Not all SEO advice is good. In fact some of it can be downright harmful. Here are some of the most common pieces of misleading advice you will hear over and over again.

1. Age of the site plays a significant role in where it is ranked – This has been an accepted theory for years and almost everyone in SEO is guilty of making the correlation between age and searchability. Some may even think there is a correlation. There is no evidence of this though. Searches return newer results all the time after all, does that mean that those sites are just super amazingly good at all other aspects of SEO? Maybe. More likely the age of a site has become a false correlation. The older the site the more likely it is to have good links, to have more visits, and to have become trusted in the eyes of search engines like Google. Remember, the goal of a search engine is to return the most relevant results for users. The age of a site has nothing to do with how relevant it happens to be. What effect age has is that it give Google time to determine its legitimacy and users time to decide if it’s the type of site they click on and stay or if they click on and leave immediately (a major factor in ranking which is why relevancy is so important). But once those factors have been determined, additional days, months or years that site is online likely has no impact.

2. Don’t report spam – Um, what? This is more an insider SEO code of silence thing. It’s dumb though. If someone is spamming in order to boost their ranking, then report them. They’re going to get caught anyway, why should you have to sit and wait for it to happen while your ranking sinks? Of course if you are spamming and involved in black hat SEO tactics, then it might be a problem. Make sure your hands are clean first, or get them clean at least.

3. Make a different Headline and Title Tag – The theory is that you can cover a couple of different keyword phrases, and also make a more searchable Title Tag for Google and then when they get to the page something more relevant or more attractive to the reader. A lot of well respected SEO experts do suggest this, but there is no actual data that really says that there is a search benefit. It may turn off readers though. Imagine you click on a search result with one title and see something totally different when the page opens. You may think the site has been jacked or that you’ve been redirected, or worse, the site you clicked on just tricked you! There is some wiggle room, but at the least make the Title Tag and the Headline very similar.

4. Never exchange links with other sites – The idea behind this advice is that if you are doing a link exchange, then you are automatically linking to things that are irrelevant for the sole purpose of having another link, which Google and other search engines hate. That is good advice usually, but there are times when there is nothing wrong with a direct link exchange. Linking to a news article about your product or service, linking to partners, even linking to relevant sites is all okay and even helpful, even if it is a straight exchange.

5. Keywords and content structure are more important than actual content when it comes to searches – This could not be more misleading. Good structure and the right keyword phrases will help search ranking more than great content of course, however, full page reads, links, more visitors staying longer, all of this impresses Google way more than any keyword of phrase in the title and content. Ideally a writer can balance these two; you are always better off with great content in the long run though.

Getting your on-page content to attract search engines while not turning off your potential customers can be tricky, and in the long term should probably be handled by someone who specializes in content. There are some things you can do yourself that should give your site a boost though. Just follow these quick and easy steps.

1. Find your keywords/key phrases – Doing this the right way can take a lot of research and specialized knowledge, making an educated guess is better than nothing at all though. Do a Google search of the phrase you think your customers are using most often when they are looking to buy your product or service, for example “puppies for sale”. On the first page you will see 10 results. Notice the bold words within the content? Those are important. For “puppies for sale” the first result as of the time this is written was breeders in bold along with puppies for sale. It looks like the other words that show up are puppy and dogs for sale.

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