As a business owner, we imagine how overwhelming navigating the digital landscape can be. It doesn’t help when the word ‘algorithm’ is thrown around more often than the phrase ‘Monday morning coffee.’
There’s a lot to know about the field of SEO (Search Engine Optimization); the ever-changing nature of it means you never stop learning best practices and keeping up-to-date on what works best. Maintaining an effective SEO strategy can do wonders for your business, but with all the conflicting answers out there, SEO can be fuzzy, at best.
Here are just some of the myths you may have heard regarding how SEO works.
URL structure is important
URL structure doesn’t matter that much, at least when it comes to ranking in search results. Before, it was common practice to make the URL structure of your website as simple as possible, then webmasters started adding levels to their URLs. (The more levels, the longer and deeper your URL goes into your website, similar to subfolders.)
The length and depth of your URL doesn’t matter as much as making sure redirects are working, should you choose to change any URLs. It’s also important to keep in mind that Google doesn’t constantly index every single website at the same time. It could take some time for Google’s crawling bots to realize you’ve changed the structure of your URL
The actual structure of your URL isn’t as important as simply maintaining the URL structure scheme you have in place.
Your site is ranked based on outbound links
It’s a very common misconception that linking out to other, often more popular and reputable, sites would increase your ranking in search results. According to a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, external links to other sites is not a ranking factor in and of itself. However, the anchor text is considered content, and content is a ranking factor.
The more content you produce, the higher you’ll rank in search
Just the act of publishing new content to your site is not a ranking factor, but posting more frequently can affect rankings if you now have a more robust library of newsworthy and searchable content.
The big takeaway here is that quality content, no matter the frequency of publication, is what’s going to make a difference in search results.
Don’t employ SEO strategies that take up time with little to no results. You can be successful in search engines with some practice and the right content as your backup.