links. What do you do?

You don’t want to go to a link farm and buy links and get your site potentially penalized because that method is dead (unless you really, really know what you’re doing or using “churn and burn” domains).

However, you can hire someone with experience to go create a strategic link acquisition plan and help you implement it. This means that you use strategic methods to acquire links in a way that would appear natural.

For example, let’s say you sponsor a charity event every year, making sure to tie that in with local news, press coverage, and maybe the charity’s own news release. All tied back to you. This is a very obvious way you can acquire natural links to your site that are part of a link building campaign, but NOT a link buying campaign.

A link builder will have many more inventive and fantastic ways to do this and the best part, it will all appear completely natural because basically they are, just with a little push. Most important to note, this is the most highly scrutinized area of SEO right now, so hire well.

Links are alive. Just some of the methods died.

Myth 3: Using Google Analytics Lets Google Spy On You

Analytics is a must-have. Yet so often we hear that a client isn’t putting Google Analytics on their site because Google spies on them, so they fly blind.

Is this true? Does Google use Google Analytics to spy in you? Well, yes and no.

For instance, if you’re creating multiple domains that are being used for nefarious things (in Google’s eyes) and these sites all share the same Google Analytics code then yes, Google now knows you have these same domains (i.e., you have linked them together and told Google you own them).

If this is your link network, well you have now outed yourself. Have a penalty? Decided to just start a new site, not fix the old one? Did you use the same Google Analytics code? Well, same thing.

However, is Google using Google Analytics as part of site positioning? No.

How do we know? Because Cutts said so (here, here, and again here. Now, we don’t believe everything Cutts tells us, but this is just common sense.

These are separate arms of the same company and they simply don’t interact at that level. Also, many sites don’t use Google Analytics, so if Google used Analytics to determine the results, it would probably be worse than excluding links as a ranking factor. It doesn’t make practical sense.

Bad data in = bad product out which = bad business. So if you are a regular company with a regular site, go ahead and add Google Analytics. The only one spying on you is the NSA.

Myth 4: Ranking (Positioning) Doesn’t Matter

You’ve probably heard this before: “We don’t care about ranking. Traffic is what we measure.” While there is truth in this, it’s also a bit deceptive.

Sure, there is no true top 10 anymore. With geolocation, personalization, and other factors, you can no longer pull up a definite top 10 and know you are seeing what anyone else is seeing.

In fact, my agency no longer calls it ranking, we call it positioning because ranking has definite numeric order and stop and end points where positioning is a more loosely defined placement within the SERPs.

That being said, and as much as relevant, converting traffic is the most important metric when measuring the ROI of you investment dollars, the difference between 1st and 5th and 5th and 10th greatly affects the flow and amount of that traffic, so even if we can’t be sure how everyone is seeing the site in the SERPs, we can have a good idea of the opportunities for traffic increases and where drops and where these are happening if we follow the keyword positions.

Position does matter. Rankings maybe not.

Myth 5: Social is the New Link Building

No. Can you get links from social, yes, once they leave the walled garden, but not from sharing itself (Google+ excluded here).

The reason is simple. There is a negative history with Facebook and Google and Google and Twitter. Neither company is willing to give Google consistent access to their fire hose, so Google simply can’t factor them into the algorithm.

A while back when Google did factor Twitter into the algorithm and had access to the fire hose, you ranked well for Twitter, but that changed when Twitter pulled that access from Google. You can learn more about that here.

Article by Search Engine Watch